February 2025

The Future Of Our Audiophile Hobby Part 1
Roger Skoff writes of things to come and how to make them better.
Article By Roger Skoff

  I was recently asked by someone why I never write about how brilliantly the consumer electronics industry is doing and how, from being initially a hobby and then a cottage industry, some hi-fi companies are now being recognized by the big companies, acquired by them, and becoming, themselves, important contributors to the world economy, elements of our lifestyle, and shapers of our common future.

All of those things are true. The consumer electronics industry has become colossal and affects the lives of every one of us in more ways than I can count. The problem is that it's not our sector of the industry that's being promoted by mainstream media outlets and, in turn, becoming essential to the way we live.  It's computers, cellular phones, and video monitors, plus audiobooks, Alexa-or-their-equivalent, and maybe even air fryers and such-like devices employing fancy electronics that are highly promoted to make our lives easier or better.

One of the growth area products is the automobile industry, and let us remember the recent acquisition of McIntosh – no not the Apple or the computer, but the venerable old American company that helped the legendary Woodstock concert over half a century ago – is a good example of what is really happening to our part of the industry. McIntosh Laboratories was bundled with another top-notch hi-fi company (this time a loudspeaker manufacturer, Sonus-Faber), has been acquired by mainstream manufacturer Bose (you know, the company that builds the GM / Delco / Bose sound system in my Cadillac) and the expectation is that they might be abandoning the exclusivity of High-End Audio to sell as many fancy captive sound systems for the auto market as possible.

I can't even blame them; it used to be, back in the middle of the last century (yeah, no kidding, it really has been that long for ye Old Goats) that Hi-Fi Audio was the hot setup and had millions of excited people eager to buy the new stereo LP records back in ye ol' 1957 and the hi-fi gear (turntables, electronics, loudspeakers, and all the rest) to play them on. It was the same thing after 1982 when Sony and Philips' compact disc (CD) digitized audio product came out with their marketing promise of "Perfect Sound Forever". Everybody had to have them, and there was a second hi-fi boom, with CD players and related gear literally flying out the doors of dealers' showrooms and into the homes of an excited public, eager to buy the new digital sound; many of them even dumping their old analog record collections to do it. Loudspeakers were being marketed as Digital Ready.

It's not that way anymore, and the money – business large and small – follows the buyers, who are now interested in their cars, their cell phones, their gaming systems, and – with the possible exception of headphones and related products and some custom-installed Home Theater – practically every kind of consumer electronics product other than the kind that produces great, realistic, and lifelike two-channel sound. Soundbars are touted as being able to aurally recreate multi-channel surround sound.

Certainly, there are still active and interested audiophiles – hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of us all around the world. But when you compare whatever the actual number of high-fidelity audio fans on the entire planet may be to nearly 16,000,000 – the number of people just within the United States of America, who bought brand-new cars, just in 2024, it becomes obvious why McIntosh Laboratories would also turn to broaden their marketspace away from just high-end home-based audio and look to expand to the car audio market for its future growth. When you add in the facts that the average USA new car price in 2024 was approaching $50,000, we expect that the more expensive a car is the more likely it is to feature a high-performance sound system. The only surprise is that more companies aren't augmenting their home-based high-end audio hi-fi products for mainstream consumer demand products and more profitable markets.

This may be a real and serious threat to our two-channel hi-fi hobby and our industry, and it's not new: For many years we've been hearing how hi-fi has become an old man's sport (yes, the proverbial Old Goat, and, sadly, very few women) and we've also been (perhaps incorrectly) hearing that those old men are dying-off and not being replaced quickly enough with young new hobbyists. Yet we know personal audio is incredibly strong and the more youthful do grow up, buy homes, automobiles, etc, and will perhaps desire a high-performance multi-channel immersive sound system as their youthful life as gamers 'grow up'.

A growing interest in high-performance, high-end headphones, especially among young people, may indicate a possible rebirth for our hobby but, frankly, it's too soon to tell if those new headphone enthusiasts will go on to buy loudspeakers and a more conventional system. We are seeing signs of crossover, and this I a new positive for the audiophile community. If / When they do, great, but it could also be that for reasons of high cost, limited living space due to exorbitant home pricing, lifestyle choices, or just the values of the current younger generations, for at least many of them, headphones will be as far as they go in looking for better sound.

