"Whatever Happened To The Audiophile?"

Very well said Steve!

Better link to the article mentioned above:

NPR Audiophile article

what difference does it make ? enjoying music is a higher priority than being an audiophile. the medium is less important than the message. in this case the medium is the equipment and the message is the music.

you can be an audiophile or a non-audiophile and still attain enjoyment when listening to music. whether its in the foreground and listening is the primary activity--typical of audiophile behvior, or the music is in the background, as a secondary activity it can be equally appreciated.

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The most chilling stat was the 60% drop in sales in a little over a decade. If that's true, we're dropping like flies.
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according to the npr article, "high end" sales totalled $200m in 2010 (i'm not sure about the statistic; i've read $1 billion elsewhere). for all the talk about vinyl's resurgence, only 2.4m total units were sold in 2010. these are staggeringly tiny numbers-- by way of comparison, apple sold $3.4 billion worth of ipods alone in 2010 and lady antebellum (whoever she is) and justin beiber sold more than 3m cds each. all of which points to the rapidly increasing marginalization of traditional audiophilia, at least as we think of it--there seems to be little or no economic incentive to continue to develop or manufacture high end products, and this little community (like a group of latin scholars) looks ever more like a dying breed.