Was my friend given misinformation.


My friend is just getting into audio for a music system. In his price rang I thought the Rogue Sphinx V3 would be a nice choice. He could also look at the Revel Concerta 2 line of speakers. Well he decided to stop by Magnolia at Best Buy.  Not a bad setup he got a Denon 3700 AVR and a pair of B&W 603's. He said the salesman told him to stay away from integrated amps as they are not anything but stripped down AVR's without the features. So I guess all us owners of 2 channel preamps and integrated have been duped. Who knew??

luxmancl38

I feel a bit inclined to defend BB / Magnolia. In general, they have employees that know more than nothing. They are salesman… but people as well… so some are great some good and some not good. They sell low end and mid-fi to mostly people that know little to nothing. It is there job, and not one that pays six digits. So, within that context, they usually do pretty good. I have met some really enthusiastic pretty well informed folks there… although not the most common. I haven’t met too many sales people that were just pushing stuff. If they sell something inappropriate it is more from lack of knowledge.

You want high end, you go to a high end store.

@luxmancl38 

Drop the subject - your friend is happy now and likely closed minded on upgrading and may have been closed minded on your audio opinion

An update. He seems pretty happy w/the purchase. However he's a bit overwhelmed buy the manual, 312 pages. I'm going over to help him navigate the instructions. A big difference from my Lo-Tech Luxman Tube Preamp Instruction Manual which is only 20 pages long. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)😎

@luxmancl38 maybe you'll get lucky and the manual is in 5 languages and you will only need to power trough 50-60 pages

Setup and tweaking on some AVRs can be a chore with room analysis microphones for optimized speaker placement, carving up the power for different speaker channel configurations, etc

Best of luck

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