Veteran audiophile journalist Art Dudley has stirred up a hornet’s nest in this month’s Stereophile. Dudley’s words are long overdue and just might act as the snowflakes that start sliding down the mountainside and set off a mighty avalanche. Than again, they might just subside into the general verbal soup that audio-dom spews forth on a regular basis. Here’s the critical paragraph:
But it’s time to call bullshit on some of this stuff. It’s time to call bullshit on five-figure interconnects and four-figure isolation cones. It’s time to call bullshit on $30,000 amplifiers that would be priced to sell for $10,000, tops, if not for their massive, jewelry-like casework. The compulsion to make the best of anything is noble, but the inclination to rely overmuch on the brute force of excess and opulence in doing so is sloppy. And while I understand that the imperilment of the middle-class consumer base forces some start-up companies to aim up-market in order to survive—see JA’s essay on this subject—I feel that the inability of so many present-day high-end audio manufacturers to offer outstanding performance for less than astronomical prices does not speak terribly well of their engineering talents.
Surreal pricing has become distressingly common in the audiophile world. It doesn’t help any when confoundingly expensive items routinely receive glowing notices from the audiophile press. That they might be fine-sounding gear is beside the point. The plain fact is that very few people can afford to drop $200,000 on a pair of speakers, or $25,000 on a preamplifier, or $10,000 on a pair of speaker wires. As long as the mainstream press gives the impression that only insane expenditure marks one as a true audiophile, then the industry is headed for extinction as well-heeled baby boomers go shuffling off into the Great Beyond, leaving their Magicos and Wilsons and MBTs and Boulders and the like to their kids—who will most likely dump the stuff on eBay or Audiogon or Craigslist.
It isn’t all decadent overindulgence, thank heavens. Encouraging signs pop up here and there. Stereophile runs a regular column on so-called “entry-level” gear; it’s enjoyable enough but I must admit that, as a middle-aged Boomer, its urban Gen-Y gestalt sits poorly with me. The author’s musical tastes are diametrically opposed to my own, his budget far less than mine, his lifestyle alien. But, as I said, at least it’s a step in the right direction.
What magazines such as Stereophile and The Absolute Sound need is a middle-class-first policy. That is, the bulk of the equipment covered (and praised) will be priced within reach of ordinary professional folk, with the very expensive stuff relegated to the occasional special feature or maybe an annual “ultra high-end” issue. Even if both magazines do cover ordinary-priced equipment on a regular basis, both have a strong yen for the super high-end stuff, a bias reflected in their writers, some of whom are reasonable, while others sport weighty and snobbish chips on their shoulders. I grow increasingly weary of the current faddish fixation on retro equipment: tubes, rebuilt 1950s turntables, all that. Those might be all the rage amongst audiophile-type writers and afficionados, but the driving force is audiophilia’s conceit of swimming against mass-market currents. It’s a measure of audiophile coolness to heat your living rooms with 1930s-style vacuum tubes. Pictures from a recent audiophile show looked to me as though the clock had been turned back to about 1955 or thereabouts. Distressing. Depressing. Discouraging.
With initiates and insiders calling the publicity shots, the potential audience and market shrinks ever smaller. Prices go up, technology regresses, and a 2012 newcomer is likely to feel as though he has stumbled into a time warp. An insanely expensive time warp. Given the paucity of high-end audio stores anywhere but in the largest cities, most folks with a yen to dip a toe into audiophile waters are obliged to consult the high-end mags—or at least their web sites—for guidance. And when they start looking around, when they encounter that litany of $20K-plus price tags for stuff that doesn’t seem to offer anything all that extraordinary, and after they’re through choking back disbelief at the sight of all those tubes and toggle switches and bakelite knobs, they’re going to toss the mag and make a beeline for the local Magnolia Home Theater, or worse, just go wandering unprotected about BestBuy—lambs led to the big-box slaughter.
To audiophilia’s credit, those writers who have responded to Dudley’s broadside have been mostly in agreement. It’s almost as though the lion’s share of Stereophile and The Absolute Sound subscribers agree that the hobby has gone Dadaist but nobody has been willing to pipe up with an objection, perhaps in fear of being labelled audiophiliac trailer trash or worse. But there are just too doggone many writers heaping praise on these astoundingly expensive products without ever asking whether the product is really that good, if it is really worth that much except by the self-serving logic of the very rich, the very privileged, or the very selfish. Perspective is lacking. The industry backs ever more deeply into its self-constructed corner, ever less visible to the very people it hopes to attract.
There’s a way out. Dudley is quick to single out those companies that buck the prevailing trends by offering fine-sounding, beautifully-made gear that doesn’t require taking out a second mortage. Companies such as VPI, Rega, Bryston, Music Hall, Magnepan, B&W, and NAD—among many others—provide truly first-rate stuff at a fair price. Support them; buy from them; recommend them to others. Let the $30,000 interconnects, with their Mysteries of Isis materials and Transcendentally Inscrutable technology, languish on the shelves. The madness will stop, but only if audiophiles make it stop. Otherwise the whole shebang will keep on spinning out of control, out of reason, and eventually out of existence.