Mergers, Aquisitions and High-end Audio?

Hedge Funds, Investor Groups buying high-end audio manufacturers? Why? As an investment [do they know something we do not?] or as a hobby [trying to relive their 2nd, or like me, their 19th childhoods?].

I believe ARC, Krell, and Sonus Faber are in this category.

Then a few weeks ago Focal bought [reading between the lines] Naim.

Can we blame these troubles on the ipod? I saw a stat that 16 billion songs have been bought on itunes. That is 16 billion dollars that could have bought a decent system or two – but probably would have gone into CDs a decade ago.

Cisco, of all companies, conducted a survey of our youth and they would rather hang out on the internet than go on a date and rather own a smart phone than a car. That old ‘pendulum’ has swung kind of far from where it was when I was young[er].

Who knows what the future brings, but right now the sector of the market that was setup to be attractive to college students probably isn’t doing very well.

On the other hand, our part of the market, the ultra, uber, stratospheric part of the market is doing OK [would do better if so many people weren’t ‘short’ America deliberately trash talking the economy for personal gain (most large corps are reporting a bettering economy, and even the real-estate market locally is picking up, albeit our home here is still unsold – hint, hint :-).].

As for high-end audio ‘for the rest of us’ [get it? This is Apple’s old slogan], something like a wireless system headed by an iPad with DAC and Amps in the speakers might be ‘cool’ to the next generation [now Neli tells me that something like this was also proposed on c|net earlier today], the generation who will not know what to do with a CD and more than they know what to do with an LP.

… and those hedge funds must be doing this as a hobby – or a write-off – or are looking at a awfully long time-frame which has that pendulum swing back…… back to where we are 🙂