"I'm never going back to Guitar Center"

I say it every time I walk out of that place... and I consistently walk out empty handed. It's always a frustrating experience, and every time I walk in I think "I know I said never again after the last time, but today I just need one simple thing, and there's no way this trip will be a waste of my time." It's always the same self-rationalization as a slink into the K-Mart of music stores against my better judgment, trying to pretend I'm not in a crappy mood just because I crossed their threshold.

Most recently, I just needed a phaser-- specifically, an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone. I walked in, walked up to the counter, and asked for a Small Stone. The clerk looks at me blankly. "Who makes it?"

I answer "Electro-Harmonix."

"You mean a Small Clone?" He responds, naming that company's chorus pedal.

I try not to rankle at his correcting me: "No, I mean the Small Stone." Anyone who doesn't play, and play through pedals, might not get why this annoys me: the EH Small Stone is probably the second most popular phaser pedal in the world, not quite as ubiquitous as the MXR Phase 90, but it's been in production non-stop since the mid 1970s. Someone working behind the effects pedals counter at a music store should at least have heard of it.

He looks up this strange and unfamiliar pedal in his computer. "Hmm... I don't have one in stock. I could order it from a warehouse and give you a call when it comes in." And this is the primary problem with Guitar Center-- if I wanted to order one, I would have done so online, without dealing with the fluorescent lights and the ambiance of someone practicing Metallica riffs on an out of tune guitar: that's what I use the internet for. I walked into the mega-chain-store because I wanted to exit the store with an extremely common pedal in hand.

I've made this mistake more than once-- I have often gone to Guitar Center because they're a big chain, and I expect them to be well stocked. I don't enjoy being in the store, I don't like shopping there, but their size always makes me assume that if I want to find something that everyone uses, something mass produced, this will be the obvious place to go... and I am always wrong: I leave empty handed, wondering why I had to describe a Big Mac to a McDonald's counter jockey (you mean Quarter Pounder? No? Maybe I can order you one from the store across town)

It's got to work on all systems

I don't know who's going to follow me through this metaphor, but...

When you're working out a mix of a song, you have to check it on different systems. This lets you make certain that the song doesn't just sound good in a studio, on nice monitors. You want to make sure it sounds good on bass boosted DJ headphones, on laptops' built in speakers, on a boom box, and on a pumping home stereo system. It's even important to check the mix in mono (there's a number of reasons to do this... but for right now let's just focus on "if you can make the mix sound good without a stereo image, the thing is pretty solid"). If it only works on one system and fails elsewhere, you've got more work to do.

And so we get to the point:

If you want to argue the quality of Avatar as a film around the argument that it can't be appreciated without 3D special effects and an IMAX screen... you may be right. It may very well be designed to show of an amazing system, but if the thing doesn't hold up in mono (so to speak), it's not really that good.