Best Buy Magnolia - shockingly bad
I've visited a couple of Best Buy Magnolia demo rooms with the goal to compare them vs my home stereo, how much I might be still missing. I've spent at least an hour at each location frantically switching all possible combinations of speakers and amps. I want to thank them for the opportunity to A/B pretty much any possible combination with one simple click, technically, it was great.
What was the sour surprize though - the sound was consistently bad. Not just not reaching to my setup on some aspects, but failing 1 or 2 grades worse on every single metric. It was not just comparatively bad, it was unacceptable. Fatiguing, flat, unresolving, no soundstage nor imaging at all - outright painful to listen.
I wonder if sound engineers from any of the brands sold there ever visited to check? It was probably designed by technical people who did the part of clever software switching so many devices well, but probably with zero audiophile experience. It might be something stupid, like extra long interconnect cables, substandard speaker wires. I also think the home theater amplifiers they have (Denon and Arcam) are total crap. Unfortunately 2-channel amps were not wired in at both location, only 5 or 6 home theaters, all of them bad.
The A/B part was still working very well. E.g. while Arcam amp was bad, Denon was horrible. B&W 703 was bad, KEF Q3 Meta really bad, and KEF LS50 horrible, and so one.
Do you have any opinion on what's going on there, how did they manage to screw up all this?