Taters and others:
Your posts point out one of the sad realities today: high quality reproduction of music in the home doesn't matter much to the vast majority of people, although people will spend substantial sums on home theater systems.
I think this phenomenon is attributable to three factors:
1. Music is often treated in American culture as background "filler" (pay attention sometime to the nearly ubiqitous presence of music in restaurants, malls, stores, bowling alleys, etc.);
2. Far fewer people take the time to actually sit down and listen seriously to music -- either in the home or at classical music concerts;
3. The quality of recorded music, with a few exceptions mainly in the high-end, continues to deteriorate. American pop music is far more concerned with making money than developing top talent; in many cities, classical music and jazz concerts are struggling; and many young listeners have no standard against which to judge well-recorded and well-reproduced music (think about the popularity of MP3, for example).
The audiophile community is, infact, a "deviant" group when compared to the vast majority of Americans. Most folks simply don't place the kind of priority we do on music as a source of cultural, intellectual and/or emotional pleasure. All this reinforces the necessity for those who do support high-quality music reproduction to be adamant with both recording companies and audio equipment manufacturers to raise their standards. (In the early 1970's, I owned Bose 901 speakers, but they provided the basis for me to move on to much better equipment.)
