Jult52, are you related to Pettyofficer? :)
One reason why audio is suffering: Connectivity
Complaints about the decline of audio enthusiasm as part of the general population are constant on A'gon and other forums. There are many reasons for this decline, but I wanted to pinpoint one big issue:
Connectivity, as in connections between components, is very difficult to navigate, even for a committed stereophile like myself. Here are some sources being used by my family (kids & wife) and myself:
iPhone/iPad: using their DAC, we can now hook them up through RCA connections into my 2-channel rig. But it isn't particularly convenient, so I regularly find my wife listening to mp3 songs on her blasted iPhone while she's literally 5 feet from a $6K system. (Which she knows how to operate, just so you know.) Hooking a component up each time you want to listen to it is a pain.
My daughters mini iPod. No way to hook it up. She listens to it on some $25 speakers -- right next to the $6k family room rig.
More on my daughter: I was very pleased recently to see her sitting on the couch listening to pop songs and not doing anything else. That's how being a music fan starts - you want to listen to some music so much you do it to the exclusion of any other activity. I'm proud of her. But she's listening to the songs on a Wii through our blasted TV set. I don't even know how to plug the Wii into my 2-channel stereo.
Our Apple laptop: USB audio out, although the sound quality probably sucks. (I'm not a fan of PC audio.) No way to connect it to the 2-channel rig. My wife was actually listening to music the other day on the Apple laptop -- a few feet away from the aforementioned stereo rig.
Note that we have a DVD/CD player and TV (through the cable box) flowing through my 2-channel preamp and so we use the 2-channel rig for sound in those cases. But changing to the TV output requires flipping a switch, and is yet one more thing to do. We’re about to start using Roku as part of an effort to decrease our cable bills. We’ll now have a microjack input which can be fed into the 2-channel rig, which I will take care of, but be assured that if I wasn’t around to set up this connectivity, my wife would throw up her hands and listen to music through Roku on the TV set. (Let’s leave aside the fact that the current Roku models don’t support lossless.)
So the big picture here is that I have some family members who’d prefer to listen to music (they can easily tell the sound quality difference) through our fairly pricy family room 2-channel rig but that doing so is so complicated due to connectivity issues that it’s just not worth the bother. Only because there is a dedicated audiophile in the house (me) are some of the sources set up to feed the stereo.
The audio industry desperately needs to initiate a new type of high-quality modified preamp that
1)accepts everything, from RCA jacks to SPDIF (all types) to HDMI to USB to wireless;
2)one that switches between these automatically depending on the feed;
3) that outputs both analog and digital signals through various connections.
Rant off. Thanks for your time.
Connectivity, as in connections between components, is very difficult to navigate, even for a committed stereophile like myself. Here are some sources being used by my family (kids & wife) and myself:
iPhone/iPad: using their DAC, we can now hook them up through RCA connections into my 2-channel rig. But it isn't particularly convenient, so I regularly find my wife listening to mp3 songs on her blasted iPhone while she's literally 5 feet from a $6K system. (Which she knows how to operate, just so you know.) Hooking a component up each time you want to listen to it is a pain.
My daughters mini iPod. No way to hook it up. She listens to it on some $25 speakers -- right next to the $6k family room rig.
More on my daughter: I was very pleased recently to see her sitting on the couch listening to pop songs and not doing anything else. That's how being a music fan starts - you want to listen to some music so much you do it to the exclusion of any other activity. I'm proud of her. But she's listening to the songs on a Wii through our blasted TV set. I don't even know how to plug the Wii into my 2-channel stereo.
Our Apple laptop: USB audio out, although the sound quality probably sucks. (I'm not a fan of PC audio.) No way to connect it to the 2-channel rig. My wife was actually listening to music the other day on the Apple laptop -- a few feet away from the aforementioned stereo rig.
Note that we have a DVD/CD player and TV (through the cable box) flowing through my 2-channel preamp and so we use the 2-channel rig for sound in those cases. But changing to the TV output requires flipping a switch, and is yet one more thing to do. We’re about to start using Roku as part of an effort to decrease our cable bills. We’ll now have a microjack input which can be fed into the 2-channel rig, which I will take care of, but be assured that if I wasn’t around to set up this connectivity, my wife would throw up her hands and listen to music through Roku on the TV set. (Let’s leave aside the fact that the current Roku models don’t support lossless.)
So the big picture here is that I have some family members who’d prefer to listen to music (they can easily tell the sound quality difference) through our fairly pricy family room 2-channel rig but that doing so is so complicated due to connectivity issues that it’s just not worth the bother. Only because there is a dedicated audiophile in the house (me) are some of the sources set up to feed the stereo.
The audio industry desperately needs to initiate a new type of high-quality modified preamp that
1)accepts everything, from RCA jacks to SPDIF (all types) to HDMI to USB to wireless;
2)one that switches between these automatically depending on the feed;
3) that outputs both analog and digital signals through various connections.
Rant off. Thanks for your time.
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- 11 posts total
- 11 posts total