Recently I've been reading various comments in threads about amps and
other equipment to the effect that CES demo rooms are somehow set up
in ways that consumers can't or shouldn't duplicate and yet company
spoksmen disclose these factoids. I'm not sure I understand this
concept. I have been involved with the listening demo room set-ups
for 6 companies at CES(the diverse range of Cerwin Vega, ESS,
Marantz, Desktop, Christopher Hansen Audio and Lazarus). I've also
thrown a few muscles into helping people like J. D'Agostino when he
set up his Krell booths (in return for pizza dinners and beer on the
floor). I did this at 17 CES Shows and dozens of other shows both
foriegn and domestic. With the exception of a few toys like plungers
to hold records onto turntable platters and interconnects or wire, no
manufacturer I've ever heard of (that has lasted more than 3 years,
because a few bozos who only lasted 1 show might have done "who knows
what") would risk accepting anything added to their displays that
wasn't researched for weeks ahead of time like their lives depended
on it, BECAUSE their lives really did depend on these demos.

First of all, I would say that the huge mass merchandise companies
won't include almost anything they don't make themselves. So
companies like Yamaha (who might have one serious demo room) won't
have anything in their room that one of the corporate directors in
japan hadn't approved for use (lest they lose their jobs for being
too much of an independent-thinker and not enough of a slavish team
player). Moving down the food chain, companies that had smaller ponds
where they were bigger fish, (companies like Nakamichi, NAD or Proton
level players), would work on their demo presentations for weeks
before the show and unless they had a co-op promotion with someone,
their displays were absolutely firm weeks before "show-time". In the
more esoteric equipment rooms like Krell, B&K Components or Conrad
Johnson there were two perspectives to consider. Either the speakers
and other equipment chosen were acceptable to most of their current
dealers and/or the dealers they wanted to court, or they went for a
pair of the best possible sounding speakers they could borrow and
then took the advice of the speaker maker on how to set them up.

The speaker companies were almost uniformly opposed to ad hoc
"showtime" changes to their displays for 2 reasons. #1 they knew what
amps, turntable/cartridge combos, wire, CD player etc. would make
their speakers sound the best possible, and that would be all they
would use. More importantly it was the manufacturers who wanted to
keep any "acoustic presentation improvement products" a secret, so
they would benefit from better sound to steal sales away from other
manufacturers who didn't have this trick product. This meant that
speaker manufacturers would audition every possible CD player, amp,
phono cartridge etc. and after eliminating products which would turn
off their dealer base and potential new dealers, they would pick the
one that made their speakers sound the best. #2 they didn't want
retailers saying, "My demo room isn't set up like this" or "Our store
doesn't sell product XYZ, so could you please demo your stuff without
product XYZ in the room or I can't be sure I want to buy YOUR
product"." Either of these suggestions is death in the "confidence"
arena of selling. Actually this helped products like Monster Cable
which was the product most likely to be unobjectionable if not a
better sounding product.

So there was always a fine line that most manufacturers tread with
their demo displays. 99% of the lobbying to get products into
displays with high traffic is done weeks or months before the show. I
often pioneered ways to make product demos sound better. The
electrical line noise in Las Vegas and Chicago at showtime is pretty
incredible. So I would often use an array of very high power,
isolated, uninterruptible power supplies in my displays. The building
lights would go dim when I powered up my listening rooms first thing
in the morning, but I didn't suffer the background noises and power
brownouts that everyone else experienced. I'd also have an array of
amplifiers available for use if dealers wanted to hear a certain fave
amp with a speaker they were consiodering buying from me. These amps
varied greatly from Carver 500s to B&K Components ST 140s to Conrad
Johnsons to Bryston to NAD to Krell to Meitner to Acoustical Mnfrg
(Quad) to anything else that made the speaker I was selling sound
great (or at least okay). I would listen for hours deciding which
amps and wire to preconfigure and then which program material to use
with which combo.

No company president I knew would be willing to take on any new piece
of equipment or room treatment unless they were sure it would help
them sell their own stuff. If everyone else was using something in
the way of room treatment I know a dozen company presidents who
purposely wouldn't have that stuff in their room and would find some
other way to make their room sound good. That way company president X
could say, "It isn't the speaker (amp, etc) that my competitor, Mr. Y
is selling that sounds good, it's all that (insert room treatment
product name here) that (insert room treatment product name here
again) paid them to put in their room. So of course not only can't
you trust Mr. Y but since you will never convince your local
customers to buy all that stuff from (insert room treatment product
here) so you shouldn't be making demos with your rooms full of stuff
that will make your local retail customers wonder about your demos
(or worse yet, your local retail customers might ask you what your
equipmment sounds like without that room treatment stuff)".

