San Francisco Stereo, on the corner of Market and Sanchez, has shut its doors. I could see that coming for the past year or so, but it’s kind of sad anyway. I peeked in the show window and saw a single lordly B&W 802D speaker standing in the midst of all the packing and disarray. Shock of recognition: several months ago I almost bought that speaker and its sibling, but I decided on the store’s pair of 803Ds instead, fearing that the 802D might overwhelm my listening room. (I was right. Fasolt & Fafner—I named them after giants for a reason—merely dominate the room.)
With SF Stereo’s extinction San Francisco is now reduced to only one Bowers & Wilkins dealer—Harmony AudioVideo in West Portal. Fortunately we still have plenty of fine hi-end audio emporia in town, especially AudioVision SF on Pine & Market, a playground for audiophiles if ever there were. I bought my NAD M3 amplifier from them, and they’ll be seeing me again.
So a hi-fi store closes, but that doesn’t mean that the audiophile world itself is shrinking away to nothing. To be sure, the landscape is littered with the bones of once-proud, now-defunct manufacturers and dealers. But that’s the nature of the beast: hi-end audio equipment is specialized stuff, profit margins are invariably razor-thin, and not all companies survive although their products tend to soldier on for ages. (I owned a fine pair of Rogers LS7t speakers for several decades past the company’s dissolution, and those speakers are gracing a new owner’s home.)
A look through either Stereophile or The Absolute Sound—both leading audiophile mags—reveals a flourishing industry. Great stuff is available at all price points, and you can treat yourself to fine audio for less money than ever. And there is no shortage of surrealistically-priced ultra-high end stuff, either.
This NY Times article is weirdly confusing, in that it implies that iPods and their ilk have been hammering holes in the audiophile world. I just don’t see it, myself. The first tipoff that the article might have a wee slant is the accompanying pair of pictures: one shows a kid listening to an iPod via the standard white earbuds, and the other a $125,000 rig at an upscale hi-fi store. The pairing implies that the iPod is a threat to those Sonus Faber honeys at the upscale emporium. But that’s just plain silly; fine audio is no more threatened by iPods any more than it was threatened by transistor radios, car radios, boomboxes, or Walkmen.
Nor does fine audio require massive cash outlay. You can put together a really beautiful system for well under $2K, maybe even less.
Both the NY Times article and the lead in the March 2010 Stereophile quote audiophiles who decry digital audio’s empowerment of folks using audio as background, rather than being actively involved in listening as required by vinyl. Or so they say. Frankly, I think they’re talking through their hats. Whether a listener pays close attention to the recording or uses it as accompaniment to other activities has nothing to do with the media, nor has it ever.
Modern vinyl afficionados forget, or are ignorant of, the reality of everyday listening during vinyl’s heyday. Only audiophiles fussed around with record cleaning and tonearm positioning and all that. Most folks plopped a batch of uncleaned records onto the record-changer spindle, pressed the "on" button, closed the lid, and went on about their housekeeping, socializing, or culinary business. Or they just turned on the radio—either FM stereo or regular old mono AM. Recorded music as Muzak probably started with Edison cylinders.
Cast your thinking a bit farther back in time and you might find more people who actively listened to commercial records. That’s because albums consisted of heavy stacks of 78 RPM shellac discs—expensive, fragile, and good for only a limited number of playings. So people might gather around the family Victrola while a designated tonmeister took care of managing the playback. But that’s not only pre-vinyl, it’s also pre-hi-fi.
A modern-day audiophile is just as likely to be an active listener with digital material as with vinyl. I offer myself as Exhibit A: I may have embraced the full monty of the digital revolution—all my music is streamed digitally from a media server, controlled using iTunes software. But I listen with full attention, just as in days past with LPs. Nor have I compromised on audio quality: the digital streams are bit-perfect reproductions of the original CDs, and my playback equipment is tip-top from soup to nuts.
And while vinyl might have necessitated fussing with cleaning, I fuss instead with the tags used to catalog my computer-based audio, so I can find anything I want in a heartbeat.
At the same time, with one click I can draw together an entire genre—say, "Mozart Serenade"—and provide myself with an entire afternoon’s worth of continual housecleaning music. In other words, my 100% digital audio collection is equally adept at active and passive listening. I’m the one in control here, and not the stereo system.
In my opinion, mobile devices have displaced radio and boomboxes, not audiophile equipment. At the same time they’ve cracked open a low-end market that offers much better sound than the convenience-over-performance audio of days gone past. Remember portable 45 RPM record players? Boomboxes? Cheap record players? Today’s inexpensive iPod-dock-with-speaker rigs sound a million times better than any of them. The NY Times article quoted above decries the ability of people today to hear the difference between fine audio and the everyday iPod-ish variety. But you can take that as glass half-empty or half-full; the half-full interpretation takes note that "everyday" audio is a hell of a lot better than it used to be. In 1965, the difference between a department-store RCA record player and a high-end audio system was like night and day. In 2010 it’s still a big difference, but the low end of the scale has moved up so much that many folks may not consider the extra expense worth the improvement.
And I’m not so sure that the audiophile market has changed all that much. It has ever been the bailiwick of middle-aged and older men, so henny-penny portents of doom over a lack of younger people are just so much ado about nothing. Those younger guys will become older, and they’ll keep the (tiny) customer base active.
Nor is the apparent desert-island atmosphere in today’s high-end audio emporia anything to worry about. I’ve been going to fancy hi-fi stores since I was a teenager and they are always dang near unpopulated. It’s kind of like being a Maserati dealer; you don’t need to sell all that many to keep your business healthy.
Maybe I’m just an incurable cock-eyed optimist, but I can’t keep from feeling that hand-wringing over high-end audio is unjustified. Even in the face of a neighborhood store closing, I don’t see cause for alarm. Dealers will come, dealers will go. Ditto manufacturers.
B&W recently revamped their flagship 800-series line. The prices went up—in some cases way up. At the same time, Bowers & Wilkins has brought out several marvelous iPod- and computer-related audio products: the Zeppelin iPad dock, those spiffy little desktop computer speakers, and even a pair of headphones that show a clear orientation towards portable listening.
Bowers & Wilkins, in other words, isn’t sitting on their collective butt wailing about mobile digital music wrecking their gorgeous and expensive audiophile products. Instead, they’re embracing the new audio world with elegant and powerful additions—while making sure to keep the flame lit for audiophiles.
Bowers & Wilkins 800D: audiophile grandeur writ large, with price tag ($28K for a pair) to match
Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin: $600 gets you astonishingly fine audio, and it looks fabulous
