Why Don't More People Love Audio?

Because you don't need anything better than a ghetto blaster for the crap which is playin out there. MP 3 is a good example. Listen to an MP3 file over a high end system and you know what I mean.
Good music - as an art - is elite stuff....so is high end gear.
Aida_w

I'm a recent convert to the high end. I think my conversion began the day I listened to and purchased a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones. For a few hundred dollars I owned audio gear that could be considered among the best in its class and far outperformed the speaker systems I'd heard in BestBuy and the like.

That purchase led me to websites like this one, where I learned about the many choices, cliques and nuances of audio gear. Granted, I am playing on a smaller scale, but I've just ordered my first SS headphone amp, and am looking into interconnects and powercables. In the future I'd like to experiment with an OTL headphone amp, and in my research I've become more interested in tubes.

Recently, I've seen Sennheiser advertisements in men's magazines. Perhaps readers will become interested and follow a path similar to the one I've found.

We're guilty of projection. Most of us are into gear as a means to the end of hearing moving, exhilirating music, on demand, in our homes (I actually believe this). We also tend to think that others want, or would want, the same experience. But they don't. Like one of the earlier posts, my wife knows good sound because we have it in our home, but she almost never goes to the big rig in the dedicated room. I have had many friends sit in my dedicated room and I have played music chosen by them on my $20k+ system. They say "WOW," sometimes genuinely amazed at the realism, power, intimacy, and immediacy of a good system, but none of them has changed their priorities to invest even a quarter of that amount in their own systems, even though they could. Music over my stereo is an ecstatic experience that gives me goose bumps and brings an occasional tear to my eye. I would never give it up! My conclusion about others, though, regretably, is that very few of them have ever been moved by music the way most audiophiles are on a regular basis, no matter how good the system. That's the main reason most people don't pursue hi-end audio, even inexpensive hi-end, which can be quite good; they just don't care that much about music. This is not elitist, it's just the way it is. The quality of their systems reflects the priority of music in their lives. High equipment prices and snobby dealers sure don't help, but they're not the main limiter of the appeal of hi-end audio. When I reluctantly came to this conclusion it saddened me, but now I don't worry about it, and instead focus on my own experience of music.

Because most people don't have the time to listen. From those who have, a bunch just don't get it (do you have to play it so loud? I have neighbours walk up to my door in broad daylight cmplaining, one telling my wife to turn down the system, they like Céline Dion on a ghetto blaster by the pool... the other telling me to lower the volume, he firmly belives, bless his religious heart, that the blues is the "Devil's music"... maybe I should move). This leaves another bunch who have the time but not the money (I think there's a song in there somewhere...)and then you get to those who really believe, like I do, that the whole thing really is an ends vs. means mixup. Focus on the music, get your system to a certain level of accuracy, competence then forget it and concentrate on buying recordings, reading about music, reading about recorded music and above all else listening to music, preferably live.

I have a couple of friends who make absolute nuisances of themselves hinting and hemming and hawing for invitations to come over and listen to my good system. They wanna bring stacks of their own CDs (and wow does one of them have terrible taste) and sit for hours in rapt attention to Sousa marches and tribal music from Outer Barudisplatt.

Now, both these guys have beaucoup bucks--helluva lot more than I do--yet they won't spend a dime on their own systems. One has little more than a Technics boombox while the other has some ancient electronics and a pair of Advent "bookshelf" speakers with the grill cloth literally rotting away from the frames.

Both these guys have healthy personalities and reasonably good ears. Neither is cheap. I think they are just daunted by snotty salesmen, incomprehensible jargon, and the challenge of struggling for that synergy we all keep talking about.

I think it would help a lot if we would try harder to introduce people to our hobby in ways that seem to them realistic. Help them to start with some just-above-entry-level gear and grow into the hobby, as most of us did.

Telling a newbie to budget as much for cables and ICs as for components is an utterly absurd thing to do. We wouldn't have believed it at that point in our own lives and many of our most golden-eared colleagues don't believe it now. Condescendingly referring to $3K speakers or $2K amplifiers as "mid-fi" doesn't help matters, either. One afile friend of mine told an enthusiastic newbie that if he didn't have ten grand to spend right off the bat he should just forget it and stick to his boombox.

That, brethren and sistren, is a big chunk of (1) why high end remains a niche market and (2) why people think we're nuts.

Have fun anyway.

Will