Would you pay to audition speakers

Quite a few years ago I was looking for some video gear and entered a high end video/audio retailer here in NYC to see what they had. The owner informed me it was a $50 fee (good towards any purchases) to demo.

I didn't go ahead with it, since most or all of the gear would have been out of my price range at the time. But especially on video gear, I could see so many people getting his recommendation, then buying mail order. I think now I would gladly pay $50 for guidance through a complex purchase, and to be able to see state of the art gear.

That being said I have recently made my foray into being a dealer for a select few pieces of gear. Luckily this is not my main source of income, so I suspect that I will be dealing with many of the challenges outlined here retailers face.

it might be worth it to pay for an audition in your stereo system, to avoid a serious mistake. the cost of an audition may be less than the loss accruing from resale of an expensive component.

I kind of equate this to a car dealer asking to check your credit before giving a test drive. As a retailer be it car sales, high end audio or whatever you accept the fact that you will work really hard on a deal and not get it. When that happens no matter how unfair it is you have to put a smile on your face and move on to the next prospect.

I have a similar great experience with a salesman who was at a tweeter in chicago (suburbs). I went in to the store to buy some cheap head phones and ended up spending a couple hours in their hearing all kinds of different set ups. At the time I only had a Denon avr 3200(which I was pretty proud of,lol) but he showed me some serious stuff and opened up a few new worlds to me and raised the bar for me. In a nut shell after that anything I could buy from him I did at full asking price, which I was happy to pay since its hard to find sales people of his caliber. Now I was still pretty small potatoes compared to many of his customers but I did my part.

Now however thanks partly to him I can only afford to buy the equipment I want used here or through other sources. But the point is his free demo for a 20.00 head phone customer earned him thousands in sales.

In retrospect, I can think of one instance in which it might be fair to charge for an audition: If one is asking a dealer to either order something from a line that he doesn't ordinarily carry or bring in an expensive reference piece from a line he does carry but will have to front the money himself, then I can understand his being concerned that if the sale doesn't go through, he might have to offer the item at a heavy discount in order to move it.

After reading all your posts I've decided to pass on the 500.00 audition. I'm going to buy speakers that I can audition for free. I did call the company that produces the speaker in question. They told me that they dropped that dealer due to his business practices. When I told him about the 500.00 audition he wasn't surprised.