It's nice being asked to do the shop review column for the 'Poultry Breeders Gazette' once in a while. After all, those music stores get boring so the opportunity to take a look at a place specialising in sensible things like turkeys is not one to be missed.

The Turkey Shop.... hang on a minute... I think there might have been some mistake here.

I'll start again. The Turnkey Shop is nothing at all to do with feathers and beaks, but everything to do with multitracks and mixers. Not to mention mikes, modular effects and many, many accessories.

It's the retail end of the recording business. A totally new concept in consumer-related buying aids, as they say in Burgerland.

From the outside it's a standard, if smartly decorated shop in a small offshoot of Tottenham Court Road, merely seconds from the very centre of London's West End and merely moments from Heal's department store, which my great-grandfather used to manage. I bet you didn't know that.

But from the inside it's got a startling selection of the best in pro or semi-pro audio. And more interesting than that is the way it's all demonstrated. Some of the larger bits of gear - mixers and so on - were lying around for what you could call 'Hands-On' demonstration (if you were the sort of excessively hip person who uses exciting new expressions like that. I bet you wear big red glasses as well.) The rest of us would say that they were waiting for an assistant to show you over the finer details of the mixer and demonstrate how to use it. However, that is merely the tip of the high-tech iceberg.

On one side of the shop are a series of small booths containing a video screen, a pair of headphones and a small piece of recording gear — for instance, a Fostex X-15, a Tascam 244, and so on. And the three are interrelated thus: you, a potential customer, walk into the shop, find your desired gadget, put the headphones on, press a conveniently placed button, and watch the video screen. Which lights up, as if by magic, and runs through the functions and use of the selfsame device that is in front of you waiting eagerly to be fiddled with and, eventually, bought.

Quite what the shop assistants' union will make of this I'm not quite sure, but it certainly takes the embarrassing "err... I'd like to.... err... have a look at one of those... you know, those things with the.... err... oh, forget it" out of checking out the latest musical merchandise.

Of course, there are also assistants, whose expert advice and help will no doubt aid you in your knotty technical queries, but the nice thing about the zappy Turnkey method is that it means that they don't have to deliver the same boring description of the same old product three million times. "This-is-a-Portastudio-it's-got-four-input-channels-these-are-the-gain-controls" must wear a little bit on the vocal chords after a couple of years at an average of 80 times a day.

But more high-tech than this, yet, is the computer-assisted Cape-Canaveral approximation that helps you try out the effects. With two racks of gear, both a good few feet tall, one would imagine that plugging them in to try out would be a task taking hours and gallons of sweat. Not so. The secret is that they're all permanently wired into a selection of sound sources (guitar, synth, bass, various drums, voice and so on) and thence to headphones. The routing of these FX is controlled by a computer, so you can look at the screen display, select your chosen source, select your desired gadget, route one through the other, and Hey Presto!

It's all very simple to use, and gives you enough flexibility and ease of comparison to make you wonder why nobody has thought of it before. Think of the number of poor little patch-leads that could have been saved.

But I haven't run through the list of gear that you could purchase from this palace of futuristic delights. How about AKG, Shure, Sennheiser, Beyer, Soundcraft, Seck, RAM, Fostex, RSD, Soundtracs, Otari, C-Ducer, Tascam, and many others too numerous to mention.

There's a well-stocked accessories counter if you need to buy a 3/8" reverse-threaded forward-splined grommet bush, or even leads, plugs, acoustic tiles, and all those minor but important things; and there's a fine selection of mikes ranging from the usual to the outlandish, like the PZMs that everyone and their engineer is using for ambient miking these days.

Never have I been to a shop and had so much information presented to me without having to speak to anyone. Handy for those with bad breath or unsightly social diseases, particularly. But it's difficult to describe and enthuse over the Turnkey Shop without drifting into trans-Atlantic jargonese so I shall merely say that it's a tremendous advance for the ongoing recording/retail interface scenario and its easy-access consumeration principles. Got that?

The Turnkey Shop (Contact Details)