Death of hi-fi predicted; podcast at 11

[unixronin]

"Apple Computer, on the bus, with the iPod."

According to this article, the iPod — or, more accurately, the current ubiquity of music-on-the-go via a small portable player — is killing hi-fi.  JVC and Kenwood just merged in an effort to cut costs and stay competitive in a shrinking and crowded market, and the parent company of Denon, Marantz Boston Acoustics, Snell Acoustics and McIntosh is up for sale.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Didn't RTFA but I've been seeing articles like that for about the last year or so. The market for audio gear is becoming bifurcated, with crap-grade background-music equipment no better than a boom box at one end, and very very high end equipment at the other end. The sort where you pay to have a room engineered in your house to hold the system--and that's *before* you pay well into five figures for the gear itself.

It's not really the fault of the iPod, though. Other factors that are much more important:

• the CD, and the fact that one can track-skip easily.
• the return of young and early-middle-aged professionals to urban living, where it's rude to crank your stereo because you'll disturb your neighbors
• lengthening commute times for those who choose to live in single-family homes in the suburbs, cutting into the time available for leisure activities
• the combination of lengthening commute times and the return to urban living having led to the growth of ground-pounder car stereos
• Changing choices in leisure activities--people are much more likely to watch a rented movie at home or surf the internet in their spare time

"Listening to music" as an activity--where you put on one side of an LP and do nothing else for twenty minutes--is, alas, a relic of an older era, when people had a lot more leisure time, and had the thick walls of a basement rec room to absorb the sound.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

the combination of lengthening commute times and the return to urban living having led to the growth of ground-pounder car stereos

That's not really where those rattle-windows-two-blocks-away car stereos started. Frankly, they started as a ghetto/barrio status symbol, and that's still mostly their core market. Most people who want to listen to music on their commute don't need or want to do so at sound levels that leave their ears ringing.

I don't really buy the CD as a cause, either. There's lots of very good audio gear out there that post-dates the CD. Apartment living is very likely a factor, sure — when I was in an apartment in San Jose, I almost stopped watching movies on TV because I got sick and tired of being unable to listen at a volume that made dialogue clearly audible without getting complaints at the first loud noise. It's one of the things I hate about apartment living — I'm perfectly willing to live and let live, the problem is finding neighbors who feel the same way.

I'm not happy about the middle dropping out of the audio market, because I like my component A/V systems. I don't want to have to choose between an iPod (well, OK, an integrated all-in-one box hooked to a six-inch "subwoofer" and a half-dozen tinny little inch-and-a-half satellites) and a fifty-thousand-dollar high-end audiophile audio system.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

when I was in an apartment in San Jose, I almost stopped watching movies on TV because I got sick and tired of being unable to listen at a volume that made dialogue clearly audible without getting complaints at the first loud noise.

yeah, browngirl lives in a place like that. We're watching TV, something funny happens, we all laugh, and the neighbors are thumping on the walls. That's part of why I will not consider buying a condo in my current search to own property. The *only* place I've seen that kind of housing "done right" is in the corridor between Philly and Baltimore, where you have blocks of 100-year-old rowhouses and the party walls are *brick* rather than drywall.

I did fairly well 20+ years ago picking my components out of the bottom of what was then considered "mid-fi". Sounded a helluva lot better than what most other college kiddies were bringing to school even if their audio gear theoretically had more watts and more blinkenlights.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's part of why I will not consider buying a condo in my current search to own property.

I would never consider buying a condo anyway. Everything I've ever learned about condos seems to indicate that buying a condo has almost all of the disadvantages of buying a house combined with almost all of the disadvantages of renting an apartment, and very few of the advantages of either.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Condos are good for:
--those who prefer living in a city
--those who don't want or need a whole lot of living space, e.g. single people
--those who can't afford a single-family home just yet but want to get onto the property ladder, hoping to trade up in a few years. of course, this assumes that your property will actually appreciate.

Other than that, they're just plain annoying. Condo associations telling you what you can and can't do, thin walls, condo fees that far exceed what you'd pay on your own for snow shoveling, repairs, landscaping, and trash removal--given that if you owned a single family home you'd end up doing a fair bit of the labor yourself "for free". No thanks.

One peculiarity of Boston-area condos is that so many of them are located in converted two- and three-family houses. This makes the condo association very small, and it makes special assessments for repairs to the structure and/or grounds problematic. There's always one person in the group who can't or won't pay, and then the owners of the units end up suing each other and making enemies of each other.

If I'd had the scratch for a down payment I'd've bought one when I was 25, *mumble* years ago, but now? no way.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Condo associations telling you what you can and can't do

Don't you get that in (some) suburbs, too? Coming from a country where homeowners' associations and gated communities are almost unknown, it sounds like hell on earth.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

It can happen in lots of single-family-home oriented suburbs as well. Much to the annoyance of folks like myself and unixronin, one common restriction is "no motorcycles."

HOAs often perform the same functions as a town or city government. In places like New England, NY, and NJ, where every bit of land is incorporated into some municipality, HOAs aren't that common. But once you get into the South and West, where there's lots of housing built on unincorporated land, you get more and stronger HOAs. I could rant for days about how evil HOAs can get.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are neighborhood homeowners' associations too. Someone I know was commenting recently about getting warning letters from his HOA because he hadn't mowed his lawn in two weeks, regardless of the fact it had rained every weekend for the past three weeks. I've also heard stories of HOA people going around the neighborhood with rulers measuring people's lawns and issuing warning notices.

Personally, I think all of them need to go and get laid or something, or find something productive to do with their time.

[skellington.livejournal.com]

Well, some of this article is a bit of an exageration..

"CD Player sales were $36.2M" Well, who buys a dedicated CD player instead of a DVD player? (In 2006, there were 20M DVD PLAYERS sold for, I'd guess, well over $1B in sales.)

And the thing is, with a digital output, ANY DVD player is going to produce absolutely gorgeous sound, if you put a decent amplifier in front of it.

So the end result is that the only "Hi Fi" component you need is a home theater amplifier, and then a half dozen digital devices for sources.

And home theater rooms, and home theater systems, are selling just fine.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"CD Player sales were $36.2M" Well, who buys a dedicated CD player instead of a DVD player? (In 2006, there were 20M DVD PLAYERS sold for, I'd guess, well over $1B in sales.)

A sound point, though I'm frankly annoyed that my dedicated CD player died. Being magazine-fed and optimized for playing CDs, it did various things that my DVD player, however versatile it may be at playing almost any existing standard-definition optical media, simply doesn't do. Random-shuffle play, for instance, or CD-tape synchro recording.
(Though the last is somewhat moot because, well, (a) my tape player died too, and (b) who records CDs to tape any more? The advent of readily-available CD-ripping software and the commodity portable MP3 player has made the Philips compact cassette effectively obsolete.)

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I do think the DACs in most mid-fi and better dedicated-CD players are a touch better than the DACs in the commodity-grade DVD/CD/MP3-CD players though. Maybe it's just my imagination.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Ahem. I record CD to tape because my car does NOT do CD and I do NOT wish for it to.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, point. :) I guess I need to figure out whether I can fix the tape deck, then ... though the chances are slim, especially considering it's 16 years old now and there probably aren't any replacement parts available.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

*points out the mini-stereo on the carved table that has a CD player and a tape recorder*

Good enough for Neil Young

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Neil Young never liked CDs, but blue ray at 24 rather than 16 bits and 192 rather than 44k sample rate is good enough for him, he is releasing a 10 disk set of everything.