The term "High End" needs to die. Long live Hi-Fidelity!


I think if we are going to keep this hobby accessible, and meaning anything we need to get rid of the expression "high end." In particular, lets get rid of the idea that money equals performance.


Lets get rid of the idea that there's an entry point to loving good sound.
erik_squires
Alright, here's my "get off my lawn" gripe today.  Day after day, post after post, I see rampant misuse of "its" and "it's."

Not only here, but in e-mails, on the web, in the newspaper.

It's really easy.  "it's" = "it is."  "its" is the possessive form.

That dog is licking its wounds.

I'm going to wait until it's cooler outside.

Let's get more literate - please.


Post removed 
The comments: “I think its capitalism at its finest. Not only that but the market is shrinking and manufactures need to increase their prices to make a living getting by. That, and greed.” Are totally off base and just foolish.
Technology keeps improving things and usually the price increases as well. Have you heard of the trickle down effect? A lot of the Uber expensive components/technologies are often found in the companies lower cost components over time. 
We need people to think outside the box to try new ideas that take advantage of current technologies so we can improve over what is out today. 
Mad for greed, the more expensive the component, the less you are going to sell so when you have to recover costs on a new product that is going to be outside the reach of the majority, it will cost more.
You will never see a Bugatti go for the same price as a Toyota, this isn’t greed, it’s reality


The heart of the original proposition, I think, was to consider that money does not always equal best quality.  Since I'm getting close to meeting my maker, I had the opportunity in the 50's and 60's to build amps out of various magazines--and found that a very good quality could be had for very cheap if you were a bit of an engineer. I went on to become a physicist, but never lost my love for designing and building my own amps.  For a while in the 90's I tried to share DIY kits and ideas via forums, but found that the heyday of home engineers had passed.  I had enough money back then to spend on the "high-end" stuff, nevertheless found it fairly easy to build something for a 1/10 or 1/100 of the price that was the equal or better in sound quality.  Naturally, because of the ease in building them I gravitated toward tube designs.  

It would be nice to see a real resurgence of DIY movement--it could certainly give the super expensive stuff a second option.  Consider for a minute a "Macintosh" type power mono-block, built in China for less than $200-$300 and sold in America for $3000-$5000, or $15,000-$30,000 with the right marketing and name recognition.  It may have some bells and whistles that are hard to add as a DIY, but then most of them are not needed if you are the user and can control your environment.  


Well, I'm pretty much out of date with everything today, but it is fun to ramble.  Thanks for listening.

In the thread entitled (I believe it was) "Audiophile Or Music Lover?" a while back, I noticed a fair number of posters identified as music lovers first, their audiophile leanings being as in service to the music. Sure, hi-fi can be thrilling, but a system’s primary responsibility is to better reproduce the quality of the music itself, not merely it’s sound. That was and is Linn’s entire sales pitch.

It’s a funny dichotomy: music is sound, but sound isn’t necessarily music (no offense, lovers of Serial and other modern Classical "music" ;-) . I call the room I have my system in the music room, not the audio room.