It's a shame that big box stores (Walmart, Target) / online retail (Amazon) / brand owned stores (Apple, Bose) have all conspired to reduce consumer choice. Even in big cities, there's practically no specialty stores to go to in which I can demo a product category across brands.
Think pre-GFC peak Best Buy & the old CompUSA/Circuit City chains of the past or even Apple before they captured every other product category and actually had entire tables of headphone and speaker brands.
It strikes me as very hard for any new brand to come about in this environment if they aren't already big enough to have their own storefront. As you are generally left shopping online by price (DTC / China alphabet soup branded sop on AMZN) or by known brand (I'll just get a Sony / Apple / Sonos / Bose).
The consumer choice spectrum was pretty rad in the mid-to-late-1980s. I was often in the market for hi-fi stereo equipment, and I did it by accumulating discrete components one-by-one.
In my home city, we had several electronics retailers who sold every kind of component stereo equipment, including car stereo and whatnot. So I could literally walk into a store and see a huge gamut of dual-deck cassette recorders, or turntables, or amplifiers, receivers, etc. And they were all set up for customer demo. It was fantastic.
When the time came for me to shop for a CD audio player, I pre-purchased a few CDs to listen to for the demos. That was a great move; the place where I went for "auditions" had a dedicated listening room just chock-a-block with equipment that could be switched into whatever speaker system fit my home setup. And so in exactly one stop at a retail outlet, I was able to listen to that CD through several diverse systems, make a final purchase decision, and walk out of there with my favorite 7-disc CD changer, which served well for about 15 years after that.
The problem with showrooms is it is easy to go in, see what you need, then walk out and order from the cheaper mail order place that doesn't have retail overhead.
The other problem is walmart with the generic stuff is good enough for most even though it is measurably bad, in a cheap but measurably bad listening environment - but they can thereby compete with online sales. That and a lot of expensive stuff is measurably no better than the "our best" walmark junk and so if you do find such a store there is no guarantee they are not pushing you overprice junk instead of the good stuff.
It goes back to the old tale of "being too poor to buy cheap boots" that US consumerism has forgotten. We are addicted to cheap stuff, not good value stuff. Cheap is not always good value.
I've found $30 sneakers at Wal-Mart that compare to $90 sneakers from Brooks, they are compatible with my feet like Brooks, they don't last as long as the Brooks but they last more than 1/3 as long.
Trouble is those were only available for a short time, I've gone back and there's been nothing that good.
We went from being able to walk into a store and actually try stuff out - compare how headphones sound, how a speaker feels in your hands - to now just gambling on Amazon reviews and hoping return policies are generous
Think pre-GFC peak Best Buy & the old CompUSA/Circuit City chains of the past or even Apple before they captured every other product category and actually had entire tables of headphone and speaker brands.
It strikes me as very hard for any new brand to come about in this environment if they aren't already big enough to have their own storefront. As you are generally left shopping online by price (DTC / China alphabet soup branded sop on AMZN) or by known brand (I'll just get a Sony / Apple / Sonos / Bose).