Is Audiophilia a Dying Hobby or Just in Need of a Tune-Up?

Audiophilia is facing a crisis. With most enthusiasts over 55 and younger generations uninterested in high-end audio, the hobby risks fading into obscurity. Blame it on space, budget constraints, or the elitist image of the community—something needs to change.

40% of Audiophiles May Be Gone Soon, and No One Is Replacing Them

Can we make audiophilia relevant and inviting for the next generation, or is this truly the end of an era?

 

The times they are a changing… and perhaps we’re just relics of a bygone era. Time to pour a glass of wine and drop the needle. Let youth sort it out.

I'll drink to that.

 

Yeah, old guys who like stereos (and make stereo equipment of the type we all have) trying to reach an audience who don’t give a shit probably does mean the industry is fading. Trying to sell buggy whips to Model T owners. Quite possibly the future experience of music has nothing to do with amps and speakers but instead neural links and embedded chips. The next big thing might be imagined in the head of some 10 year old kid tomorrow. In Elon’s Mars colony, how will folks relax and decompress… probably not with turntables and DACs and XVX or M9 type speakers.

Philosophically, I’m thinking of the Kahlil Gibran passage from “the prophet”…

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.

The times they are a changing… and perhaps we’re just relics of a bygone era. Time to pour a glass of wine and drop the needle. Let youth sort it out.

Well put! At the end of the day youth must sort it out for themselves.

But maybe not entirely by themselves, lol! Peace!

 

Some observations:

1. No hard numbers are presented in the article that suggest that replacement customers are not happening.

2. If newer generations favor experiences, can’t we sell in-home listening as an experience to best remember the last concert? I see a lot of merit to the idea of ‘experience machines’

3. Maybe the product mix and offering needs modernizing. At TAS we talked about ‘metropolitan systems’ to describe scaled down systems that fit an urban lifestyle of smaller apartments. Think beautifully designed integrateds and Watt Puppy 50 or Sabrina size speakers. And let’s be honest, audio sucks at product naming. Get rid of the fucking acronyms and long numbers. My old Sony player is the SCD-777ES. I still love it and it still spins discs and sounds very good on Super Audio discs. But like many product names, only an engineer can appreciate the name.

4. Elliot had a great point about how the industry doesn’t market worth a shit. Largely true in my experience. Maybe we need to think in terms of 2025 types of marketing across socials and how we bring customers along the entire journey to when they are older and have more space and income for a two channel system.

5. Japanese Kissas. How cool would it be if most medium sized or larger cities offer a sound experience with cocktails. Just watching someone DJ jazz and other records while having a nice drink can make the Bosch visual cues into reality. Maybe Devon Jonas deserves credit for creating the art experience version…

You weren't on the board of Blockbusters were you?

 

Denon, Marantz and B&W: Business closure allegedly on the cards

"In the highly competitive hi-fi market, the brands belonging to Sound United, such as Denon, Marantz and Bowers & Wilkens, have long seemed like a rock in the surf. However, there are currently increasing media reports that Sound United's parent company Masimo is considering discontinuing the –...

pinkfishmedia.net

 

In my glass half full view of the hobby the love of sound and the love of music are very much parallel pursuits rather than exactly the same thing… though I’d consider it’s likely most audiophiles are also musicophiles but the priority and weighting we put on each of these values may likely vary.

It’s also entirely possible to be very much in love with the performance of the design, the technology and the engineering of audio and then the performance of music itself can act as an accompaniment in the listening. Not the way I choose for it to come out but completely understandable… the audio pursuit is a sensational ride. It can also be a complicit distraction.

However I also like to think that music can be the siren and seduce us over to it when we thought we were heading off onto the high seas of sonics and our focus more caught up in the rigging.

I’d also figure that for some (or possibly all at varying times) our priorities in listening can be about appreciating the qualities of the recording or a focus in the qualities of a performance or even more just in the value of the music in itself.

The love of the gear and the love of the sonics for me as great as they are become so much less meaningful without an accompanying deepened appreciation and connection to the music that I am playing.

But the truth is music has always survived without being recorded in performance but not so much without it living through being performed and shared and in being appreciated and valued.

In the end though music itself needs high end audio much like a fish needs a bicycle.

