Originally Posted by
shane
Wow! I’d forgotten all about Nightingales. Sold a few pairs around 1975. Brilliant at imaging, but not great at impressing customers’ wives.
That was a really exciting time. The top range stuff we’d been selling were the likes of Dual turntables (601 and 701), big Yamaha receivers and Gale 401s, when a customer asked us to demo this system against another system so he could decide which to go for. We agreed and pitched up to his place, set up the system and had a good listen. We then took our system down and the other dealer set up the competition; Linn LP12, Grace G707, Supex, Naim NAC somethingorother/NAP250 and DQ10s.
Say what you like now about Linn and Naim, but we put the slow moment of Shostakovich Piano Concerto no 2 (Christina Ortiz, HMV ASD3081, the impact was such that that album was engraved on my memory) and our world was never the same again. We didn’t get the agency for Linn or Naim, but it completely changed the way we listened to and judged equipment, and we did get Nightingale, Rega and A&R and similar, and I think sold better and more involving systems as a result.