Home listening rooms aren't anaechoic chambers either. That's not the problem. It's that they may or may not be acoustically superior to a salon auditioning room - and they are likely to be quite different either way. How anyone would ascertain in any accurate way how their room acoustics vary from the salon's (without measuring in room response of both), much less how they would factor that in during a listening session, is unclear to me. Given the chance the your results in store could be exactly *opposite* of what you'd get at home, in-store A/B seems not just second best, but potentially misleading. So, again, a liberal return policy would seem the way to go, *if *you are very concerned with comparing sound. Buy two sets of speakers, return one. (Even there, it's pretty nigh impossible to do a rigorous comparison of speakers at home, since even small differences in position will matter, and blind conditions may be difficult to achieve -- Harman had to build an expensive facility with a mechanical 'speaker changer' to perform their speaker evaluation tests).
I should add that I've never done such comparisons. I go by published bench measurements and reviews, and cross my fingers.
