Should You Buy Speakers Online?

I was reading this article on CNET and it actually made quite a bit of sense, but I’m not sure I completely agree with the author’s conclusions.  let’s go in and take a look.

Steve Guttenberg out on CNET believes that it’s a bad idea to buy speakers online for a whole bunch of reasons, among them including that you can’t listen to the product beforehand to help determine if it’s right for your needs, and that you can’t consult a salesperson to ensure that the product is right for your needs.  Actually, that’s pretty much ALL of his reasoning.

Leaving aside for the moment that his advice on such a frontier is unopposedly tainted by the fact that he himself WAS an audio products salesman (hey, if you used to make buggy whips, are you really going to recommend people buy a car?)  his advice is also pretty feeble.  Okay, sure, you can’t listen to the speakers online.  But even if you listened to them in a store before buying them there, would you really get any better effect?  You’d hear how the speakers sound in the store.  Unless your house looks an awful lot like that store, you’re not going to get the same effect.

Of course, one thing he didn’t mention, an important point especially THESE days, is that online, you really can’t haggle.  Perhaps the lone bright spot about this misery of an economy the whole planet’s in right now is that, suddenly, cash is KING.  Just ask for a discount and, chances are, you’ll get it as long as you’re reasonable about it.