Tvad: Mostly customers were pre-sold by advertising. That was fine, but when I tried to give advice based on my knowledge, such as it was, I was met by arguments and questions derived from advertisements. Neither I, or my customers had any useful technical knowledge. For example, we were once treated to a discussion of FM tuner specifications by a factory engineer from Marantz. The ads all compared tuner sensitivity. He pointed out that the tuner sensitivity standards were set in the Thirties for table radios and were of no relevance to stereo reproduction, however, the engineers had to "dumb down" the circuits to meet the sales competition.
CD players were introduced as vastly improved sources. Unless you were deaf, you could hear how horrible they were, but sales soared.
Now all this was in the seventies, so perhaps things are a bit different now.
