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

mahlman

... wouldn't it be a hoot to get these guys to do double blind testing ...

What are you waiting for? Why don't you organize some double-blind testing of your own?

Much of the so-called High-End is to blind listening tests what New Clothes were to the Emperor!  Suits you sir! Indeed.

How many times have we all heard the same tired excuses at shows when the audience response has been rather muted?

“It’s these hotel rooms”, or maybe “it’s the humidity”, or even the poor recordings to blame etc etc.

Let’s face it when you can pick up a pair of Harbeth M40.2s for £11.5k and a Technics 1200G for a little over £2.5k, it might be worth asking exactly just how high end do you really need to go?

I dont like saying I am in the "High End Audio" business at all. It denotes a social location. Fook that.
So Ive been using HiFi for about 10 years now, the only thing I run into is people that use the word "HiFi" to mean sterile sounding neutered music. The lifeless crappy sound, you know ... And lemme tell ya , there is no "End" to anything we do..lol

I like the term "hifi" and use it frequently, and although I'm lucky at this stage in my life to be able to afford pricey stuff, I've always felt that there's a lot of reasonably affordable (a relative term really) brilliantly  designed components that embarrass the so called "high end" stuff and sound beautiful. Besides, it's more fun to use the experience accumulated from years of hifi fun to assemble a world class sounding gear heap from less "precious" (and sometimes "previously owned") components, and compare it to a multi buck system someplace (usually a local "audio salon") and note that, yeah man, my gear pile sounds better (with the obvious advantage of it being in my house where I can dial it in)...more fun, way more fun.