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The Demo Room

By John Paul

September 2009

The Demo Room. 168 Parnell Road, Auckland

An interesting new hi-fi salon has recently opened at 168 Parnell Road in Auckland city. The very experienced team at this new shop are critically aware of the countless component and system “variables” that must be considered towards achieving great sound. They then valiantly try to help you listen to what should work best for your ears. This takes time and effort but is well worth the money you will eventually save by having a consistently satisfying listenable system.

The Demo Room in Parnel Road, Auckland

Mentioning experience for products on-hand, who knows more about premium Linn Hi-Fi than long-time Linn distributors Dean Harnish and John Ellingham? Who knows more about sensible Arcam components, and high value Image Loudspeakers than (ex Smith Sound) Phil McIsaac? Acoustic Energy, MIT Connectors, and several other high quality brands all benefit the collective experience of these three polite professional gents.

Familiar people: Phil McIsaac, John Ellingham and Dean Harnish

Collectively they have over one hundred home audio business years, mega-dollars, and tens of thousands appreciative and satisfied NZ customers. Although they really have “heard it all before”, they are receptive to, and encouraging the new downloading and wireless technologies while welcoming iPod generation “newbies” and old farts (and fartresses) alike to demonstrably better sound through better components.

Just right

In their shop, the three demonstration rooms currently are in a “Goldilocks state”. There is a large room with a big screen and plush winding sofa where the music either is too remote, or too in your face. That is arguably fine for movies etc. but the room will need some diverse furnishings and trial re-arrangements to truly sing. The small room doesn’t sound great (what small room does?) but works OK with some modest system configurations. Then predictably, the mid-size room is where the clarity and balance of any decent component provides a performance that simply shines.

The largest Demo Room

Collectively, these three rooms do a good job of approximating, vis-à-vis, many of our typical domestic environments. The big room can resemble many open plan lounge-kitchen-dining situations; the middle room, a contained medium size lounge; and finally the ever popular, acoustically obstinate small room. Each provides an initial relative comparison basis for demonstrably achieving good sound into our homes.

Doing the name

An exemplary experience in the middle room with a mid price set-up (less than $4K) was with MIT mains power cords where Phil McIsaac briefly presented a Patricia Barber song to Dear Editor and me as a spitty, rough, coarse, nasty recorded sound. I know that is not how that PB disc sounds because I have the same one at home and know it’s a superb smooth, clean, intimate studio sound. A few quick swaps of ordinary supplied “cheapo” power cord to “entry”, then “intermediate” level, was frankly astounding with a presentation of smoother, cleaner, more detailed and fully enjoyable sound from only swapping to a better quality power cord for the amp in that system.

The middle Demo Room

The best fun though was hearing Patricia B’s apparent sound source position move vertically from her piano bench height to tall stool height with changes from “entry” to “intermediate” level cords. Why or how, I don’t know. Good or bad, I don’t know. WDF is going on? (And they ask me why I drink?) But it definitely was obvious, and it was a repeatable artifact in that specific demonstration situation.

This sort of thing probably happens dozens of times per day in The Demo Room. It’s certainly worth observing and learning that even more than with science, specifications, and price, there is also a certain inscrutable expert dealer skill-set required for selecting then delivering high quality home music reproduction.

Done and demo’d

So I purchased that same MIT power cord that kept Patricia B. sounding good on her piano bench because that’s where she belongs. And with that new cord on my DEQX DAC, which actually (measurably, via calibrated mic into Real Time Analyzer) lowered the systems electrical background noise and fizz, Ms Barber is sweetly singing and playing just where she belongs while sounding better than ever.

With minimum (or maximum, if you win Lotto!) efforts, the guys from The Demo Room can probably make your favourite music sound much, much better. So take your discs in there sometime and ask them to “do something fantastic”. Or at least ask them for a good hot cuppa as you ponder the mystique of achieving good sounding home music reproduction. Then they actually might demonstrate that they have it pretty well sussed! A must visit for all music appreciating ears.