Confessions of a high end audio salesman

hello friends my name is Steve Guttenberg and I'm also known as the audio feely ACK because I know a lot about audio too much I think sometimes but it's a brewery it's a burden I'm just kidding anyway I know a lot about audio and and one of the reasons I know so much about audio it's it stretches out over many decades of my life and I'd say starting and I think that's a 1978 and ending in the mid 90s I saw high end audio in New York City so I had lots of experiences thousands of experiences of sitting with people playing high-end audio and doing demos for them and hearing how they reacted to different speakers and amplifiers and cables and everything it was it was a real education and it really set was it was a good foundation for becoming an audio reviewer but I gotta tell you it was New York City so no surprise there were lots of very eccentric people and I had this customer this guy was was the top of a heap he was the most extreme of all because I don't know he was let's say maybe in his mid 40s he was a little chunky but he was very smart he always had this big thick book that he carried around them that had stickers and stuff coming out of he came to turn to pages and he was some kind of electronics designer and he but he was also communicating with people in other universes and stuff he was telling these stories about you know what he's learned from talking to other beings you know that kind of person but he was very wealthy and he did spend money freely it sound by singer that's the story that I worked at so one day he was all upset because one of his dinosaurs one of his oh one of his penises he also had dinosaurs in this book but he had like little cartoon penises that he would stick on different images in the book you know dinosaurs sword things and he was missing one of his penises and he was very very very upset and he was calling the store and a lady that worked at the counter would answer the phone and he'd say hi this is John if you have you found my penis yeah something like that say things like that and and he came once at the he this one out for a day or so because of this missing penis of this this paper of penis it was in one of his books and he went behind the cake came back to stir it he was on the floor crawling around behind the counter looking for the lost penis I'm sorry I don't remember whether he found the lost penis but he he was seriously eccentric and I remember one day he came to the store and he was sitting in a had a stool in front of the counter and he's just started rocking back and forth and holding his head and say hi I don't look like I took my meds today I said well do you have them with you I'll get you some water you can take me says no I think they're home I said well let me get you a cab and take you home so that you can get your meds and it was just he was a piece of work nice guy so one day I'm standing around nothing's happening and this little kid that's boy maybe 10 years old he comes in and he tells me he wants to buy a high five nice quickly well that's that's nice I think you need to come with your parents and he said well I just don't want to listen to things and I was like okay so I'm playing some talk to him he was definitely an avid stereo file reader and also the absolute sound so he knew all the the products so he knew what to ask for he seemed very smart so I was doing these demos and I think came twice to listen spend an hour so each time and you know I almost it was like a put on like someone told the kid to come and pretend to be in or fall but anyway he was real and finally he comes with his mom and he buys like seven hundred eight hundred dollar system with a creak amplifier and I think Creek speakers ones with a little green dome tweeters and one often lived happily ever after I don't think he ever came back so maybe he fulfilled his audiophile dreams with that starter system which would be a nice thing but okay so he got crazy people a ten-year-old boy buying a high five the other one that was kind of weird was this is really early in my time it's lying hi-fi this this couple comes in and they were in there I'm guessing early 30s and they're looking for a system and everything and I put him in a room set something up after doses and then I left the room and then I come back you know like 15 minutes later and they're on the floor having sex so I I back up leave the room and I go I do about this what about what's my reaction with a wife how's it going in there guys how's it Sally so I just let it go for a while and then I came back and they were done and we continued so I think it's entertaining if nothing else those are good ones right there one day a guy comes and he has a he's from his own company and he's selling amplifiers tube amplifiers and he sets up the amplifier in main room in the store and he's waiting all day for the own story come listen to the thing and it's really busy and the owner doesn't have time to hear the amplifier and it's getting the hours are going by and I'm sitting there with the guy in the room listening to music with his amplifier sitting there on the floor looking really cool and then all of a sudden the amplifier just cuts out into flames shoot up out of the amplifier three feet four feet tall big not a little spark that little smoke a geyser of flame shot up out of this amplifier and I run over the wine yanked the power cord out and just room was filled with that terrible smoke smell and everything needless to say he didn't get to have his amplifier carried by the store anyway well I was actually storage 20 was better than happened that at that moment because if it didn't happen and it happened at some other time and we had to see selling these things would have been a reality right so you know there's those things up I have a guy coming he's asking me stuff and he tells me that he's deaf stone deaf like nah he doesn't he's not hard-of-hearing he really doesn't hear anything but he wants to buy a very expensive turntable NLP 12 turntable this was really on my career so say it's early 80s or something and I'm like but why do you want to buy a turntable what he can't hear and he said he just liked it he like he's just so look cool they the way it's may the idea of Allen really appealed to other people in his life you know had normal hearing and they would be using it so okay sure I'll saw you turn to no problem and you know I'm gonna finish off with this one as I was ending my my selling career I I did I did suffer from audio burnout and I saw other salespeople suffer the same fate that things are going really well I like my job I really enjoy selling for most of the years that I did it but then all of a sudden I didn't enjoy it anymore I was I was like I didn't have enough patience to deal with customers I was bored by getting my you know people wasting my time and I just didn't want to do it so I had maybe two weeks left before I was done yeah I give my notice and a woman comes in and she's in her early 40s or something and she inherited some money I think four or five thousand dollars and she was really into music but never had a nice I fight and she was going to take her inheritance and buy a system fantastic good so I'm you know taking her through the process and she says to me something like so I guess I should just get rid of all my records and just buy CDs and a CD player you know rest of my system I said well how many records yam and finger - he hadn't know about thousand records and I said well she lived just a few blocks away from the store I said why don't you come by with some of the records and let me play in the records and see she said really I thought records are over you know in the midnight she said I thought LPS are history nobody cares about her anyway sure they're good and you already have a lot of money invested in those LPS you should get a decent turntable if they're in good condition she said oh I don't think they're in good condition I said let's find out so she brings four or five records by we plan they were okay so she's like wow they're sent so good I've never heard him sound this great and I said wait let me look let's get you know you should get a turntable and a CD player I'm not saying you shouldn't have a CD player I'm saying he should invest in a nice turntable she did and I called her the next day and she was so happy and she came by a few days later to thank me personally because she was ready and other stores that she had gone to before she got to look to my store we're very happy to not even try and sell a return table and just sell her a CD player she was impressed that I made the effort to sell her a turntable because she had all these records it's the main point of that story but for her is she already had the music she'd have to spend many thousands of dollars to replace even if it was just a quarter of those records and she's gonna buy two hundred and fifty records at that you know albums as CDs that would have been you know a couple of thousand dollars right there so anyway the thing is she thanked me and I thanked her I said you know if all of my customers were as nice as you and not just because she appreciated that what I did but she was a nice person and there was no BS it just preceded our few hours together whatever was four or five hours from beginning to end this relationship said man if I had and more customers like you I probably wouldn't be burning out I'm probably continue to sell hi-fi but I didn't have many more customers like that so I stopped and I started writing so there you go those are my condensed very very very condensed history of my years selling high-end audio in New York City the store was and is sound by singer in New York City if you like these sort of things this is called the audio fili AK Daily Show comes up daily and so please subscribe to this channel if you like these videos like them share them it's a etc and I will see you 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Channel: Steve Guttenberg Audiophiliac

Views: 42,997

Rating: 4.9011583 out of 5

Keywords: audiophiles, high end audio, selling audio, Stereophile, The Absolute Sound

Id: z-U-SZ_rZDY

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018