It is also possible that they're not looking for better sound at all, at least not by audiophile standards. And that leads directly to another very real threat to our hobby and our industry:

Because virtually all concert halls, dance or jazz clubs, churches, stadia, and anywhere else that people are likely to hear music being played have sound reinforcement systems (used to be called PA), most people nowadays have never heard music that was either unrecorded or unamplified. The very best sound they've ever heard may have been at movie theaters, although movie sound can certainly be quite impressive because everyone at every seat in the theater must be able to hear all of the sounds equally well. I think they may miss out on experiencing high-end two-channel audio's greatest, showiest, and most satisfying tricks: imaging and soundscaping when you sit within the sweet spot of a properly installed stereo system within a dedicated listening room.

With a good, well set up high-performance high-end audio hi-fi system within a decent room, playing well-recorded program material, it's possible not only to hear the music, but to hear how many performers are playing it, on what instruments, the size and shape of the space they're playing in, and where they are, relative to that space, to each other, and to you, the listener. When we account for what the music business has successfully promoted as popular mainstream music, we need to remember that quite a bit of it is electronic instrumentation, computer composed and emulators, so there may not be any acoustic instrumentation at all.

But what about live acoustic music that some of us grew up listening to? The popular Bugs Bunny cartons used live orchestration. That's how we're supposed to hear acoustic music, and when we can actually experience a recreation of it, music becomes thrilling; great music becomes glorious and, for some of us (like me at age twelve) it becomes a life-changing experience.

They say that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. We already have that "mousetrap". Given the best of today's high-end audio technology, we can truly re-create a genuine and lifelike immersive musical experience, good enough to impress even the most jaded or least interested listener. The problem is that, other than the audiophile community, very few knows about it.

When I went to the Toronto Audiofest show a few years back, as I was entering Canada, a young woman Customs Officer asked the purpose of my visit. When I told her I was there for the Hi-Fi Show, she had no idea what I was talking about and asked what "Hi-Fi" was. When I then told her it was "stereo" she still had no clue, and it was not until I told her that I was there for a trade show that she understood and let me in. Since that time, the same sort of thing has happened to me almost every time I've talked about my work with people outside our hobby or industry. The most recent time was just a few weeks ago, when I was sending a load of cables to a non-USA country. The shipping clerk (a woman probably in her fifties, this time) saw on the customs documents what the products being sent were and asked what they were used for. When I told her they were for a high-fidelity audio sound system, she asked what those were, and when I said "stereo equipment", by way of explanation, she had no idea of that, either.

From being a normal part of most people's lifestyle a half-century ago, hi-fi, of some quality or another, has become something that few people other than its fans and hobbyists even know of in my opinion. And if they don't know what it is, how can we expect them to want it? And if they don't want it, how are our hobby and our industry to stay alive?

When I was a little kid many decades ago, electric trains were ubiquitous as it seemed nearly everybody had a train set. They could be bought practically everywhere – including drugstores and "dime" stores and, at holiday time, practically every Christmas tree had an electric train circling its base. Where are 'mainstream' electric train hobbyists now? And decades from now, will hi-fi suffer a similar fate?

There is a possibility that the reason that nobody knows about hi-fi, and why we're even wondering about the future of our hobby and our industry, is that nobody is telling them about it in a large commercial way that greatly broadens the knowledge that our high-end audio exists. Nobody is bringing it to their attention during the Super Bowl, UEFA Championship Football (that's soccer to you Americans), and nobody is, in a very big way, getting them curious enough to walk into a high-fidelity audio shop and hear for themselves why high quality, high performance, hi-fi, audiophile music needs to come back into their lives. And because of that, we, our neighbors, our industry, and our culture are at risk of losing a technology that can be a doorway into man's greatest musical accomplishments.

There are scientific studies proving music is beneficial to family life. A family grows stronger, together, when there is a music system within the main living space of a home. We all know that today's elderly, with certain mental deficiencies, very much benefit from music therapy.

There is a way to save it, though, and I'll tell you, in Part two of this article, how we can protect our hobby and our industry and continue to

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff