remarkable visit

Last week I had the perfect example of how appreciated good customer service can be. A business trip brought me to Vancouver. In a few free hours I brought a visit to Hificenter (dot com) to snif around a bit. One of the guys working there offered to show me. He spent a full hour with me showing every single listening room !! Very, very knowledgable and enormously friendly people.

HifiCentre is the best equipped store I ever saw. Every single listening room is completely furbished with acoustic optimizations and nice furniture creating an atmosphere optimized for the specific equipment. And of boy, do they have equipment: the very high end of McIntosh with Sonus Faber (I think Amati) was a complete walhalla. I heard various Jazz songs on the set which blew my from my seat. 

 The Naim room had a set-up of the SuperNait2 with CD5si and Totem Hawk. I heard this combination a few times earlier and it reconfirmed the good balance of the set-up. There is something with Naim sound that has been mentioned here already thousands of time: a kind of relaxed, comfortable and so musical way of bringing the music to your ears. Extraordinary and very appealing. The Hawks were over 3,5m apart with a slight toe-in. Very, very good. I prefer my ND5xs over the CD5si especially regarding the detailing that to my stance is better with the streamer.

There was also a high-end Linn set-up with the top end IsoBariks and amps/streamers. Very nice, but I prefer the Naim sound. Linn seemed to be a bit more cold in its sound I thought. 

Apart from various well known makes like Naim and others, HifiCentre also has a dedicated section for B&O. Having listened tos o many wonderfull equipment I asked whether the “typical B&O customer” was willing to audition other makes instead of B&O. The answer was a firm “no”; apparantly customers looking for B&O are not open to other equipent. They more or less ufront seem to decide on what they want.