Detlof and Gthrush1: Your posts made me think of an amusing incident that I thought I'd pass along. In the early 1990's, I was overseas teaching graduate courses for Chapman University (Orange, CA) on US military installations in the western Pacific. Since I taught in the evening, my days were mostly free, and I decided to take a part-time job selling audio equipment for the Navy Exchange System at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan. We carried a moderately broad range of brands, and among the various lines were Adcom and Klipsch. The sales on most of the gear in the "high-end" room had been really slow, because no one was there to demo the equipment for prospective buyers.
About a month after I started with the Exchange, I was doing a demo of a pair of Klipsch K-Horns (the big corner units), driving them with a pair of Adcom GFP 565 monoblock amps (talk about complete amplifier overkill for horns with 104 db efficiency). A pair of young sailors came in one afternoon and asked me to play the Telarc version of the 1812 Overture - they particularly wanted to hear the cannon shots at the end. So, we cranked up the Adcom/Klipsch combo. The system was being played at fairly high volume, and when the cannot shots went off, people came running from other parts of the Exchange building to see if something had blown up. Then, about 5 minutes later, the base fire department showed up, saying there had been a report of an explosion. I thought all of this was hysterically funny, although the Exchange Manager failed to see the humor in the situation.
The bottom line to the story? I sold a pair of K-horns and Adcom GFP-565 monoblock amps to BOTH sailors. Where they eventually put this stuff in their barracks was beyond me, but they seemed pleased as hell with their new gear. Apparently word got around among the younger enlisted guys that the Exchange had some "awesome" audio gear, because over the next 2 months, I sold virtually every item that had been in inventory for nearly a year (over $30,000 of Adcom gear alone -- and that was the Exchange price, which was 45%-55% below MSRP).
So, out there somewhere, there may still be a bunch of Navy guys groovin' to the sounds of the Telarc 1812. Never underestimate what sells audio gear .
