Quote Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
Show-Me was where I worked and they were in business since I believe the 50's, started out distributing parts and then got into retail. They went under in the 90's. I just wondered if we ever sold anything to your store..
Not sure but the store I managed was called Audio Concepts. It was Joplins main source for better audio for quite a while in the 90's and our only competitor was a place called Four state TV which sold Jamo and Marrantz but hardly sold any separate components or anything of anything above that area of audio. We sold B&W, Paradigm, Adcom, Mirage, among other brands but those were the brands we worked with the most because they were what people around here could afford and still be somewhat high end. We did sell higher end products on occasion and also we repaired speakers in our shop and I have worked on a number of different brands of vintage and other speakers out there so I know speaker build as well as I have built some of my own designs in the past. B&W had a few speakers I liked but as a whole I thought most of the models we carried were overly bright for my tastes but I always liked Paradigm for what they could do at the price points that they set their products at. The Mirage speakers we sold were the bipolar designs that Mirage made back in the mid 90's before they sold out and started building the pint sized sub sat systems that they make now. some of the best systems we sold used the Mirage M-1 or M-3 si series speakers which in my opinion were awesome speakers in their day and were very high end in sound, the only draw back to them is that they were quite big and people either had to design their rooms to let them be their best or live with these huge speakers in their houses knowing their wives will be pissed. but they did sound good though. I actually do not remember our supply companies names but we had reps come in from time to time and we would hang out and talk audio for hours sometimes when they would visit and usually they would bring some high end goodies with them for us to try out and that was fun. I got to here some high end tube stuff and some higher end ss amps like Acurus among others when we were open. We had basically two different areas in our shop for two different groups of people. We had an open area in front for the lower end receivers and speakers like Yamaha and Sound Dynamics and we also picked up Denon toward the end of our run. Then we had a separate room that was set up with sound dampening materials and built for superior acoustics for critical listening to our higher end stuff and that was where I spent most of my time but our bread and butter was the lower end stuff in our front room since I live in Joplin and the economy around here never really allowed for too much action in the high end area. Most people around here freak when you mention speakers costing more than a thousand dollars a pair or a 2 channel amp that costs more than a home theater receiver. That for the most part has been the death of pretty much every high end shop Joplin has ever seen. People around here just don't think an audio system should cost that much and for the most part they refuse to pay that much and try to bargain with you like you are trying to sell them a used car. I guess thats what I get for living in a smaller area is that there are not shops like the ones that you have there in St. Louis and other bigger cities in the 4 state area. I wish it were different but this is the reality.