Tweeter Concept Store Features Interactive Tours, Demos

"What can they do today? How do I feed it? And what's right for me?"

Checking out more ways to "feed it" we come to the lounge with a couple of big screens paired with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Tweeter clearly understands how huge gaming is today.

After passing through the staple wall of flat-panel TVs, we head into "The Video Challenge" room. Opposing walls are lined with three TVs apiece -- plasma on one side, LCD on the other -- that lead to a Pioneer Kuro setup as the showcase.

In the middle is an information bar that has buttons, which you can press for demos highlighting resolution, color, contrast, and content.

With seven TVs all showing the same content, it makes for an effective demo for consumers whose brains get fried hearing things like 120 Hz or 1080p -- this way they know what to look for, like clarity of license plates on moving cars or color accuracy among a set of drawing pencils.

Audio, of course, is half the experience of home theater. The "Signature Sound Room" lets you hear lineups from Klipsch, Focal, Polk Audio and MartinLogan.

If that's not enough, Tweeter's mobile audio solutions and accessories await before the tour concludes.

Tweeter stresses its "No. 1 in customer satisfaction" rating from J.D. Power and Associates. If the Dedham store is any indication, customers will be more than happy with their experience at Tweeter's new concept stores.

Whether Tweeter can leverage that and crunch the numbers to bring the concept experience nationwide remains to be seen.

"Among the challenges we wanted to deal with were creating a bullet-proof demonstration, which means that a customer could engage themselves with the push of a "Try Me" button, they could engage a demonstration and it would go off every time, every day," Granoff says.

"My experience traveling the stores was that our demos were complicated, and if a customer or salesperson fiddled with a receiver or changed a plug on a speaker, the demo wouldn't work.

"All you have to do as a salesmen is be defeated once by what they call death by demo, and if you've been defeated ever, you don't want to ever walk into a room and cue up a customer for a demo and try to hit it off and it doesn't work.

"For Tweeter, [we look at ourselves as] the company that is the most skilled for installation and therefore, for all that is holy, we should be able to do it in our stores."