I had the same experience with Klipsch. They wanted me to travel 3 hours to demo a pair of speakers. Ended up with the Focal Kanta 2's. Klipschs' loss. Focal has a markup of 47%, the retailers take, as I assume most others do as well. Why they can't buy them, demo them, then re-sell them and still make a profit is beyond me. Happy with the Kanta's as my L/R/C.
Have you ever wondered why speaker manufactures do not consign speakers to dealers?
How many of you have wanted to hear a pair of speakers and the dealer only has a pair of their low end speakers to listen to? I would say in most cases, dealers in Colorado have limited availability of speakers to listen to on their floor. How then is it possible to purchase a speaker without listening to it first? You would think speaker manufactures would want to sell their higher end speakers and consign at least three speaker models to dealers so they could have them available for their customers to listen to.