Why Don't More People Love Audio?

I have a couple of friends who make absolute nuisances of themselves hinting and hemming and hawing for invitations to come over and listen to my good system. They wanna bring stacks of their own CDs (and wow does one of them have terrible taste) and sit for hours in rapt attention to Sousa marches and tribal music from Outer Barudisplatt.

Now, both these guys have beaucoup bucks--helluva lot more than I do--yet they won't spend a dime on their own systems. One has little more than a Technics boombox while the other has some ancient electronics and a pair of Advent "bookshelf" speakers with the grill cloth literally rotting away from the frames.

Both these guys have healthy personalities and reasonably good ears. Neither is cheap. I think they are just daunted by snotty salesmen, incomprehensible jargon, and the challenge of struggling for that synergy we all keep talking about.

I think it would help a lot if we would try harder to introduce people to our hobby in ways that seem to them realistic. Help them to start with some just-above-entry-level gear and grow into the hobby, as most of us did.

Telling a newbie to budget as much for cables and ICs as for components is an utterly absurd thing to do. We wouldn't have believed it at that point in our own lives and many of our most golden-eared colleagues don't believe it now. Condescendingly referring to $3K speakers or $2K amplifiers as "mid-fi" doesn't help matters, either. One afile friend of mine told an enthusiastic newbie that if he didn't have ten grand to spend right off the bat he should just forget it and stick to his boombox.

That, brethren and sistren, is a big chunk of (1) why high end remains a niche market and (2) why people think we're nuts.

Have fun anyway.

Will

My personal feeling is.....there are not to many people loves audio( high end) because they were not expose to it.We kind of keep the good stuff within our community. If we look at the ads, it is only going in our own small world. Nobody did try to go out there and expose it and worst than that common people felt that going to a high end audio store is worst than going to a car dealer. We as audiophile needs to spread these hobby. Let us go out there and explain to our freinds that having a good equipments will really make the difference.
I know a guy that recently bought a lexus... He asked me if a Mark Levinson car stereo is better than the ones you can buy from the regular electronics store.I said to him. Go listen to it with me and I will let you know. Thanks.

Because the more revealing the hardware the less enjoyable the software. Since I have become involved in this hobby, 90% of my CD's are unlistenable. So now I sit in the dark and listen to Tubular Bells. !@#$%

Joekras, got to love'ya. Short, to the point. The undoing of this hobby lies in its very goal! As someone once put it, audiophiles upgrade their hardware until they can prove that all software is excrement. At least you have Tubular Bells. Maybe another thread could be started, something like: "How many recordings do you have that still remain enjoyable after your last upgrade". Whoever can honestly answer 0, should win the "Great Golden Ear Award" and retire to Arizona. Why so few people becoming audiophiles? Most people have lives to live and don't really enjoy obssessing over trivialities.

Will,
You hit the nail on the head. Audiophiles should do less overt projection of their sound systems and more subdued nuturing and education. My experience is to let my system do all the work. When my non-audiophile friends and family come over, I ask them to bring any new music they have purchased so I can experience their musical taste. This also broadens my musical exposure since I seldom listen to the radio. I'm a Jazz & Blues type of guy.

I don't talk about the cost or the time it took to get my system to its current state. What I do is ask them what exactly it is they like about the sound and then find out if they are interested in changing what they have. I ask their forcasted budget and then look for a good initial start-up system to match their current musical interest. A system that I could enjoy listening to when I visited them. Over the past 20+ years I have converted a couple of dozen Bose-slanted people to much better system (my % is about 80%).

Some of those people have gone on to the perverbial quest for "that perfect sound" and the others have been content with what I helped them purhase initially. One of my Uncles still has the Ohm F/Phase Linear 400/Conrad Johnson Pre/Denon TT & MMC we picked up many years ago and when I visit him it still sounds fantastic.

What I have learned to do is softly persuade those people who have asked for assistence towards the highend gear. Oh by the way, one of my nephews has surpassed me in the system he currently has. Oh to be young, single and wealthy.