My guess would be less than 5% of people appreciate high quality reproduction. Of that percentage, even less would spend very much to achieve high quality reproduction.

Convenience of digital and "good enough" rules the day for most all. Stereophile isn't dedicated to that segment of the population.

Catch22 wrote:

My guess would be less than 5% of people appreciate high quality reproduction. Of that percentage, even less would spend very much to achieve high quality reproduction.

Convenience of digital and "good enough" rules the day for most all. Stereophile isn't dedicated to that segment of the population.

As a youngster playing the new Beatles albums on my Dad's HiFi in the '60's I've always craved getting the best sound possible from stereo gear.

As soon as I started working after college in 1976 I purchased a Marantz 2325 receiver, JBL 150 speakers and a Dual turntable. The system sounded great and really put the hook in me.

It's hard for me to understand why more people don't feel the same but it's probably because the majority of folks have never experienced the fine sound of quality components.

Simply put, they just don't know any better.

The hobby started out by turning people on to the image that stereo gave, but when it became a high dollar snob factor instead of music first, the numbers started dropping off greatly. I think the numbers will come back but with a much different look to the hobby.

It's sad that high end audio built a wall between themselves and the cost effective products. The guilt of moving up the $$$ ladder instead of getting the best sound through a balanced approach all but killed the hobby and certainly killed the interest of the listener. However I believe if the industry looks at the opportunities the lower price scale offers and can swallow a little pride things can become healthy all over again.

It's not music or stereo that is dead, it's the way too expensive none delivering part that is. With a hobby like this if you are told to setup up the system without a plan for good sound, and more attention given to the 3 parts of audio (acoustical, mechanical, electrical) equally, chances are very hit and miss that a great soundstage will happen and the system might as well be the sports car sitting in the garrage only taken out when it's club time. Even the sports car gets a garrage, but high end audio usually gets stuck with a living room and the WAF. Nothing worse than belonging to a listening hobby with flat as pancake soundstages.

Take a guy off the street and have him put on a set of headphones vs an in-room pancake stage and watch which one he chooses. Doesn't matter how much the system cost or what it looks like, if the listener is not into it he or she is not going to bite.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Well stated MG!

Michael pretty much hit the nail on the head. However, I don't think that the crux of the issue is the quality of the equipment with low priced "high end" or that not allot of people. I think at the core is a dwindling disposable income of the middle class. So even our favorite companies at that end of the, from Onkyo and Yamaha and Sony offering ever more sophisticated HT equipment that may or may not actually hit the mark for sound quality to stallwarts like Cambridge, Arcam, and Creek continueing an upmarket creep with each year. I think at the end of the day companies just see a dwindling middle class and realize where they could once make a great living selling to the say upper 50% of income earners, it's gone to the upper 75%, and heading toward the upper 10%. Because that's who has disposable income left at the end of each month/year/economic cycle.

My good friend Robert Barstow (SUNY), would always say "there is not as much right or wrong as there is different".

There was a time when the names of the "high end" regardless of sound quality was said to be better (with a large amount of guilt attached to it) over the mass names. I'm guilty as I owned stores and selected those names carefully and built the arguement for that dividing line. From 1980-95 there was a regenerated high end audio crowd of about 250,000 world wide. Sterophile could give us the demographics of these people. Around 95 the numbers started to decline in people buying high end, yet there was an increased in music purchases among the general public. I think if we are to make judgements on the industry we should look at the facts about the numbers and quality. If we were talking about 10 million people buying high end audio I would buy the economy case, but as the high end started to take a down turn, other markets went the oposite direction, saying that people are still spending money, just not on high end audio. Car audio took an upswing as well as home theatre. On the pro side home studios took off like a rocket. Musical instruments were on the rise, as well as headphones (portable systems), personal computers and other technical electronic components such as flat screens. All these moves happened in a seamless way and without a fight. The technology from big and bulky to slim and cost effective took place with nearly a snap of the finger. We look at pictures of rear projection boxes, heavy tube TV's and deep computer monitors as a day in the past. A necessary time from one conversion of living to the next. Even though we don't see high end audio mom and pop shops, there are more audio systems being sold today than ever in history.

I see the high end as a dying industry, but at the same time giving birth to a newer generation of audiophile. The old is going to go down kicking and screaming like those few still saying the huge computer monitor out performs the flat screens, no matter cause the huge boxes are going and gone. Same with the currect high end audio, going and gone. I have a $29.00 CD Player and $99.00 receiver and will happily take on any ultra system out there in a sound off.

High end audio went the path of components and component pushing, but maybe the industry should have taken a look at what and who the audiophile is, and that they are different from the high end audio client. The high end audio client is component driver and the audiophile has many faces, from the people sitting in the bus with headsets to the music collector, to the equipment collecter and the method listener (my category).

High end audio as we know it $$$ may die, but the audiophile (the practicing listener) is alive and well. The question is, how long will it take the high end audio industry to move from the big, bulky and expensive to the real world?

If you would have asked me back in the mid 90's if I would be using Sherwood and Magnavox as one of my main listening systems I would have politely grabbed you by the belt and the back of the neck an escorted you out my back door so no one would see that you were at my place to begin with. Now you see me promoting this little setup and the tools and method to great sound. I went from components to a plan for great sound, and began getting the best sound of my listening life. When I took my eyes off of the sales pitch of high end audio $$$ and placed them on how to get great sound I found that "great sound" has nothing to do with starting with high priced components, and moving up the $$$ ladder will not compete against a listening method that is sound.

Is the high dollar component chase part of the industry over? We'll see. But the audiophile spirit will always be around as long as soundstages exist.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

Agreed- there is a plethora of great, used/demo gear in the market now!
There has never been a better time to put together an excellent to outstanding system for pennies on the dollar.