There are exceptions to every rule and retailers like Lyric in New
York could sell almost anything they tell their customers is "good",
no matter what it is. But these retailers can't be influenced at
shows. In fact Lyric doesn't want any other retailer in the USA
selling something that Lyric knows sounds good. So it isn't going to
help many manufacturers to have their stuff in every demo room at CES
(speaker wire companies excepted). In addition any product that is
universally accepted doesn't need to have their stuff in every
display at CES. Most speaker companies would have wanted to use Mark
Levinson amps or maybe Koetsu phono cartridges at CES but not many of
them could arrange it. Once in a while companies would do anything to
use a product in their displays. If a certain speaker that sounds
great is notorious for making some amps sound bad, then quite a few
amp companies will want to show listeners that their amp sounds great
with this speaker. The same was true for turntable manufacturers and
fussy cartridges etc.

It seems ludicrous in an industry built on entreprenuers who are
brazen and secretive and who attack their competitors visciously at
every possible turn, to find all of them going along like sheep
according some unwritten rules from anybody. Just imagine how
important it is for companies to make 25-30% of their sales or
contacts for sales at CES. This means if they do even $300,000 in
yearly sales you'd have to pay them $50k to risk their company's
sales by putting your stuff in their demo room. Sure, there are some
products that people might always want (especially if they get to
take them home afterwards), but the products would have to be the
kind that would never put off a potential sale to a retailer and it
would also have to be something competitors can't bad-mouth me about.
I didn't get caught when a retailer would say "Your competitor says
your speakers only sound good because you demo them with Krell amps."
because I would then demo that speaker with anything from a Marantz
receiver to a Carver cube to a Bryston or Meridian amp or even the
lowest powered NAD receiver. But that's only because I was prepared.
Most other people just wouldn't take any chances with their biggest
promotional week of the year.

Finally everyone should beware almost anything a manufacturer says to
anyone except their mothers and their deathbed confessors. If you are
a retailer a manufacturer will always want to reassure you. If you
are a magazine employee, manufacturers will always say whatever it
will take to get a good review for their own products or to sow the
seeds of doubt about a competitor's product. To everyone else,
manufacturers don't really need to tell you anything unless you are
an attractive member of the opposite sex (or the same sex if that's
where they're at). The real "secrets" manufacturers have are
disclosed only to their most important retailers and magazine
reviewers, because if too many people get this info it isn't a
"valuable" secret any more. So unless you can make big sales for a
manufacturer you will likely not get anything truthful, and sometimes
they will just be testing your gullibility by telling you wild (read:
untruthful) stories to see if you'll repeat them. Sometimes a new
employee will blab something to the wrong person or a useless
blabbermouth "nobody", but they usually get fired soon afterwards.
Mystique requires mystery and half truths, and telling the real story
to anyone except people you've made big sales with for years and
years just doesn't happen for any company that wants to stay in
business. If anything Paul Klipsch pioneered a kind of cynicism with
his "Bull****" buttons. Unfortunately some of the things I read about
in this forum, that have supposedly been disclosed by some
manufacturer at an audio shows sounds like the kind of stuff either
designed to test a person's gullibility or would have been said by a
company employee who didn't stay in the audio business very long
(either the employee or the company or both). If anyone isn't willing
to say that (Name like Ed Meitner, John Beyer, Sid Harmon, or someone
else you can check with) said something specific, and can thus be
checked back with to verify, then it isn't likely true. Sometimes
with the right amount of alcohol or the euphoria of large written
orders (from credit worthy retailers and distributors) some notables
have said some pretty outrageous things. But it's rare and they
usually beg off afterwards with "I was misquoted" or "drunk" or "she
made it sound like she wanted to go back to my room". It's a blabby
business so if you blab too much people get too much ammunition to
use against you and it really can make your sales suffer especially
combined with the vaguaries of economic ups and downs, retailer
politics and squirrely magazine reviewers.

TTG

--
We don't get enough sand in our glass