@jmcgrogan2 thank you for your comments, John. Hope all is well back in the Philly area...
You bring up excellent points on the internet and the state of society. Obviously, the web turned most retail businesses on their ear. My previous point was the rising price trajectory of one to two
orders of magnitude crippled what we used to considered the audiophile
world, and shrank it more than proportionally. Though the internet rose
at the same time, I don't blame that on HEA's decline, as it
could (should?) have actually grown the hobby. Personally, I'm surprised this
many brands have survived until today.
Of course, you may disagree with how I see things...
I saw the internet change high-end audio in several ways. The information explosion provided sources far beyond the two magazines. The many internet publications, forums like Audiogon, and email allow us to discover and discuss brands, setup, experience, etc. we often had little to no previous knowledge of. We transcended the days of relying on the advice of friends and local dealers, with this newfound access to these brands and their personnel yielding almost instant satisfaction compared with the days of sitting down to write and send off an actual letter or the once expensive long-distance telephone call. Going the other way, it allowed the mom and pop or one man band audio companies to compete on a more level than ever playing field with the bigger names in the industry by providing low to no cost advertising and the ability to interact with a nationwide and even worldwide customer base, and to even bypass the need to build a dealer network via direct sales and eCommerce. Except for a very few companies that guarded geographic integrity,
buyers now interacted with a far greater dealer circle and used
component wells. All of this increased price competition on components to something that just didn't exist.
Still, component pricing took off on a level that we could not have imagined 20 years ago. Back then, most considered a $4K speaker the investment of a more than dedicated audiophile. Somewhere around 5 years ago, I almost fell off my chair when I read a post here lamenting the flaws of a product, "you just can't get that good a speaker for $35K." Things have only gotten more expensive since. Call me out of touch with current reality, but I still believe one can buy an awfully good loudspeaker for $4K, though that now often has to come from the used market.
Anyway, in the past decade, I've turned the other way. Having access to now afford the kind of things in life we used to dream of as younger men, I find less fulfillment, and even disappointment in the bigger, more expensive, garish item, audio and otherwise. It's a rare component, loudspeaker, cable built to impress that actually satisfies me. I feel happier and hear more music and soul in the simple typical 10 - 50 watt tube amplifiers than those with more than 100 watts, or additional and complex circuitries designed to take care of myriad supposed issues. I could say the same for loudspeakers, etc., but the point has been made