Well now, had a post here but it went bye bye, so will have to re-write in a bit.

Something that Allen said which is very true, is the huge used market. I'm not sure this number is true but I have been told that since the early 80's there has been 10 times the number of product built than the number of highender audiophiles. I'm not sure what this number is, maybe higher I would think, but here's what I do know.

High end audio is not like cars. With most audio products, a little care and the component should last a very long time.

Many higher end audio product lines are bench designed and not production designed. Meaning, what was listened to as a bench (prototyped) product is different sounding from the production product. Being a store owner that carried a lot of lines and someone who listened to every amp (for example) that came in and out the door, I can tell you that the sound of model SKU's changed as they go from a few built to many built, and much of the time not for the better.

A couple of things that I and others noticed with high end designers is that they make one or two products that are "their best efforts" and the other products are more filler type products or products designed for keeping the customer in buying mode. Much of the time it is also their simplist product that is the one that is at the top of their game.

Mass production companies build products the opposite way. They take into account all the aspects of the product into the designing. Meaning what you get on the bench is a lot closer to what comes out as an end user product. For example most high end audio designers make their products shipping worthy after the sonic choices have been made. So adding tie wraps, glue, nuts and bolts, rubber mounts and other parts like feet are added to the sound and not a part of the original design.

Personally I like very simple designs and am not attracted by the dollar signs as a judge of sound. Another thing I am attracted to is a particular designers "prime design years". High end audiophiles sometimes use reputation of a brand to make judgements "what have you done for me lately" instead of sticking with the models or even certain production runs of a model that is a representation of the best works. The same guy will go nuts over numbered vinyl presses, but will pay no attention to the vintage of a designers work.

here's an example

The B&K ST140, in it's first production run smashed the sound of the runs that followed. Same is true with some of the Rotel and Parasound amps. The simpler early designs smashed the more noted design that came along later. If you follow the designers and the production runs you will see that there are and were clear "prime times" with each of these guys and not so much that the newest is the best. Same goes true with biggest. In audio, biggest is not the best and if you get to know a designer you can usually tell when he is talking theory or talking sound. Often a high end designer will get caught up in his own experimenting, projecting that he has the next great audio product, but his best efforts were actually his simplist and at a time, he had time, to listen and not talk so much.

New products are cool but are they really the companies best?

Here's how I can tell, size and weight. When things get more complicated you start to see the size and weight go up in a product. The more complicated the speaker is to drive the more the amp has to be built up, type of thing. This is the opposite of how audio should work. When things become the next level of complication we should be stopping to ask why. Is it for better sound or for matching one thing too complicated to another?

Audio is not really all that hard to understand. You have electric, a source, an amp, a speaker and a room. If you treat these parts with the same attention due them, and figure out how they all relate and are working or not with each other, your way ahead of the game. If you start making things more complicated than they need to be in any one of those areas, the other parts start to require more as well. Some of the earlier models of product lines such as Superphon, B&K, Rotel, CJ, Music Reference and AR are good examples of companies that came out of the Pioneer, Marantz, McIntosh days as the next step. In each of these times you see the base line product, than the added bells and whistles products along with the products design to push more complicated systems. If you take the base line product and run them with their mate in speakers (not necessarily from the same company) you will hear far more dynamics and soundstage size. This is true almost across the board.

It almost sounds like I'm getting off topic but think about it. What did the early market do that the today market is not as far as the high end audiophile marketplace? They provided a reasonable good sounding base. A place where the audiophile could start and either stop or move on from. It was a place of entry that was in many ways just as good as the higher end, but simpler. When high end started their guilt driven "climb the money ladder" game the listener lost interest and started looking for sound in other ways, so by the time the next generation of listener came along the industry as a whole wasn't even showing a entry level that anyone wanted to buy into. This doesn't mean that there is no entry level, it just means it is not being talked about in a meaningful way by the press. There are plenty of entry priced systems, old and new, that are completely over looked because of nothing more than teaching and not listening.

I believe there is a high end audiophile market just waiting to happen, but their not going to jump in at thousands of dollars, no way. 3, 4, $500.00 dollars for a starter system and probably another $500.00 or so with tweaks as they learn about acoustics and other parts. If the audiophile peers are not down with that and the rags can't re-issue their writing to inclued the great sounding entry price products convincingly, the pricy world that has been built will fall.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

What we have here is a fine example of Pavlov's dog. It all started when somebody over in Europe somewhere came up with idea for Compact Discs. Then the whole thing, the whole high end audio thing, that is, started it's descent into blackness. Everyone one was saying, "Hey, these Compact Discs sure sound good." Well, yeah, if you were all thumbs and couldn't get your fiddly turntable set up right or were just plain sick and tired of the whole audiophile turntable ritual. Then CDs sounded good. Maybe. Now, I admit CDs do sometimes sound crisp, sometimes they sound undistorted. If you didn't know any better you'd think you were being treated to all the music on the recording. And yes, CDs are sometimes dynamic. Just not 90 dB dynamic. And so bland and lifeless, with a top end that sounds like a faint glimmer of what a top end should sound like. Listen to the tape, friends. All in all, like a nice paper mâché facsimile, but not even close to what the tape sounds like. Tape is a natural medium, it breathes. Digital as a medium for music is a dead medium, strictly for lazy bones.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Dumpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses and
All the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynmica

Hi Geoff, did you put this on the correct thread? Or are you saying that High End Audio has become a minority because of the CD?

Nothing is stoping audiophiles from choosing or even creating their own playback source. Types and vinyl are plenty easy to do and there are talented people to do them. If you don't have a playback system that is able to play CD's and it is sounding like this is the case by your recent move from CD's to tape, it makes sense for your move, or you can design a system that plays the CD's so you can hear more than you are describing.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune