Of course you're entitled to your opinion, and I'm entitled to disagree. If she did revive the guitar market (which I haven't heard anyone else say), does that make her someone special? She's a marketing machine, and those machines sell things.
Music exposure observation
Hello everyone,
Each month Stereophile seems to have a column that highlights the generational Gap between Boomer/ Gen X audiophiles and Millennial / gen Z listeners, usually emphasizing the ideas of both value/economics and streaming/ on demand services as a way of demarcating why younger generation isn’t as beholden to the Hobby as those of us who have been in it for 20 or more years.
As a proud Gen x-er, I thought about something the other day insofar as what role music plays in a daily life of a typical household. Whereas up to about 20 years ago or so music was a dedicated entertainment investment - that is, one would put on a CD or vinyl, and that would be it. And whether that CD was a complete album or a mixtape of sorts didn’t really matter. More important was the lack of any on demand paradigm: no audio or visual streaming services. In short, music was much more of a dedicated facet of life in most households. Yes, there were cable and DVDs, but the idea of listening to music as more than simply a Whitman’s Chocolate sampler, to use a somewhat weak analogy, wasn’t an option.
Going back even further to my young childhood days of the mid ’70s and ’80s - and for many of you here you’re adult days of the 70s and 80s, music was a viable form of In-House dedication. Putting your record on meant listening to the record in some semblance of continuity, even if background. In short, music was much more of a temporal investment, no matter the quality of the production or the artistry.
And of course, times have changed. And I was thinking about how much my own two children experience music as that similar investment. Yes, I have my dedicated audio room upstairs, and a Sonos set up in the kitchen, as well as the obligatory multi-channel receiver set-up in the family room, but there are so many other things to distract my children from music as a be all end all. Now there does exist streaming video games and streaming video services and On Demand entertainment of all wavelengths, and unless I have them in my car, or I’m playing music in the background as we do something else on a family game night or in the kitchen, it’s simply not the same visceral experience.
I’m not bemoaning this change; everything shifts and if the center does not hold, it simply achieves a new equilibrium somewhere. But it does make me think about this idea of a dedicated focus on something, like, in this case, music, a much more rarified experience. There are simply way too many other stimuli out there more cheaply and efficiently had that take away from the pure audiophile experience. In essence, be growing up experience was in the music is much much different nowadays than it was 20 or 30 or more years ago.
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This is where I disagree with a number of my Audiogon colleagues. I don’t believe that financial status is a primary reason. There are more audio products available for reasonable cost than I can recall in the30 years or so I have been engaged with high end audio. Not to mention a very ample used audio marketplace. @mahgister and other members here have given testimony of achieving terrific sounding audio systems for modest sums of money. It does require planning, effort, will and motivation but can certainty be accomplished. I believe that it more a case of other priorities for disposable income usage. Which of course is fine. Charles
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No one pay attention to the sound quality if he is not a music lover first and last... All old audiophile or younger one here love music first.... But there is commercially "fabricated" music and music of higher craftmanship... The frontier between these two extremes is not clear cut at all but at the two extreme musak ascensor music is not an Indian Raga or a Bach piece...😊 Most music oscillate toward these two levels of qualities : genuine craftmanship and mere fabrication... In an era of consumerism the content of musical products declined toward varieties of usefullness and needs to be surprized or the needs to be programmed ( as robots are ) and all these three factors together... Then because music as acoustic must be LEARNED and is not understood at birth, especially other culture music or peculiar esthetical one as Jazz or classical, we assist to a decline in the number of people invested in audio stereo system for the sake of musical content itself... It is not about money, there is an offerings of low cost high quality products right now in amplification and dac in particular as there is never been so much in the past ... People are overstimulated ( tv,computer and cell phone and the rythm of life and work i hate so much cell phone i dont own one new but a prehistoric one with no usable computer screen , it is a foldable one and smaller than the usual everyone own now ) and over stimulation is like a drug , they need the drug, and the changes, and the novelties...They consume...They dont seat to listen in a concentrated directed attentive way for hours the art of the fugue and compare it to many versions... They dont meditate on the time perception in Indian raga...😊 Then they dont need a sophisticated audio system , acoustically sophisticated, not necessarily very costly, because they consume varieties of short pleasures and stimuli in short span EVERYWHERE.... Listening music is a sacred event.... In ONE place.... Because we need to contentrate...Ectasy is a sacred experience in a way a repetitive annoying masturbation is not...And music may be an ectasy for those of us who are so much moved toward it that we try hard to create an acoustic corner around it with even costly gear... Multitasking is for robots by the way....No genius multitask... They focus in the opposite without end on specific problem ... Multitasking is the first sign of a desintegrating attention or the sign of a well integrated ROUTINE and set of habits at some work... But there is no multitasking in martial arts for example...In multitasking we lost the larger attention field behind the focus centered attention and we lost the focus attention to some extent too ...In multitasking with are in a RYTHM.... Like robots... And the rythm does not emerge freely from the body and metabolism as in African dance for example but is IMPOSED on the body and metabolism by the different tasks we must do at the same time... Slaves multitask .... Free man think.... Our corporate master want us to multitask in the mean time they will think for us... |
The OP seems to be stating that the more work that is required to get obtain a playing of pre recorded music, the more serious the effort on the part of the listener. Certainly vinylistas have long argued this. The work involved with setting up and maintaining a turntable, the effort to keep records clean, static free, and flattened out mitigates against the urge to change it after 1 song. Streaming otoh seems to facilitate jumping around. I think audiophiles tend to listen differently than most people. My wife can listen to the radio all day and be really into what is playing although she didn’t actively choose it. Normal People just love music without obsessing about how it gets served up or what quality it is reproduced at. |
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