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"watch king" wrote:

Sorry that a few of the readers here couldn't understand my initial
post in this thread. I tried to have a few audiophiles and audiophile
product makers check out my text and they all understood exactly what
I was trying to describe. Manufacturers of high end audio products
would never tell "secrets" to consumers at CES. They sell to
retailers and so they only care 90% of the time about retailers or
distributors and the other 10% of the time they care about magazine
people. It's the retailer's job to deal with consumers. Manufacturers
in general would prefer that consumers not be able to visit CES.

Who said differently?

As to whether I am a retailer "too"(?), that's how I started. I sold
high end hifi in a store that specialized in Acoustical Manufacturing
(Quad) products as their primary line. I sold lots of LS3/5a
loudspeakers and lots of other mid fi electronics and speakers too. I
visited the stores of all the other retailers in Montreal and was
lucky because Montreal had the best mix of American, Canadian,
British, Japanese and continental European products in North America
or Europe. It was a very wide ranging education. That's where I met
Ed Meitner. He was a service manager at Norm Yaeger and Associates
(the Celestion distributor) and I sold Celestion speakers. The
service manager in the store I worked in was Albert Leccese.
Listening to consumers explain what kind of sound they wanted during
3 years in retail was educational. Some American audio companies
offered me jobs doing product training to store sales people because
these manufacturers thought I was able to clearly explain the facts
about how audio worked and why some products sounded better than
others. It was pretty easy as a retail salesperson/buyer to determine
which audio products sounded better than others and which sounded
best for the money.

So what is your occupation now?

So when I talk about how some retailers like Lyric in NYC would like
to be the exclusive North American retailers for the best sounding
audio products at each key price point (the way Lyric was once the
worldwide exclusive retailer for Mark Levinson audio products), it is
a reflection of having been a retail salesperson and buyer, having
trained retail salespeople for audio manufacturers and having sold
products to Lyric. It just makes sense and should be easy to
understand. I pick Lyric because they have been successful in the
audio business for a reasonable amount of time and much of their
longevity is based on their ability to recognize an audio product
that either sounds the best in its category or sounds the best for
the money in its category.

And how do they determine what sounds the best?

The staff at Lyric audition products both in their store and at
various shows like CES. They recognize products that either sound the
best overall, or those that sound best for the price they have to pay
for them. While they may sell other products that consumers ask them
to sell (whether those products are credible or not doesn't affect
the purchase of Lyric's core line-up), whenever Lyric identifies a
product that sounds the best for the money it costs them as
retailers, or products that just sound better than anything else in
that product category, they try to be the exclusive retailers for
that product in the largest possible territory.

OK but you gloss over the 'sounds the best' method.

They do this so they
can set the price for their chosen products in their sales territory.
Making a profit is essential for a retailer so if there is no profit
in a product there is no way a retailer can sell it. Exclusivity
helps a retailer sell a product profitably. Manufacturers also
realize that it is important for retailers to make a profit so they
help retailers to do this.

Sure; nobody disputes that a good manufacturer will try to protect his
distribution chain. Thanks for the clarification but what was the question?

It's the retailer's job to explain things to consumers and to help
consumers if there is a problem. Also most high end manufacturers
don't make complete systems so the high end retailer has the
additional job of finding and stocking the other parts of the system
that a manufacturer doesn't make. Retailers also prefer that
consumers not be able to gain entry to CES demo rooms because there
is only 1 week to try to audition as many products as possible and
consumers just get in the way of this process. So neither
manufacturers or retailers (or distributors) would feel like wasting
time on consumers at CES. CES is set up to be a business to business
interaction and consumers are not part of the equation of CES.
Perhaps there are unsuccessful manufacturers with time on their hands
at CES, and the unsuccessful might say just about anything, but if
these unsuccessful companies don't know the audio business well
enough to survive they aren't credible.

So unless we are discussing companies that won't stay in business
because they have no sense of the audio business, the notion that
there are "insider secrets" that get revealed to audio consumers at
CES is nonsense. Yes, some accessory product companies may rent space
in consumer audio demo rooms so retailers can see their products.
Likely as not the people in the demo room couldn't care if these
accessory products worked or not, and if these unnecessary products
degraded the sound of a successful manufacturers demo, they'd be
tossed into the trash. there are no after hours invasions and set-ups
because CES has heavy security and no one gets into a room for any
reason after show hour closing once that room's staff leave (that
midnight set-up comment was super ludicrous because CES has very
tough security to prevent thefts and CES would never risk lawsuits by
very hyper high end audio people because anyone was allowed illegal
access to any demo rooms after the staff left [that idea must have
been a joke right?]).

If you are referring to my comment it was no joke and in the case of Room-Tunes
was given by an exhibitor and didn't require an after-hour invasion. All you
have to do is get to the display 5-minutes before the other guy.

And you've also forgotten that many manufacturers will provide wires and other
set-up stuff for free (no payment offered) if the booth will accept it. But
thank you for the insight that some of them pay for display.

Even if these ancillary products worked it's unlikely that
manufacturer staff would waste their time explaining how someone
else's product worked.

Who ever suggested anything like that?

Successful manufacturers don't have a spare
minute at CES to talk to anyone but dealers, distributors and
magazine people. It is very unlikely that a manufacturer would claim
to be telling a consumer some kind of "insider secret" unless the
teller is an unsuccessful or unknowledgable demo room staff person.

Hey; I'm not a consumer. Whoever said anything about consumers and secrets.

Since there are some manufacturers who are trying to sell products
based on audio legitimacy even they can't explain, it's hard to
imagine any manufacturer telling anything to a consumer that would
really reveal the secret workings of the audio business.

Which is why snake-oil salesmen don't tell on each other. That was my orginal
point.

Most successful audio manufacturers would love to reduce the numbers
of their competitors by putting as many of them out of business as
possible and these dozens of ultra-competitive manufacturers would
use exactly the kind of "secrets" that some people posting here claim
they hear about at CES.

Let me ask you again. If a reputable manufacturer of outboard CD-Transports
knows that wire-sound is bull**** (and it is) then exactly why don't they call
the wire guys on it? Could they all just be good guys and happy to let other
guys acquire some of their revenue without complaint? Or is it more likely that
each if them would be happy bilking the end-user out of all his money the
second time around?

There are no "well kept secrets" or
"gentlemen's agreements" in the audio business because there are so
many huge egos in the audio business that no secrets like that could
be kept from being broadcast worldwide for more than about 5 minutes
when manufacturers throw dirt at each other. To make out that the
audio business is a gentlemen's business with unspoken rules of
behavior and secrecy is ridiculous except in the mind of inventive
conspiracy theorists. So unless a person posting here can tell you
who said exactly what about what product or which CES staff
authorized after-hours demo room break-ins, so everyone can verify
those words with the teller of this "secret" or "industry-wide
agreement" don't believe any of it.

Watchking

Let me ask this question again; why has no high-end manufacturer ever publicly
complained that some obviously non-sonic
application (like the possibly deleterious recomendation of Arnor All as a cd
protectant; or CD-Stoplight as a jitter reducer or speaker wire as a
sonic-enhancer) was not a good thing?

Because high-end isn't a competitive industry in the classic sense because
performance has become a commodity and much of it is basically antiques where
history, legend and 'art' has put audio performance at the end of the list of
desireable qualities.