High Performance Audio - The End?

Some people actually think the hobby is putting together and tinkering with the components.  Which for them is okay, I guess.

there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

That’s been the case for as long as I’ve been alive. People who only listen to pop music mostly just listen for fun and don’t really care about sound quality that much, so the stuff is mixed to sound good on a Boombox, crappy earbuds, or stock car radio. That was as true in the 70s as it is today and so I fail to see the point. There will always be a population that cares about making and listening to good and well-recorded music, and thus there will always be equipment made to play it back as faithfully and/or artfully as possible. To think otherwise is to me just an exercise in rhetoric.

On the flip side, turntables are starting to become “cool” again, and bars where people can just sit and listen to well-recorded music on good systems were starting to catch on before the damn virus hit — the theory being that people are so inundated with being plugged in and always “on” that they’re starting to embrace ways to disconnect, slow down, and just be in their own heads for a moment. If that continues and more people get to experience what a decent system can actually do and for not all that much money, who knows? Maybe in a counterculture kinda way higher-end audio could experience a bit of a revival.

A lot of truth to that. A big bunch of my favorite music sounds best as mp3's in the Honda. But some tracks from the same recording sound fabulous on the big rig. A good session sounds good on anything.

I gave up years ago trying to ever improve.  It got to the point where I was listening to equipment and not the music.  I could tell you the pieces and parts of a song but not the melody.  It was totally less than satisfying.  I sold all my stuff and went much simpler.  I probably dropped back to 80%, but the enjoyment factor shot to 100+!  I just turn my kit on and listen, it’s really made a big difference for me.

Could it be possible that the future of high end audio be totally different in a decade or so? Maybe some day soon, nobody will be spinning discs anymore . All of your music will be either in the cloud or on some hard drive. Your cell phone will have a great DAC built in and your speakers will be hung on your wall, where DSP technology will make it sound great. Our current gears will be collectors’ items and we all will be old men reminiscing about the past on some forum or telling our grand children how our amplifiers could heat up our listening room during the winter. Who knows?