I’m nearly 38, have been into music and audio from a very young age (one of my first ever CDs, around the age of 9 or 10, was a 24K gold version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon… it wasn’t until many years later did I understand the significance of that particular “tech”).
I’ve spent my entire adult career in high end audio and custom integration so I have a lot I could mention about this. But here are just a few observations:
People have different priorities. Personally, I don’t buy the whole idea that one needs to be rich or have a lot of money to enjoy an excellent music playback system. When I was 16 working at McDonalds, then later at Rubio’s Baja Grill, I was putting money into my car - suspension intake, exhaust, engine drop, sway bars, body kits, etc. - I could have easily chosen to make a different decision and buy a motorcycle, or a custom surfboard, or a nice stereo system. I thought my little Aiwa shelf system at the time sounded just fine for my bedroom. Later, when working at Best Buy and living in my first apartment after moving out of my parent’s place and going to community college, I chose to purchase a big TV and video game consoles, along with a lot of car audio upgrades. I went through numerous head units (Sony, Kenwood, Pioneer - mostly because two were stolen, San Bernardino CA is not exactly always the best of neighborhoods), Cerwin Vega speakers, Pioneer speakers, MTX, etc.
My point is that people have the money, and younger people do too, HiFi is just not important to them. When dumping money into car audio, I was also buying a lot of CDs and building my music collection. I would go on trips to LA with friends and we would spend hours in Amoeba records and other spots around LA. We would have nice meals at nice restaurants. These were all people I worked with at Best Buy, not making a ton of money, and it was there that I started learning about nicer stereo gear. Either way, we all were still spending money on stuff that we could have easily diverted into a stereo system. One of my friends at the time, who is a fairly proficient studio drummer at this point, had invested something like $5K into his custom Drum Workshop kit and Sabian cymbals (though I think he later switched to Paiste, or Zildjan? Not sure). I had a cheap, but decent enough sounding Sony HiFi by that point, which I had inherited from my roommate’s coworker. I knew about B&W, McIntosh, and even applied at the B&O store in South Coast Plaza at the time, but I had still yet to experience what a real HiFi can actually do.
Which brings me to my next point. Having now been doing this for something like almost twenty years, I can honestly say there are only a small handful, maybe two handfuls? Let’s say somewhere in the realm of 10-15, actual domestic audio systems I’ve had the opportunity to listen to, which play music at any level even remotely beginning to approach a live performance. And I am not strictly speaking of volume levels, either. I’m talking about emotion and raw energy, which is nearly impossible to capture on a studio recording (so those who do I have a lot of respect for). Heck, I have a decent HiFi but I know exactly what I’m missing, and I know how to get there too. I should mention that I was an on-call audio engineer at The Crocodile Cafe in Seattle, which has a d&b Audiotechnik front of house rig with an Avad (used be a Yamaha M77) 48 channel mixer, and am quite familiar with the professional and recording side of the industry as well. I’ve worked with or at the very least am familiar with nearly every brand of “High End” domestic loudspeakers or electronics, and most of the stuff people buy for their homes simply cannot approach what a properly implemented professional audio system can deliver. So young people, who are into music, and frequent live music performances (as I did all through my entire adult life), when they walk into some “high street” boutique retailer with a crappy sounding HiFi that hasn’t been properly setup because the salespeople have been smoking too much crack and think that a $4K power cable is the “magic sauce” for their reference system and can’t stop gushing about it, simply look on in amazement, walk out the door, and go down to their local Urban Outfitters to purchase a Crosley
On this note it is not a surprise to me that another group in tandem with young people not being particularly into high performance audio are musicians themselves, which in large part is because any thing these HiFi retailers think sounds good, sounds like complete trash to most self respecting musicians who have often put an equal amount of time and money into assembling their instrument collection. When they hear some goopy sounding, muffled, “warm” system they immediately realize there isn’t a HiFi out there that is going to sound anything like the stage monitors they are used to having, or the things they are using in the studio to record with.
