I am presently in the process of opening my first showroom. While the equipment availible is endless,weeding through and finding good demo material is a different story. Any suggestions?

I recommend you check out the Pixar’s Short Films Collection, which is available in DVD and Blu ray. The disc includes many of the short films Pixar does, including “Jack-Jack Attack” from “The Incredibles,” “Mater and the Ghostlight” from “Cars” and “Mike’s new Car” from “Monsters Inc.” among others. These films are family friendly five or six minutes clips that tell a story with super A/V qualities.
In the world of music The Eagles “Hell Freezes Over” DVD is popular, Diana Krall “Live in Paris” is popular, and the “Legends of Jazz” on Blu ray are used a lot in demos.
The key to a good demo is finding material that appeals to you client and then efficiently showing those movie and music clips. Many installers are now using hard drive-based components to efficiently scroll through their demo materials. Some are using Media Centers, others are using Apple TV or proprietary servers from companies like Codex Novus, ReQuest and Kaliedescape.
There are lots of CDs that can be used and to you may want to consult with some of your manufacturer partners to find out what they recommend.
I also suggest to dealers to use music that people know so you can appeal to their emotions. Audiophile discs may sound great, but nobody outside of the audiophile world buys them or know who these artists are.
Some popular recordings from artists that people know include albums from Lisa Loeb, Dave Mathews, The Eagles, Steely Dan, Black Label Society and Jamie Cullum.
In the world of audiophile labels, companies like AIX Records and Chesky Records make clean, dynamic recordings of many jazz and classical musicians.

At my old job, we had 2 audio systems that we needed to push with huge amounts of margin. What we did was hook up our best tvs to them, the Sony BDPS500 and Panasonic 30k, and those sound systems. On one system we put the Mariah Carey blu-ray, which was her birthday concert IIRC, and the second demo we put on Pearl Harbor and looped it through the scenes where the planes attatck Pearl Harbor. Those drove sales on those and we had a 600% increase in sales on those particular models.

Good luck