You left out the hope of being thought to be “a success, self made man, having arrived” by being able to buy and own the most expensive gear out there (this includes the manufacturer who increases the price of his products to outrageous degrees specifically to give the illusion of better quality and to attract the above ); and ipso-facto being able to approximate the sound of the very best at a fraction of the cost.

There was the member who cited the youth of today turning up their nose at high-cost equipment but thinking nothing about blowing $1,000.00 on Taylor Swift concert tickets. I think the point was that they prefer group experience to the solo-listening experience, but then went on to say his daughter collects LPs however, that she goes with friends to retro markets and digs through records looking for rarities (the key point is that she is going to those shops “with friends”, no doubt sharing details of their “finds” with their friends who engage in the same).

I believe the blip in greater record sales is due to the demand from us old silver-back’s. We have bought our homes, raised our families, seen the world and now retired, use our disposable income to keep ourselves engaged in this hobby that, quite frankly, represents what we wanted but couldn’t afford when we were teens. We don’t feel anxious sitting alone at night in our listening rooms.

The youth of today however, live in uncertain times. The world is smaller, less safe and rapidly changing. Living to old age is no longer the norm, s**t happens. Like fish swimming in schools, or birds in a murmuration the youth must feel safer in groups, spending whatever to experience life together. I don’t think they will be taking up this hobby. Our gear that survives us will likely end up deteriorating in garage of a relative who inherited it or surviving as a novelty in some Japanese Kissa bar or museum.

 

If Rexp's statement - "no one in the real world can hear much difference between an audiophile rig and their car stereo" - refers to "non audiophiles" then it is probably true.

In that case they’re also deaf.

My 86 years old non-audiophile father can tell the difference. Actually he said he didn’t like the sound when I switched to Devore O/96s from a modified old speaker and later again when I switched to 10” Cube Audio Nenuphars. He was right unfortunately.

 

When was the last time you heard a woman say: "He's so hot, he has a digital to analog converter."

Darn, as a single person, I was really pinning my hopes on this!

 

In the mid 1970’s the Japanese began dumping CB radios into the US Market. Suddenly, CB radios were all the rage. I was in high school and college then. I saw my parents sitting at their base unit every evening talking for hours to unseen strangers. The radios have limited range- 5 miles at best but of course everyone was looking for ways to increase their range from taller antennae to illegal amplifiers. It seemed like the fad faded as fast as it started. Within a decade or so it was over. Can’t blame the internet, that was still a couple of decades from maturation. I imagine HAM operators were expecting a surge in their community at the time; but I don’t think that happened. Parallel CB radios to the general audio population and HAM radio as the hifi community. What killed the CB radio? Satellite TV. At least that was the case for my parents.

What I’m getting at is that hifi was a branch of hobby electronics that began in the 1930’s and continued to flourish just beyond the rise of the CD. The natural outcome will always be to ultimate performance, ultimate cost. Like a pyramid, audio goes ever higher catering to an increasingly smaller crowd. Take Reel to Reel- the ultimate source. How many people today have a studio grade R2R let alone ever heard one? And I mean analog R2R. Today, everyone has an incredible array of options vying for their time. Steaming audio in the car or at home, streaming an infinite amount of video programming, games, endless news sources from around the world and there’s the world of social media. Just the S/N of all that drowns out hifi. We are like a small group of monks that can still tune out the world to experience our wonderful world of music.

My uncle had a hifi in the 1960s. I remember his Dual turntable and Pioneer receiver. He even went Quadraphonic in the early 70s. Since the 1960’s I have watched the world change so much. From our single rotary dial telephone in the living room with a small, B&W TV with 4 channels and twice daily newspapers to all this today. I haven’t sat down on a Sunday afternoon to enjoy the Sunday edition newspaper since sometime in the early 2000s, I think. Boredom is no longer an issue- that’s for sure. But thinking rather than just taking in information is a rare thing these days. Today’s big fads will fade in time to be replaced by something else. Music will always remain important in peoples lives but how they listen in the future, perhaps we cannot even imagine.

And I find that streaming with Roon ARC in my BMW X7 makes car stereo sound amazingly good. Surprisingly good. Sure, my home system is much better but the cost per performance ratio is not good at all.

