Current Trends In Home Audio

While their will always be audiophiles , sadly, I believe the numbers will diminish. It seems that the trend is for convenience over quality. Music all stored on a Hard Drive with sound quality as a secondary consideration. Its frustrating. I was in a music store this morning , I remember two of the first CD's I ever purchased were Dire Straights , Brother in Arms , and Stevie Wonder In a Sqaure Circle . To this day, they are among the best sound quality CD's I own. Twenty years later, If I go out and but twenty newly recorded CD's at random , I would be lucky if I found 1 or 2 out of the 20 that could approach the sound quality of these two CD's . Thats a crime. Twenty years and no consisent sound quality on redbook software.

Darrylhifi, excellent sound quality can be readily acheived with hard disk based systems. It doesn't have to be MP3 compressed audio.

BTW, I was going through some nice homes in nice neighborhoods, not mega-mansions, but homes where the owners could easily afford $30,000-50,000 audio systems if they so desired.

Ahhh... the old houses that had giant front porches families would hang out on or nearby,watching the grass and kids grow.
The electronics industry can't address the 24 hour day,so somethings gotta give.The HT is efficient at delivering the goods to an entire family.2 channel recreational listening is going the way of evening porch sits.

I've been hanging around a few "hi-end" stores in my area for about 20 years. All of them are in to "whole House" audio. The trend has been "ease of use" and "I don't want to see it - I just want to here it" for about the last 8 to 10 years. Most of the systems are designed around Denon, yamaha and sony entry level stuff with in-wall or in-celing speakers. The stores keep a few hi-end pieces on display, but their bread and butter is custom install. Even the big hi-end stores like Soundex in Philly make the majority of their money on custom install. Makes it really apparent how small a minority we are.

A few years ago, I programmed the home automation system in an $18,000,00 , 22000 square foot, 7 car garage home. They spent over $1,000,000 on the audio system - over $200,000 on the crestron stuff alone. The system took over three years to complete from the planning stage until we sat down with the owners and staff to show them how to use the system. Guess what type of equipment and speakers they use? Yes, that's right, Denon equipment and all inwall/inceiling speakers.

Last year when i was shopping around for house, it absolutly blew my mind how hard builders and designers worked to create houses that were as hard as possible to work HT or a 2 channel rig in. (laugh)

There was one line of homes, between 250,000-400,000 i was checking out, and the livingrooms were built against HT all the way. With the popularity of surround sound, you would think they would start incorperating this stuff into thier houses as perks.
In this specific line of houses, each house had the option of coming with a complete 5.1 surround sound system with in-ceiling KEF speakers and velodyne subwoofers. Now these houses had yer typical "TV nook" built in the wall with optional equipment racks above and below. The greatest part of these HT systems is that in the middle of the wall where the TV would sit, was a massive fireplace, and the actual TV nook itself was shoved in the corner, slightly to the left and below the Left channel. The center channel was directly above the fireplace.

Im not sure how much crack the designers were smoking, but last i checked the center channel is supposed to be over the TELEVISION, NOT 6 feet to the right. Every Stinking model of home they had was set up that way.

The house i finally settled on (my ex fiancee's mothers house) is about 20 years old and far far better for accousitcs or any type of AV setup. Especially since i have been gutting and renovating the entire interior for the past 6 months.

In colorado they have the "Parade of homes" where they build incredibly nice houses and furnish them, and people can come in and check them out, and even buy em. One of these houses actually had a high end audio room built in with non-parallel walls and all the accoustical treatments, along with a nice little 50,000 stereo system (wilson&levinson). Obviously one of the people involved in that house was an audiophile and knew what he was doing.