High End is Dead?

Less and less funding for public education.
Music classes no longer standard in public schools.
Musical instrument lessons not longer offered in K-8.
Fewer and fewer bands touring up and down the coasts stopping at local venues. Live concerts are a rarity.
Young people playing video games online with their friends with soundtracks that satisfy their musical needs.

I also blame it on the music industry. No longer do we have visionaries like Ahmet Erdogan of Atlantic who embraced new music and fostered an environment of creativity. Look at what those idiot white shirts at Capital did to Beatles' and Beach Boys' music. If it werent for the sheer talent of those musical geniuses, that company would have killed any creativity.

It's harder for a younger person to have the time, inclination and desire to explore a hobby with all the competing forces in this era.

I'll keep carrying the baton and holding the torch high, but even that won't help change funadamental forces that diminish new interest and participation over time.

Nothing always changes

WOW after 8 months, that is the best you can come up with ... ??

I don’t think HEA will disappear, but I do think less people care about it than a generation ago.  When I was in school in the seventies there were a lot of people preoccupied with having a good system.  Check in with most of those people fifteen years later and and they had moved on from their starter systems but with the preoccupation with work and family, rarely listen to their floor standing speakers.  Check in with them 10 years later and the floorstanders have either been replaced by “Lifestyle Products” or nothing at all.  The younger Generation uses earbuds.  All of them are appalled when they find out that my system may have cost me 30 K to assemble, and around this site that sum is what people spend on power cords.
  So the HEA will persist, but probably by trying to extract ever more revenue from the True Believers and ignoring the rest, leading to a further bifurcation between audiophiles and the rest of the world

I forget the actual product, but there's a recent commercial for an app where this Gen Z actor is simply hitting buttons on the tablet screen to create a tune. Said buttons are marked "Bass", "Strings", Vocals", etc. and they all correlate to an existing backbeat, again chosen from a menu of backbeats.

The whole thing (on the commercial at least) sounds engaging and catchy, even as it's just a mouse in a musical maze bragging about which direction she's choosing.

With music becoming more and more codified and ephemeral, it's no surprise HEA is starting to age out.