To me it’s actually a lack of knowledge, as someone pointed out above, that is why younger people aren’t into audio and high performance, along with the elitist attitude possessed by many, many people in the “HiFi” audio industry. The failure of the older generation to properly share the knowledge and passion as to what makes a high performance system sound good in the first place has been my personal experience, and I’ve worked with people who are considered luminaries within the industry. When you witness people who have been doing this stuff for over thirty years pretend like the system they’ve managed to cobble together that costs more than what most people make in a year sounds any good, and then people pat them on the back and say “good job”, it leaves me completely baffled, and no wonder why a friend of mine told me once that she thought all the high end audio industry sounded like to her was a bunch of fronts for illicit activity (she is a musician herself).
A huge one, that someone mentioned. Very few people I’ve met in the high end audio industry have good music taste, and they generally pick pretty crappy demo material. I mean, I love classical music, and jazz as well for that matter (in fact very much so) but some of the stuff people listen to sounds like it is being played by a soulless automaton, and not a human. I have electronic music that has more soul than some of that stuff. I mean, come on people, there is so much music out there just waiting to be discovered for the first time, or re-discovered, that doesn't sound like it was made by talentless hacks. I think it’s another case of there’s about 10-15 people I’ve met in the industry who actually like good music, and give a crap about what it is they are trying to share with the person they are sitting down in front of their demo system. Think about it for a sec. If I am someone who is wet under the ears, say a college age kid, with absolutely no prior reference to what it is I am about to experience, and the person has taken absolutely no time to evaluate what it is I might want to hear on that particular system, and instead plays me some music that sounds like it is being played by an anemic assembly of borderline robots, or like the by-gone days when the white drugs were plentiful and fueling the “creative” sides of studio musicians and engineers being paid way too much money, it’s likely that I’m going to walk out even more puzzled than before, because I didn’t hear anything I enjoy or like or even remotely appreciate.
Which brings me to another topic. In such an effort to “control the demo” for many of these insanely expensive and highly flawed pieces of audio trash that do exist out there, so many of these audio sales people shoot themselves in the foot by not allowing someone to play their own content on their reference system or other high end equipment. They are deathly afraid someone might actually want to listen to their own music on something. You know what I say to that? If the system can’t play the music I want to listen to, then why should I even consider buying it? As a younger person, this attitude I’ve seen repeated over and over again by industry people is what turns people off. It’s not worth the effort, especially when I can sheepishly go home after having the guy at the high end audio store tell me I couldn’t play the CD or record or file I brought in to listen to on their high end system, listen to it on some off-the-shelf stuff from Best Buy, and enjoy what I’m hearing for the most part.
Ultimately the audio industry has failed to capture a larger market (it is quite niche after all) because too many people got cozy with the easy money that comes with being lazy bullshitters. As someone mentioned above, they know about sales and product but not about audio. The people that do, I’ve found tend to be more involved in the professional side of things and often have as much an issue with the bullshit as anyone else would who actually takes their craft seriously. Despite what people think, there are a lot of people in the younger generation who are much less tolerant of the bullshit than their forebears. As someone also mentioned above, “seniors” tend to be more prone to fall victim to what I would consider to be highly outdated, Madison Avenue sales tactics, whereas younger people often see through it and reject it in favor of taking their own path.
And finally, as someone who has been a young person very much involved in this hobby, it has been my overall experience that the older folks more or less “running the show”, are very threatened by individuals with actual knowledge with respect to much of this stuff, because I can’t tell you how many times some “audiophile” has played me their system for me to only immediately find some flaw in the setup. In fact, I can’t tell you how many times I was sabotaged by the ineptitude of the sales people I worked with over the years, and how many problems I have had to fix in the homes and systems of people who had “professional” installation of their system (and I’m talking often insanely expensive stuff here). The standards are simply almost non-existent, and where they do exist in the industry, they tend to really stand out. I am often quite baffled at the fact that these companies selling these products are happy to walk away from a system in the condition it is in and have that be a reflection of their brand. And then the brands themselves seem to make poor choices in who they choose to represent their product, so it's not at all surprising that there aren't more younger people interested in the category.