 

It has nothing to do with what I or we like only t



No
One is telling anyone what they can listen too only that in my experience I know not a single client that bought a high end system to listen to that genre of music.
Music in the 60-80s had a much different place in the world .Music changed. The world and if you don’t agree that’s fine but I don’t agree. Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles , Stones etc changed our world and music was the centerpiece. This was pre internet, pre cell phones pre ear buds etc.
You’ll hate this comment but the pre 1980’s music was the golden age of Rock and almost all the great Artists and Bands came from that era. I said most not all.
Take a piece of paper and try writing it down you will have a lot of fun.

The world of music is so much larger than comparing great 60’s, 70’s pop music to rap or whatever. I wish I had multiple lifetimes just to explore music from the last couple of decades (regardless of genre) not to mention all the great recorded music from Gregorian Chant to the present.

 

The times they are a changing… and perhaps we’re just relics of a bygone era. Time to pour a glass of wine and drop the needle. Let youth sort it out.

...I have been sorting my re-recycling, turning off lights in unoccupied rooms, consolidating driving errands since the 70s.

And as I have told a few of my young friends: it's your planet now. You guys have to decide what's important to you. What you want.

I'm leaving my hifi in the "on" position 24/7 now. There are not enough old audio guys to worry about all that. Turn off Luxor for five minutes and you'll cover our consumption.

If the future wants earbuds, let 'em have earbuds.

 

You left out the hope of being thought to be “a success, self made man, having arrived” by being able to buy and own the most expensive gear out there (this includes the manufacturer who increases the price of his products to outrageous degrees specifically to give the illusion of better quality and to attract the above ); and ipso-facto being able to approximate the sound of the very best at a fraction of the cost.

There was the member who cited the youth of today turning up their nose at high-cost equipment but thinking nothing about blowing $1,000.00 on Taylor Swift concert tickets. I think the point was that they prefer group experience to the solo-listening experience, but then went on to say his daughter collects LPs however, that she goes with friends to retro markets and digs through records looking for rarities (the key point is that she is going to those shops “with friends”, no doubt sharing details of their “finds” with their friends who engage in the same).

I believe the blip in greater record sales is due to the demand from us old silver-back’s. We have bought our homes, raised our families, seen the world and now retired, use our disposable income to keep ourselves engaged in this hobby that, quite frankly, represents what we wanted but couldn’t afford when we were teens. We don’t feel anxious sitting alone at night in our listening rooms.

The youth of today however, live in uncertain times. The world is smaller, less safe and rapidly changing. Living to old age is no longer the norm, s**t happens. Like fish swimming in schools, or birds in a murmuration the youth must feel safer in groups, spending whatever to experience life together. I don’t think they will be taking up this hobby. Our gear that survives us will likely end up deteriorating in garage of a relative who inherited it or surviving as a novelty in some Japanese Kissa bar or museum.

If I was in the under 40 group now, I wouldn't be taking up this hobby, not because I would have better things to do, but because it is highly unlikely that hearing any digital audiophile system now would be, as @Lee said, life changing.

 

The world of music is so much larger than comparing great 60’s, 70’s pop music to rap or whatever. I wish I had multiple lifetimes just to explore music from the last couple of decades (regardless of genre) not to mention all the great recorded music from Gregorian Chant to the present.

Of course it is but the history is what it is. There was an explosion of music in the 60 and 70's unlike anything in human history. The Beatles absolutely changed the world. This is very different Wil than loving Gregorian chants. The sales of music went through the roof as well as people listening to more and more music.Classical and Jazz etc.don't move the needle like that no matter how much some like it. These groupssold MILLIONS of albums, got huge mainsteam coverage on TV , Film and Press. This was a very big deal.

 

and by the way we went through different revoluitions with the portable music storage devices and headphones/earbuds. This has dramaticlly changed how people listen which is very different than what I experienced as a young person.
Headphones were not a big thing until the iphone, Beats and hip hop. We can think that audio is way more important than it is but it is a small , undercapitalized industry with an aging population that cares about it. Headphones became "cool" speakers and hi fi wasn't and truthfully still isn't.

