"What's happened in the marketplace, the midmarket for audio has completely been obliterated," he says. "You have this high-end market that's getting smaller all the time, and then you've got the convenience market, which has taken over -- the MP3s, the Bluetooth devices, playing on laptops." He wishes more people knew what they were missing. At its best, he says, audio reproduction has "a religious aspect." "There's a primacy to audio," he says. "It's a form of magic." http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/tech/innovation/death-stereo-system/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
It has been going this direction since the very advent of the mp3 format. I have been involved in recording on and off since about 1997 and everyone I know in the business shares the frustration over diminishing standards of quality, particularly at a time when the technology to make outstanding recordings is more readily available than ever before. It started with the loudness wars and has progressed to what might be termed the apathy war. If it translates well on a crappy set of earbuds in a noisy environment, you're done. Good enough. I agree that great audio reproduction can be positively transcendental in nature, but it takes an effort on the part of listeners that the majority of people aren't willing to put forth. I'm only hoping that just as a dumb public chose VHS over Beta but then accepted DVDs and now demands Blu-Ray, the listening public will someday reverse course on audio reproduction. Pipe dream, maybe, but we are seeing a rise in high quality headphone sales. Maybe there's hope after all. First step, great headphones... next, great speakers and a carefully placed listening chair?
That douchebag definitely ain't heard of tinnitus. Now I love a good system, but my ears are wrecked from concerts so I find myself straying to smaller portable iPhone docks. The double kicks don't pump through as well but they still do the job. I'm really conservative about my hearing these days and there's something about big stereo systems that simply frightens me.
