November 2024
If you spend any time on the internet—and since you’re reading an article on the SoundStage! Network, I’m assuming you do—you start to get ads and links to articles that are targeted to your interests. A banner at the side of my email homepage includes links to Audio Advisor, Music Direct, and other audio dealers. Facebook throws more stuff at me than I can possibly keep up with, and a big portion of it has to do with high-end audio.
A couple of weeks ago, an article hit my Facebook feed that was, for once, something I thought might be worth clicking on. The headline, “40% of Audiophiles May Be Gone Soon, and No One Is Replacing Them,” led me to an article in Headphonesty, an online magazine that mainly reviews headphones and earbuds, but also looks at other audio gear.
That headline pretty much tells the story, but the writer, Alexandra Plesa, goes into greater detail. She stumbled onto some data that Audio Resurgence, which is both an online magazine and a YouTube channel, shared on the Audiogon forum. The person who runs both sites posts on Audiogon as “rooze,” and signs his articles on Audio Resurgence with the initials CAH. Here are his findings:
I’ve posted a couple vids on YouTube recently and, as some will know, YouTube provides analytics data with every video, which is available to the channel owner.
The first video featured a Krell KSA 80 amp and at the time of writing this there have been 9,500 views:
Female - 0%
Male - 100%
13–17 years 0%
18–24 years 0%
25–34 years 0%
35–44 years 0.9%
45–54 years 13.5%
55–64 years 44.4%
65+ years 41.3%
So, 100% male, and pretty much all of the traffic is from guys 45 years old and above, with 40%+ from guys over 65!!
Numbers like that cause Alexandra Plesa to write in her Headphonesty column, “Lately, I’ve been thinking about the future of audiophilia—and it’s not looking good.” She’s not alone in her concern. Future Audiophile, another high-end mag, posted a similar piece. Writer Jerry Del Colliano, like Plesa, worries that our hobby is aging out.
Del Colliano’s article begins with a tribute to Andy Singer, a giant in retail audio who died in April. He wonders if Singer’s passing marks the end of any significant high-end audio retail presence in New York City, a key market for establishing trends in business. He goes on to list the recent problems and failures of retailers in other large markets, and points to that as an unhealthy trend.
There’s lots of hand-wringing in both articles, and plenty of theories and speculation. I agree with some of what I read. I wondered just how many people were talking about high-end audio’s demise, so I did a web search. Discussions about the shrinking audiophile population go back years on the web. I found a lot of articles and loads of exchanges in forums. Boiled down, the message in all of them is the same: most audiophiles are boomers, and as they die, our hobby dies.
Plesa and Del Colliano trot out some of the usual arguments. “For years, we’ve been an exclusive club for those with deep pockets,” Plesa writes. “We spend tens of thousands of dollars on gear, defend weird upgrades, and sometimes look down on those who don’t ‘get it.’” Del Colliano agrees: “Today’s audiophile shows do no outreach to younger people and highlight little to no gear that they can afford.”
That’s an argument that’s been around so long I’ve bought into it myself. However, if you read SoundStage! Access, you’ll find reviews of affordable gear by Dennis Burger, Thom Moon, and others. The October issue of Stereophile includes a review of Musical Fidelity’s A1 integrated amplifier, which sells for $1749 (all prices USD). The Absolute Sound, which virtually created the concept of snooty audiophilia, reviewed Schiit Audio’s Tyr monoblock amplifier. Running two of them will cost you $3200—still within reason.
SoundStage! Ultra looks at very expensive gear. So do the magazines I just mentioned. So do other audio magazines throughout the world. It’s a mix. You can read about audio that fits your budget, and you can also enjoy looking at and reading about stuff that you may never be able to afford. Jason Thorpe writes about audio gear on SoundStage! Ultra that’s way outside my budget, but I like seeing the pics he takes and reading his always-bracing prose.
Pick up a copy of Car and Driver, and here’s what you’ll read: reviews of affordable, commonsense vehicles you and I can drive to work, alongside reviews of cars very few Car and Driver readers can even cough up a down payment for. Guitar Player recently reviewed the Thorn Florentine Empirial, which carries a tag of nearly $13,000, but it also looked at the RS Guitarworks Slab LowBoy, which runs a more modest $1495. Guess which one I can afford. I read and enjoyed both reviews.
I asked Dennis Burger to give me some perspective on costly audio equipment. “I lust after Simaudio’s volume controls. I would punch Moo Deng in the face for that McIntosh MCD12000 CD player, with its glowing tubes and dancing VU meters,” he told me. “Both are worth every penny, in my opinion. But not because of any meaningful performance advantages. We have to stop pretending that expensive gear sounds better.”
