Adieu to the true audiophile?: "True connoisseurs of home stereos will take exception to the notion, but complicated home stereos may be going the way of baby boomer taste-setting."
(Via Clippings.)
Friday, May 23, 2008
Adieu to the true audiophile?
I put myself through my undergraduate education while working in a high end audio retail store and my . At the time and into my late 20s I was an avid audio enthusiast as well. As time went on and MP3s became more mainstream I reluctantly adopted encoding my music and eventually putting all my CDs into large plastic containers and never again getting them out. For myself and I believe most people, the convenience of the iPod and MP3s is worth the, at least to me, negligible difference in sound quality. I believe much of the same is beginning to happen with video. While I agree with most analysts who have said that people don't feel as inclined to own their video as they do their audio, the portability is a greater feature than the greatest resolution, and hence the reason for the fact that BluRay hasn't taken off with the same enthusiasm as DVDs did 10 years ago.
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Yes and no. The audiophile crowd have simply moved on to more esoteric ground. Witness the insane interest in:
- high end interconnects
- high end headphone amplifiers
- high end in-ear headphones (for your portable music rig which is playing a lossey MP3!)
- crazy things like $1000 3' power cords
- lossless digital audio formats
Audiophile speaker companies like Magnapan, Martin Logan, and the complete crazy category like Wilson, still keep going, although I have not seen their financial statements. Macintosh, to my complete disbelief, is still going strong.
The True Believers are still out there, they just don't look the same as they used to.
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