I know that everybody says "Brick & Mortar Stores are Dead / Yesterday’s way of shopping"
However - when it comes to spending several thousand dollars (or, at least a grand and a half and UP), call me crazy, but I WANT to touch, feel, and in this case HEAR something BEFORE I buy it.
For a Boutique product like high(ish)-End Audio - (which caters to a small, select group of consumers): it would be difficult to operate "Factory Showrooms" where you can look and listen, but still have to order on-line, except for places where lots of people have lots of disposable income or a huge thruput of visitors. (LA Area, NYC, Vegas, Scottsdale, maybe Chicago...) This leaves most of us in fly-over-country with nearly no way to get our hands on something like this, other than buy it and return it if we don’t like it.
I only put so much faith in on-line reviews - experience tells me that they can be biased and/or altered.
For companies that choose to go "Direct-ONLY" = then, they should expect to have GENEROUS return / "home audition" policies.
If they reduce their MSRP on-line a bit because they do not need to leave as much room for dealer mark-up, then maybe it would be a GOOD thing. (But we’ll just have to wait-and-see, no?)
However - when it comes to spending several thousand dollars (or, at least a grand and a half and UP), call me crazy, but I WANT to touch, feel, and in this case HEAR something BEFORE I buy it.
For a Boutique product like high(ish)-End Audio - (which caters to a small, select group of consumers): it would be difficult to operate "Factory Showrooms" where you can look and listen, but still have to order on-line, except for places where lots of people have lots of disposable income or a huge thruput of visitors. (LA Area, NYC, Vegas, Scottsdale, maybe Chicago...) This leaves most of us in fly-over-country with nearly no way to get our hands on something like this, other than buy it and return it if we don’t like it.
I only put so much faith in on-line reviews - experience tells me that they can be biased and/or altered.
For companies that choose to go "Direct-ONLY" = then, they should expect to have GENEROUS return / "home audition" policies.
If they reduce their MSRP on-line a bit because they do not need to leave as much room for dealer mark-up, then maybe it would be a GOOD thing. (But we’ll just have to wait-and-see, no?)