January 2025

It's All Good
We're living in the most diverse time for music acquisition and enjoyment.
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  The WWI French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau famously once said, "Generals always fight the last war." That statement applies as much in audio as it did in the trenches of Ypres. Although, fortunately, audio's butcher's bill is a lot lighter.

We're in 2025, now. We didn't get replicants or flying cars, but a quarter of a century into the millennium, we need to stop thinking like we are still living in the last one.

What's great about right now in the audio world is we are living in an 'it's all good' time. It doesn't matter whether you want to listen to music on LP, tape, CD, SACD, streamed, downloaded, on compact cassette, MiniDisc (yes, there are still collectors) or sent by semaphore. Nobody really cares whether you listen using tubes, solid-state, IC-based, in Class A, AB, D, or F#. If you want to play music on headphones, boxes, panels, horns or by someone tapping out a rhythm on your eyeballs... there has never been such diversity of music acquisition and enjoyment.

But we fight 20th-century battles about audio. You must use a particular format or the right kind of amplifier design. I've even heard a heated discussion about tape formulations, comparing two brands of open-reel 1/4" tape that were discontinued 40 years ago.

A large part of fighting the battles from the last century often revolves around arguments about 'pricing audio out of its own market.' While the ever-increasing prices are disenfranchising existing customers, many of those customers were already ex-customers. Maybe they got bored with audio, perhaps they settled on a system that delivers all they need and only come back when bits fall off that system. And some are no longer with us. So, it's unclear whether audio priced itself out of its existing customer base, or its existing customer base just stopped buying and the audio industry went ever higher in search of a market. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two.

Price is a hot topic in audio. In part from rose-tinted memories of past glories. In truth, audio began as a hobby for those with disposable income. If you are on the base of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, music takes a back seat next to more basic demands of finding food and shelter. Once you start looking for things to build your self-esteem, then audio is there for you. But, if you ask those entering the job market today, 'good enough' audio is cheap, plentiful and as the name suggests... good enough.

The better stuff, the equipment we write about on these pages, doesn't do a good job of engaging with those people on the first rungs of the ladder today. We can go one of two ways in this; continue to fight the battles of the last war and pontificate on how the poor quality 'good enough' audio, or try to find ways to show some of those people that there is more to life than 'musical Mars bars'.

Alan Sircom, Editor hi-fi+

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