What do you take when demoing new gear?

Source material, pshaw! First time I saw a turntable at Definitive was unexpected, asked if they had something to play? We dug through a small stack of utterly unrecognizable worn dirty second hand beat up crap until giving up I said this'll do. Whatever it was I do not recall. Not in the slightest. What I do recall is it made the little system crammed up against the wall sound twice as wide three times as deep and five times as good. It was the most engaging system I had heard at that point in time.  

Next the salesman put a CD of Janis Ian Breaking Silence on their top shelf Levinson/Wilson mega system. This was in the same room so nix that excuse. It was loud and powerful and nowhere near as good as the junk vinyl on the Linn. I made up my mind then and there that I needed a turntable.  

If you're seriously thinking of spending money on something so infinitesimally microscopically different you can only hear it in a 3 second snippet of one certain recording, its just not worth it. You definitely need to keep looking. For another component, at the very least.

Been there, done that. One of the reasons I became so insufferably good at this, I put in the work early on. Took my then ten years old Magnavox CDB650 to compare with Proceed. Took my patch cords to compare with XLO interconnects. Even hauled my Dynaco ST400 into a shop one time!

This was all while going through that awkward stage where you have a hard time hearing things, or you hear them but aren’t sure what you’re hearing, so your head is so full of doubt you don’t know one end from the other. Its real easy at this stage of the game to fall prey to things like dragging along your "reference" recordings.

Looking back on it, I would probably still bring along something like a power cord or interconnect, something easy to carry around, plug in and compare. But that’s about it.

What I would do instead, the one thing of more value than any other, is make the dealer change something. Ask to hear another power cord. Interconnect. Whatever. Anything. Just make him change it, so you hear the same system only with one thing- and only one thing- different. If they have cones or elevators or whatever ask to demo them. If you have your own cones or springs that’s a great thing to demo, especially if you can fit them in your pocket.

Most important of all, bear in mind that whatever you do- and whatever they will allow you to do!- varies tremendously from place to place. Some places like here in the Seattle area they’re so spoiled with IT people utterly clueless yet flush with cash they don’t want to spend one minute of their precious time on anyone its not immediately apparent they can snow in to dropping 50 large on AT and D’Agostino in the next 90 seconds. Find the right place though, one with the time and the patience to indulge your ineptitude, you can learn a lot. So its worth the effort. If you are smart and buy something then he sees its worth his time and so much the better for the both of you.