Quote Originally Posted by kexodusc
Don't get me wrong, nothing infuriates me more when I see a man walk into Best Buy with $5000, and the salesguy pawns off an over-rated, huge Hitachi or Toshiba TV and then tells him a basic Kenwood amp and HTIB is all he needs...talk about a mismatch. That's a huge dis-service. The guy would be much better off with a cheaper 40 something inch TV and a Denon amp with JBL's or Polk's or something. But I'm ranting now.

I still see receivers packaged with 2 huge Cerwin-Vega mains, and 3 satellite sony speaker and a sub in some places...this can't possibly sound good. But the CV's big looks sell (I guess).

I did give the Athena Micra's another go yesterday for about 1/2 an hour. For HTIB these things are quite impressive, and even did a decent job on Diana Krall's Paris concert DVD...Maybe HTIB manufacturers are making them better now, instead of just as fast as they could build them? We'll see.

I agree. Unfortunately, majority of buyers velive everything salesmen say and are easily blinded by looks of some units. I guess it's their own fault. I will never understand gow a guy can walk into the store and spend $5000 without doing any research of his own and totally buy crap from the unmotivated salesguy crap. . That's the key.
As long as you have people throwing money out of the window, you will have Dell's and Zenith's. And no, the price is not an excuse. I assure you, you can get much better equipment in the same price range, if you look for it.
Same deal with computers. A friend of mine works for BestBuy, he says they sell at least one Alienware unit per day. Now that is a waste of money. The computer you pay $3000 for in stores, you can easily build it yourself (the exact same thing, maybe even better!) for $1200 or if you are too lazy, you can make a custom configuration and have it already built up for less then $1800. While we are at it, let's name a few:
Oritron
Emerson
Norcent
Durabrand
Regent
Magnavox