Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I bought an Alpine CDA-9884 from Best Buys the other day for around $200. When I was looking at receivers I asked the salesperson what was the better makes they had. He immediately said Alpine, and proceeded to tell me of the new feature they had called Imprint which he explained contained a parametric equalizer. He proceeded to demonstrate the feature and I was able to see him adjust multiple band-pass points in 100 Hz increments. I recall thinking that this would be a nice feature as it would allow a degree of application of Fletcher-Munson correction for lower listening levels. Well, I got it installed, came home and went to set up the equalizer. An hour or so later I was getting annoyed as I could not access the function as shown to me. Well the manual seems to indicate that in order to do any of this, you need to have an OPTIONAL box called a Alpine PXA-H100 IMPRINT™ Audio Processor for another $200. Well I called Best-Buys, none of the sales staff were aware of this, neither was the installer who actually owned one. Hence the title “Dumb as a Bucket of Rocks”. So I spoke to one of the “Junior Mangers” (euphemisms for I cant do anything without the actual managers OK). He proceeded to apologize for “Dumb as a Bucket of Rocks” salesperson. Said I could bring the unit back, have it de-installed, but they would not refund the cost of the installation. I asked what the cost of a PXA-H100 would be, and could they give me a rock bottom price to make up for their screw up. After about ten minutes of looking in his computer he indicated that the Best Buys corporate site indicates that Best Buys does not even carry this item, and he could; not even special order it for me. So I am writing this as a warning to anyone else who might think of buying this unit based on the say so of one of the “Dumb as a Bucket of Rocks” Best Buys sales staff. I find it odd that they were able to make it work at the store, which implies that within the switching console was likely secreted a PXA-H100 module (fraud?), I’ll let you decide that, I know what I think.