There’s justification for extravagantly priced audio, then, but it shouldn’t be the focus of magazines or shows. However, I’ve begun to think the assumption that these pricier elements are overemphasized is a psychological phenomenon. When I go to a guitar show, the 1954 Stratocaster that costs $80,000 lingers in my memory longer than the current, more affordable Strats on display. Audio shows are rare—there’s only one in the mid-Atlantic area—and, yes, there’s lots of oligarch audio on display. You can walk away thinking that everything’s beyond your reach, but if you look around, you can easily track down affordably priced components.
One thing I find missing in the discussions about audio’s dim future is an informed look at how the current generation listens to music. “Younger people have grown up with unlimited access to music,” Del Colliano writes, “and they love music even more than those who came before them.” The first part of that statement is true; the second is demonstrably not. Plesa is closer to the truth: “For many, music is just something that plays in the background while they go about their day.”
I just don’t see a case for music’s inflated importance when it’s so accessible. Boomers heard a single on AM radio, phoned in to a local radio request line, and waited in anticipation to hear it again. If they really liked it, they bought it. They went on to commit to music in LP form. That commitment led to unprecedented wealth in the record industry, which was sustained into the 1990s because of CDs.
As the LP and then the CD became more popular, the demand for better fidelity grew. Not with everyone, mind you, but with enough people to create a healthy market. By the ’70s, that market was largely composed of pop-music fans. When the concept of high fidelity began in the 1950s, it was driven by classical and jazz fans. It was a very small group, but there were companies who created products to cater to them.
A more prosperous hi-fi market resulted when the LP took hold as a form of expression in pop music and some rock fans wanted better sound. Most of them were content with the pre-assembled component systems sold in department stores or with the entry-level gear that some stereo shops sold. A small portion of them went on to buy Phase Linear and McIntosh gear. That small portion still comprised a lot more people than the tiny group of jazz and classical-music fans who bought high-fidelity equipment in the ’50s and early ’60s.
The future of audio, then, is going to be driven by music. It always has been. Manufacturers must start courting young music fans. The number of consumers they attract will almost certainly be smaller than they’ve grown used to, but should still be enough to keep the industry afloat.
Del Colliano talks about the predominance of expensive gear at audio shows but misses the biggest mistake exhibitors make: they never play music anyone under 60 listens to. I’ve been to the Capital Audiofest a handful of times over the last ten or twelve years. If I go this year, I can tell you what I’ll hear: Diana Krall, Sting, Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan (the Acoustic Sounds reissue), Kind of Blue (Acoustic Sounds again), any number of MoFi titles, and so on. No pop music recorded after 1990. No jazz that would rattle the windows of the Hilton or challenge the tastes of the attendees.
Plesa asserts, “One big reason for [the lack of interest in high fidelity] is that today’s music is made to sound good on headphones, soundbars, or portable speakers. Listening to them on high-end gear will just ruin the experience as it’ll expose the flaws in the mastering.” Oh, pshaw. Putting aside any discussion of the merits of their music, Lana Del Rey, Father John Misty, Brittany Howard, and quite a few other musicians have released very well-recorded albums. I reviewed a new album by Katy Kirby in September, and it sounded terrific.
Those records and others would benefit from better playback. They’re also likely to attract listeners who think in terms of an LP rather than a playlist. One current area of growth in audio: turntables. If we can convince LP lovers to invest in good turntables and plug them into a quality integrated amp that’s powering a good pair of speakers, then we might entice them to investigate higher-end products.
I made a pitch for the CD in September. I think the future of audio is in physical media. Older audiophiles who have moved into streaming did so because they were eager to downsize as they moved to smaller digs. They long ago developed their attachments to various recordings because they had them on LP or CD. They retain fond memories of their music collections.
The future of high-end audio depends on younger listeners developing the commitment to music that my generation had. We developed that passion because we owned LPs. Perhaps there’s a way to create that phenomenon in streaming. I can’t think of one, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
In truth, record companies bear a lot of the responsibility for the future of audio, or for its decline. They don’t know how to market albums anymore. They don’t have to, since they rely on their back catalogs for income. The current state of the music industry is a story for another time, but boomers will soon be gone, and it seems awfully shortsighted to assume their grandkids will care about Pink Floyd.
As for rooze’s findings that no women seem to be interested in his videos or in high-end audio, that would take a much longer, more involved article to unpack. And I still wouldn’t have any answers.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
