How To Buy A Dorm Room Stereo

By Timothy Szykula

The cardinal rule that you must always be aware of when shopping for electronics is quite simple: You get what you pay for. As an experienced salesman, I can assure you with complete confidence that there is no such thing as a deal, bargain, or exceptional value. If a particular item strikes you as a tremendous deal, there is something wrong with the item. It could be a floor model, a return from an unsatisfied customer, or an unreliable brand that is prone to malfunction. Don't go shopping with the idea that you are searching for a diamond in the rough. Your goal is to compare products, not bargain hunt.

From this cardinal rule, we can derive all of the other rules. The goal of the salesman is to make money for the store, not to give customers fantastic discounts. It is to your advantage, then, to not believe anything the salesman says based on his word alone. Make sure you always read manufacturer's information, often in small print on the price tag of the item, or on the item itself. You should keep in mind, however, that there are no standards that manufacturer's must base their performance statistics on. I have clearly heard cases where one manufacturer's "40 watts" was convincingly more powerful and consistent than another manufacturer's "120 watts". In some cases you may not be able to find manufacturer's information, or have difficulty comparing features across different brands. The solution to this is another important tip: Buy a stereo with your ears, not your eyes. Bring more than one CD, preferably different styles of music, to the store when you are shopping. After you have narrowed your search to your two or three top equipment choices, play your CD's on the pieces and listen carefully. Do not allow the salesman to demonstrate one of the store's demonstration CD's. I cannot count the number of times that I would pull out our special "Acoustic Alchemy" CD at my store and make a piece of junk stereo sound good. You should not allow the salesman to control the equipment being demonstrated either, every successful salesman knows the little adjustments necessary to make an inferior stereo "sound better" than a good stereo.

So why would someone want to sell you an inferior stereo? The answer is simple economics. At my store, we sold terrible sounding speakers for $160/pair, while we had spectacular sounding speakers for $250/pair. If I were to sell a pair of the lousy speakers, my commission was $22. If I were to sell the nice speakers, I was only paid $10. It's differences like those that encourage salesmen to adjust volume and equalizer settings, choose different CDs, and conveniently forget to mention the hidden subwoofer just to convince a customer that poor speakers sound good. It's up to you to make sure you are comparing the systems on equal ground, and I'll bet you the higher priced one will sound better 80% of the time.

Now let's cover the financial fun involved in piecing together your system. You should decide how much money you want to spend before you start shopping. With that magic number in mind, you should enter a store and find a salesperson in the audio department. Although you should never make a decision on salesperson's advice alone, it's important to have them guide you when you first start your shopping. Annoying a salesperson is a sure-fire way to not get any meaningful advice or help. Don't tell someone that you are "just looking" and then try to ask questions later. Don't waste someone's time by looking at stereos that you can't afford. In fact, the best thing you can do is tell the salesperson exactly how much money you can spend. They will make their initial suggestions, and then you can analyze the equipment.

How much will a good stereo cost? I'm a big fan of component systems myself, which sound the best and offer the most versatility for upgrading individual pieces of the system. If you want to go with components, don't attempt to spend less than $600. In that price range, I would choose last year's low end Onkyo receiver for about $200. You could also find an entry level NAD receiver for about $300. If you haven't heard of these brands, you've been hanging around the discount stores too long. I'd spend another $300 on the Bose 301 bookshelf speakers. Before you rush out and buy those 301's, you should know something about Bose speakers: They are the most overrated product in the entire audio industry. In the cheap price range, they sound good against their competitors, but for anything costing more than about $400/pair, the Bose speakers sound screechy, hollow, and weak compared to almost all other speakers in that price range. Bose built their reputation on gimmicky designs, not quality sound. If you prefer floor-standing speakers, you should listen to JBL and Cerwin Vega in the $300 price range. I'd finish the system with a Sony CDP-215 single disc CD player.

If you decide to go with a rack system, where the components are permanently attached to each other, you could find a nice system for $400-$500. Both Aiwa and Pioneer have solid offerings in this price range. Keep your ears open for the Aiwa NSX-V70 (roughly $450), it sounds a lot bigger than it looks. Regardless of whether you choose a component or rack system, I wouldn't touch the following brands: Shintom, Craig, Sansui, or Fisher. Don't even buy these brands if they sound good, they are unreliable designs which I saw enter the service department many times.

After you've been to several stores, listened to tens of stereos, and heard bunches of salesman's pitches, go home and sleep. Sort things out the next morning when your head is clear, and then make a decision as to which system to buy. Keep in mind that you can always buy different components from different stores, if one store doesn't have everything that you want. When you return to a store to make a purchase, find the same salesman you had last time, but don't let them know that you are committed to buying something. Try one last time to have them take off a few dollars; tell them you are "having trouble making up your mind." If they do reduce the price, good for you, if not, you now know that the price is already very low. Immediately after you say "I'll take it", any good salesman will ask if you want to buy an extended warranty. If you stick to the recommended components that I named here, an extended warranty is a waste of money. The store wouldn't offer a warranty if they didn't make money on it, which means that the odds in are your favor when you don't buy the policy. Enjoy your new stereo!