With increasing frequency, many audiophiles and industry professionals have accepted that the quest for highest-quality sound quality is a luxury and esoteric pursuit that, by its very nature, can appeal to only a small niche market. According to this view, the masses—the 99%, if you will—are either satisfied with Pioneer, Bose, Samsung, Dr. Dre, and iPhone/Android/tablet sound; can't tell the difference between quality and dreck; or will never have the money or imagination to move beyond lowest-common-denominator sound. To the extent that the vast majority knows anything about high-end audio, it regards it as an absurdly overpriced indulgence and a target for their disdain.
Disdain, it seems, goes both ways. When industry professionals are asked why they're struggling, and why the High End seems unable to expand beyond its core constituency, they often invoke the rationale of the niche market. High-end audio, they claim, is like classical music, which is also struggling with a graying audience, diminished outlets, lack of widespread interest, and increased costs: it speaks only to a very small segment of the population with sufficient taste, refinement, discernment, and/or deep pockets to motivate it to search beyond the norm. The 99%, they say, will never become interested or get involved. Maybe they just can't understand.
The implications of this mindset are major. Among other things, it contributes to major marketing decisions, such as the recent one by McIntosh Labs and the Berkeley, California–based audio distributor Sumiko, to forgo exhibiting at last August's California Audio Show, and instead display McIntosh electronics and Sonus Faber speakers alongside the elite and vintage cars at the concurrent Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, on the Aston Martin Estate, in Monterey. (McIntosh did surface at CAS, due only to the perseverance of Soundscape, an independent dealer in Santa Rosa.)
Instead of reaching out, we reach in. Sometimes, advertising decisions by those with small budgets are governed by past experience. Other times, outreach is limited not by hard data or experience, but simply because no one expects high performance in any area to attract the masses. The notion of expanding the market by educating the public is often seen as a lost cause best left to large companies or to journalists, such as Michael Fremer, who have made a career of challenging prevailing notions.
By buying into the luxury/esoteric/niche pursuit model, we too often lose sight of the raison d'être of high-performance audio: the accurate reproduction of musical performances, as transferred to recordings by talented sound and mastering engineers. And music is anything but a luxury commodity whose accurate reproduction is of interest to only a select minority. Music is central to our being.
Ever since our predecessor Homo neanderthalensis began to rhythmically strike two objects together, music has remained at the core of communal interaction. Anyone who questions this need only visit East Oakland, where I lived for the last decade, to see how many people are brought together by music. They need only open their eyes to see all the music lovers currently glued to portable listening devices. Millions upon millions of people feel incomplete without a musical soundtrack to accompany them, day in and day out.
In diminishing the size of our potential community and by focusing only on the economically elite or the self-defined audiophile, we lose sight of the fact that music is essential. Day after day, entire cultures eat, work, socialize, and make love to music. People don't simply want music; they need music. And many of those people want it to sound the way the artists and engineers who recorded it intended it to sound.
It is high time to retire, once and for all, the notion that the High End can appeal only to a niche market. The truth is, we have something everyone needs, even if they don't know they want it. Neil Young didn't manage to raise $6.2 million in his Kickstarter campaign for his Pono system simply because he was a rock idol; he succeeded because he promised people what their hearts and souls cry out for: better-sounding musical playback. Ditto for Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, whose promise of better sound through Beats, whether fully achieved or not, has generated annual sales of $1.3 billion. Hey, you can trash Bose all you want, but they've succeeded where many High End companies have failed: they've convinced ordinary people that the music they love will never sound better than through their products.
Let's bury thoughts of the High End as a luxury or esoteric pursuit that will appeal only to the chosen few. Instead, let's look to Neil Young's and now Sony's forays into high resolution, and listen to the beat of our own hearts. What we're passionate about—the accurate reproduction of music—is ultimately what a huge number of human beings so deeply need.
Rather than folding our arms across our chests in smug self-satisfaction, let's open them to embrace the reality that what we offer is universal in its appeal. Once we make clear that the path to high-performance audio is open to all, illuminate it with exciting music and affordable products—plug'n'play USB DACs, portable hi-rez players, great-sounding headphones and speakers, affordable and easy-to-use multiformat players with volume controls, integrated amplifiers, accessible and attractive vinyl setups, and superb cables—that enable everything to sound its best, and make their presence known through outreach, what was once viewed as a niche pursuit for the elite and the already converted will instead serve as a magnet for all music lovers.—Jason Victor Serinus
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