Some years ago I made the courageous decision to come out of the closet as a bonafide audiophile. There: I’ve said it again. I love fine stereo equipment and the you-are-there sound of a fine system. I collect recordings promiscuously; I don’t really think about whether I’m going to have time to given them sufficient listening, nor do I pay much attention to pocketbook matters. I just snap them up, like a shark with tapeworm let loose in a school of fish.
While I’m laying my cards on the table, I should add that I also subscribe to, and read, two of the primary audiophile mags — Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. I can’t say I scour every word of either magazine, but I give them a pretty good go while skipping over the stuff that doesn’t particularly interest me.
Which brings me to the reason for giving this post a title that might seem to be, for now, a bait-and-switch scam. Nobody is under any illusions about the precarious shape of high-end audio at present. Even if there is more and better equipment available than at any time in history, the dealers are fading away. The prestige once assigned to the ownership of posh hi-fi gear has devolved into a hint of old-timey-ness, fuddy-duddy-ness, un-hip-ness. There’s something sadly polyester-and-mustache-with-spectacles about it all. Now, that isn’t to say that it was ever all that different. High-end audio has been a guy’s game ever since it got going in the 1950s. But in earlier times, a killer hi-fi was part and parcel of any predatory young man’s seduction arsenal. Now the industry belongs to the middle-aged guys.
And that’s a crying shame. Why should wonderful sound be restricted to such a narrow audience? I have a thought or two about that.
It is my overall sense that audiophiles are, by and large, their own worst enemies when it comes to attracting potential devotées. Hi-end audio is plagued by a host of in-crowd pomposities and prejudices that display a marked capacity to alienate outsiders. Here are a few that strike me as the most damaging.
Captain Video Retro
It’s the year 2011. Electronic devices sport a sophistication unthinkable in my childhood. Microchips and microprocessors have transformed everything. Physical media are on the edge of extinction—first LPs and tapes, then CDs and DVDs. Broadband Internet access makes it possible to buy high-quality audio without needing anything in a box or on plastic or vinyl. Look at an iPod Touch; it would have seemed futuristic even to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. And don’t even get me started about iPads.
But there’s an surprising amount of high-end audio out there that looks like props from I Was a Teenaged Frankenstein. Glowing vacuum tubes stick out of metal cases, the whole festooned with bakelite knobs and green-glowing meters, big and bulky, requiring gobs of electricity. People will swear that there’s just nothing like the sound of tubes. But I don’t think it’s about sound.
Folks are welcome to their enthusiasms, and the hi-fi mags have adjusted their articles to accomodate what must be a pretty sizeable portion of the readership. But this whole retro thing in high-end audio is offputting. It smacks of fanaticism. It smacks of Luddism. It smacks of asceticism. Especially given those astronomical price tags for stuff that looks as though it should be gathering dust in Dad’s attic or piled up in a corner at St. Vincent de Paul.
Prom Queens
I refer here not to people, but brands. I haven’t been paying attention to the audiophile world all that long, but I’ve already seen commentarial affection shift from one favorite to another. A particular component or company will become all the rage, praised to the skies. Then it’s all over.
From what I can tell, Magico speakers have now dethroned Wilson Audio as the wearers of the audiophile laurel. But just last year everybody was drooling over those Wilson Sashas and Puppies. The problem: both companies limit themselves to extremely high price ranges. So you’re reading comparisons to speakers that might very well cost as much as your home. I’m sure they’re wonderful speakers—but the obsessive attention paid them tends to lock most everyday people out of the discussion.
Price Tag Anaesthesia
There is no question but that very lovely sound can be had for a reasonably modest outlay of cash. But today’s audiophile world has become fixated on surreal prices. A reviewer for The Absolute Sound referred to B&W 802D speakers ($15,000 per pair) as “mid-priced.” To be sure, the next month’s issue carried a tart letter from a reader taking him to task for such silliness, but still I can well imagine other readers having no qualms about thinking of $15K for a pair of speakers as being on the low end of things.
But it’s a stereo set, guys. You can buy a very nice car for $15,000. Yes, if you’re thinking of those Magico and Wilson Audio speakers as your comparison, $15K might not seem all that high. But for most people $15K is one hell of an investment. And $40K for an amplifier? Puh-leeze.
The high-end world has lost any sense of proportion about money.
Plain Weirdness
I don’t care what anybody says. No normal person spends $10,000 on a cable to connect an amplifier to a pair of speakers. Or $2500 on a power cord. Or goes into transports of bliss about the “blackness” that a fuse brings to their system.
That general aura of freakishness—alas, without any accompanying coolness—is another sure way to alienate potential members. The general trend amongst some audiophiles to condemn digital audio in favor of LPs, and microcircuitry in favor of vacuum tubes and hand-wiring, marks them as cultish fanatics. I don’t doubt their sincerity, but to an outsider, nothing is more boring than hearing some guy spew on and on about how unsatisfying audio has become, and how only his $100,000 system for playing LPs via vacuum tubes is really the only true fine audio. There’s a suffocating political correctness blanketing the audiophile community, and it’s a political correctness that stands in sharp variance to most people’s interests, or to their common sense.
So there are a few of my talking points on the closed club of high-end audio. Nevertheless, somehow it manages to hang on. The recent high-end audio show in Las Vegas drew healthy crowds, and there was a tremendous amount of stuff on display, some of it insanely expensive, but here and there one saw a product designed to be sold to regular people, rather than to serve as an object of cult adoration.
But as I went through Stereophile’s pictures from the show, I couldn’t keep from noticing that just about the entire crowd—exhibitors and viewers alike—was made up of middle-aged guys. The presence of a woman in one picture was downright shocking. Heck: I’m a bonafide audiophile, but I’m not interested in hanging around those guys with their spooky prejudices and economic insanity. I’m in it for the music, not to join some damn club.