 

I was listening with headphones in the early 70s. I had a cousin with a reel to reel tape deck and a pair of high end headphones. I think that was either 1970 or 1971.

 

If I was in the under 40 group now, I wouldn't be taking up this hobby, not because I would have better things to do, but because it is highly unlikely that hearing any digital audiophile system now would be, as @Lee said, life changing.

I'm more optimistic. In the video, Tam was really talking about the sonic impact plus the emotional beauty of the music. I think that experience is very much possible.

 

I was listening with headphones in the early 70s. I had a cousin with a reel to reel tape deck and a pair of high end headphones. I think that was either 1970 or 1971.

I m sure you were. I had a pair as well but they were not cool and headphone sales very very very small. Then came BEATS!!!!

 

I'm more optimistic. In the video, Tam was really talking about the sonic impact plus the emotional beauty of the music. I think that experience is very much possible.

Lee, the world has changed. The Hi Fi Industry so far has not.
I grew up in an era when music was important. It was part of the social construct and the culture. People talked about it all the time. The Beatles and Stones etc. were on Ed Sullivan and on the news. The Beatles made huge movies, it affected the news, fashion, sexuality and hair styles.
Hip Hop has done some of the same yet that took people in another direction. That direction is different and not one of Hi Fi, listening with ones friends to a new album. We used to get so nuts about the release of a new Tull album. We all sat around got high and listened to it until we wore it out. That was fun but it is not what happens today. why? I don't really know but I do know that there is way to much talk about the gear and way to little noise about the music. Its hard today to find new music, not because it doesnt exist but the Industry and the machine promoting it is very very different and I assume the profit structure isnt the same. Its always about the money. So we get Taylor Swift and Cardi B etc. but these artists don't make people want to buy better Hi Fi in my experience.

 

Lee, the world has changed. The Hi Fi Industry so far has not.
I grew up in an era when music was important. It was part of the social construct and the culture. People talked about it all the time. The Beatles and Stones etc. were on Ed Sullivan and on the news. The Beatles made huge movies, it affected the news, fashion, sexuality and hair styles.
Hip Hop has done some of the same yet that took people in another direction. That direction is different and not one of Hi Fi, listening with ones friends to a new album. We used to get so nuts about the release of a new Tull album. We all sat around got high and listened to it until we wore it out. That was fun but it is not what happens today. why? I don't really know but I do know that there is way to much talk about the gear and way to little noise about the music. Its hard today to find new music, not because it doesnt exist but the Industry and the machine promoting it is very very different and I assume the profit structure isnt the same. Its always about the money. So we get Taylor Swift and Cardi B etc. but these artists don't make people want to buy better Hi Fi in my experience.

That's a different topic for the most part. Last week I spoke to a prominent producer who likened the big labels to more of a venture capitalist. They are hoping to find the next Taylor Swift. It's big bets that hit less often but when they do, it's a giant payday.

 

...in the 70s, for me, my friends, if you were moving everything you owned (which fit in your car, btw) to a new apartment, or maybe a dorm, the first thing you did...the first thing always...get the hifi hooked up.

Get some music rolling. How could you move boxes without tune-age? No way. Impossible.

And when the job is done, plunk into a crappy hand-me-down chair, or on the floor, continue enjoying good tunes, good friends, and your favorite refreshment. Music was a fundamental component of life at that age (teens/20s), circa 1975 +/- 10 years. IMO: more social, less solitary, although the solo head-space surely did exist.

 

That's a different topic for the most part. Last week I spoke to a prominent producer who likened the big labels to more of a venture capitalist. They are hoping to find the next Taylor Swift. It's big bets that hit less often but when they do, it's a giant payday.

its not a differnet topic at all. People use Hi Fi to listen to music and if they arent into the music they dont need the gear. Does the music that is popular today make people want to sit down and listen to it seriously? IS there enough of it to make this important? Where is the protest music of the 70's? Where is the new Dylan? the new Stones? The new Beatles?
We are not from the current generations and they don't do what we did. I suggest that the lack of music to listen to seriously rather than through headphones at the gym or while scrolling thjrough tic tok absolutely matters. Im sorry but one man surveys dont mean shit. Reality is less and less young people are involved with what we love. I think there are many factors but if they don't love the music then they dont need to gear.