Can Hi-Fi Go Big Time?

Mike Fremer and J.A. seem to be of the opinion that the Mass Media is to blame for the small size of the audiophile marketplace – as they editorialize in Stereophile.

regmac over at the Asylum described problems with this perspetive [look, I post a link to the show report there then I kind of check to see if there are any questions, and so I am over there. So I peek around to see what is happening. Seems that people are a little nicer to me and nastier to each other over there].

Messrs. Atkinson and Fremer are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore!

I agree with most of the thrust of this post – essentially that the Mass Media is the mass media. They conspire to help their owner corporations make more money in every way this side of blatant murder – and they just don’t seem to be focusing much on keeping high-end audio out of the hands of wealthy adults.

So, lets look at this a minute.

We want more people in high-end audio? It is called marketing. It is a known science.

Dealer organizations, Manufacturer organizations, and dealers and manufacturers themselves can put ads in U.S. Today, the Wall Street Journal, NYT, Inquirer, Car and Driver, Robb Report, … whatever.

Depending on the quality of marketing, and the investment, … and considering that we are starting out with essentially zero percent of the population, we could double, triple, … even grow the market by 10 times without relying on GREAT marketing [great marketing is Apple’s marketing of the iPod and iPhone].

The problem is, how many manufacturers could handle this? Some are at capacity now. Some can grow by 2X .. maybe. The ones not shipping anything can fill in the gaps, but then we have all these new people in the hobby getting second rate gear.

And what about customer service, repairs, and reliability?

So, the growth would have to be slow if it is not to collapse and make a bigger mess of things than they are now.

If we accept that dealer’s graphical restrictions makes it counter-productive for them to run ads, and that dealer and manufacturer organizations are hard to start, hard to keep from going corrupt, and hard to raise funds within a hobby that is shrinking,… then we are left with the fact that it is the manufacturers (M) that need to advertise. OK, like Honda or, say, Bose.

In order for the M. to justify this, they need to have a good dealer network, spare capacity to deliver product, a product that does not change versions every Tuesday, a product that is reliable, and enough profits to be able to afford to advertise.

I think that the number of M’s that satisfy all these requirements must be close to zero – which is why we don’t see these ads. [except for the every Tuesday part, Esoteric might be close].