Audiophile Survey
[A post on the linkedIn board was by a student who is performing a survey – you might find it interesting]
Survey for my academic research on audiophile market – please share your opinion by replying the questions.
Hello,
I am an audiophile and an MBA student who is writing his dissertation project on the audiophile equipment market. It is a non-commercial academic research project (not sponsored by any company) aimed to analyse the market and its main trends, and to convey the views of the real customers to the companies in the market.
Here I ask all fellow audiophiles to spend some of their time to fill out my survey. Here is the link:
It is hopefully going to be helpful not only to the companies but to all people in our hobby. This market is under-researched, and companies at times may become quite delusional about the target customers, their views and needs. Please ask your audiophile friends to complete this survey too.
I decided to offer a prize of 100 pounds or $200, paid via PayPal, to stimulate the participants (provided they give some means of communicating with them in the survey). I will randomly determine the winner on 20th Sept. 2009. The personal info will remain private and will not be used anywhere again.
[After some criticisms – aren’t audiophiles the friendliest people? – he posted further comments about his survey]
Thank you for your comments, and especially for filling in the lengthy survey, which I must admit may be a bit confusing.
I am not a professional researcher, in fact this is my first ‘research’ in the last 12 years, and even back then it was based on experimental observations rather than surveys. I accept all criticisms, some questions may be biased somehow towards the research focus.
Also, Sony and Phillips were picked just as examples of mass market companies in this project, which is not commercial and not sponsored by any company. However, I am interested to find out why the big companies that were present in this market before (for example Sony ES or Pioneer Elite series) and were making equipment that was often competitive (and would stay in Stereophile Recommended Components for years), abandoned this market. I am wondering if this decision actually contributed to eroding differentiation in their mass market product lines, which in turn contributed to the increasing commoditization of consumer electronics market. Some companies even abandoned the traditional mass market in favour of less commoditized market segments with lower competitive pressure (Kenwood moving to marine and car media products, for example).
I can’t help but wonder, given their R&D abilities, powerful supply chains and enormous production facilities, why wouldn’t they (big companies) come up with something like (just as example) the battery-powered amps Red Wine Audio is selling at $3k, making it 6-channel and priced under $1k. I am not suggesting that they come and kill all speicialized companies (which will never happen), but for goodness sake, the whole market exists because the big guys are making really bad sounding equipment. So probably they are lacking some critical competences to be competitive in this respect, the reason hiding in the organizational culture, anti-economies of scale, their strategy formulation, etc.
As for the higher end of high end. The majority of components sold in the market are in the medium range of $1800-5000 per component, and bringing into the survey ultra high-end (like Avantgarde Acoustic, MBL, etc.) selling in very limited quantities, would only unnecessarily lengthen the survey, as they do not statistically represent the market. Turntables and iPods… I wonder just how representative are those… As for the iPod, I know a good deal of audiophiles in a number of countries, and dare I say, only three of them own the device, and would not even connect it to their main systems. I have multiterabyte media archives, and space is still always short – why would I even connect a 8 to 32Gb device to my system? It is inferior in every respect to a good music server, be it a custom built computer, or a good hdd/network media device. I can’t imagine a good reason to even want an iPod unless I walk a lot or ride a bus regularly. Some of the audiophiles I know own turntables (not a big fraction though), but the major part of their music collection are CDs. I know only very few die-hard vinyl fans, who would not listen to a good digital source. Of course, I understand that personal experience is not a sound base for scientific judgement, but it can at least provide some hints.
In this survey for obvious reasons I have to use non-probability sampling, which is not a good thing research-wise. If I offset it even further by including variables which are not very representative of the population, stretching the distribution extremes – nothing meaningful will come out.
