Where are the young audiophiles?

I’m 35 and it’s an expensive hobby. Probably out of reach for most people. I’ve spent maybe 20k in the last year on mostly second hand gear (Marantz PM-10/SA-10, Ruby-KI/SA-KI and other things). I enjoy music but I wouldn’t spend thousands on cables or buy into a lot of bs snake oil being thrown around here as fact.

No one needs to spend hundreds or thousands on a usb or network cable or speaker cable for that matter. In my opinion, you are an idiot if you believe that wrapping gold or some other shiny material makes the cable sound better but then again a sucker is born every minute. Will there be a difference? maybe, but so subtle that a cable from monoprice would get you 90% there at 1000% less the cost.

It comes down to the digital divide. Those who grew up in the internet age and those who came before. Older people who don’t understand technology are more susceptible to scams like IRS phone calls coming from India saying you owe the government money. Not surprising that a lot of these snake oil scams continue to exist in the audio world. I don’t mean to demean or attack people because of their age as young people make some pretty stupid decisions as well (pulling down statues, calling everyone who disagrees with you a racist/etc, applying today’s standards on the past).
Most people my age or younger are looking for a house or looking to buy a Tesla. If it doesn’t haven’t an app, most people aren’t interested. In a sense, we’ve forgotten how to do things the manual way because things are just too easy now. What’s 10% of $200? That question might give many people in the younger age bracket pause now so they reflexively reach for their phone to do the math.

Young people have all the convenience older people never dreamed of having (get food delivered via DoorDash. Hitch a ride through Uber, listen to music via Spotify/YouTube/Apple Music/etc, be connected anywhere). HiFi is dying because it’s out of range for most people price wise and that void of listening to music in your listening room has been replaced by huge ass TVs that can give you content anytime. It’s not surprising Klipsch is outselling everything now in the US because that’s where the market is moving. Sound bars, home theater, kick ass explosions. I’m a fan of Klipsch as (mainly their heritage line) but very few people my age or lower are snobs about audio because cheap oled and lcd TVs have taken over. No one cares about your Wilson audio or B&W speakers. People care about how big of a tv you can shove into a living room.

@syndication.
If you have $20K invested in used equipment at age 35 you have spent more than I had at your age ($ adjusted). High end audio has always been the pursuit of a few people of the best possible musical reproduction and experience. If you are one of those... then along the way you will discover the overall sound is strongly influenced by all the components, and that interconnects and cables are a part of the system. If not, you will enjoy what you have, which is likely better than 99% of the folks out there. Hope you are enjoying it.

@ghdprentice Those most I would spend on interconnects would be in the 30-60 range per cable and I would tend to lean toward Blue Jeans Cable because it’s supporting someone making the cables in the United States. Anything above that is excess and un-necessary. I’m sure more expensive cables might be better but there’s that law of depreciating returns along with your hearing loss as you age. Everyone rationalizes after they make an expensive purchase that it sounds better but sometimes this is a placebo. Cables are that placebo. You might have an argument that analog signals degrade and are subject to interference and attenuation, but let’s not say that optical/toslink, RJ-45, and usb are the same beast because they’re not. The signals are digital and there’s a lot of snake oil about selling expensive cables from vendors saying they make digital audio sound better. Bullshit. Digital is digital, data is only flowing on 2 wires in the usb 2.0 spec and either it works or it doesn’t. (Usb does retransmit if it doesn’t get an ACK packet) Same with RJ-45, either it works or it doesn’t. Most home networks use TCP/IP and the packet retransmits if it doesn’t get there. That’s in the TCP spec. No expensive cable is going to change that when a cheaper shielded cat 5/6 cable will work just fine. If you have packet loss, the wireless signal sucks or if you have other issues with your network. (Bad cable/bad route).

“Much less than  1%”

Wow. To read some of the accounts from the period you’d think everyone and their brother had extensive systems. 

Most people are content listening to music on the AirPods or beats via their phone. Probably doesn’t help Hi-Fi is full of eccentric weirdos who believe a power conditioner makes their computer crash less or run faster or that buying some expensive black goo to spread on your interconnects makes the sound come alive.