… no matter what Neli might say,… 🙂

Look, I see it like this.

At one time you HAD to have a home stereo if you wanted to hear music at home.

Then there was the transistor radio, boom boxes, home theater, digital homes, and now ipods.

Lots of competition.

Unless we become ‘popular’ again – like the World Wrestling Federation, choppers, lime green indoor painting, etc. – it will be only the audiophiles and music lovers with lots of money who have home stereos.

Oh, wait, we are there now.

In fact, this is one of the reasons we got into audio on the business side – everybody in this hobby [for the most part] really loves it. They are not just ‘getting some music for the home’ they are pursuing their love of music, of technology, of their inner selves… whatever.

The software industry used to be like this, and then it grew and now there are all sorts of people who do not really care for it but who of course have to pontificate about it to everyone they meet [yep, still some people like this in audio too, huh?].

With the high-end audio consumer becoming fewer but more passionate and demanding, and the general public going elsewhere, audio manufacturers are able to make higher quality products. To a fewer number of people overall, yes, but I think it is the Polk and Monitor mid and low-fi home audio folks who have to worry – not the high-end.

But of course, this high-quality, and complete lack of economy of scale, drives the prices higher…

As a related note, I think the desktop computer’s days are numbered in a similar manner. The general public will have no need for them in 5 to 10 years – having moved to tablets. So… what does that mean for computer audiophiles? It means that expandable computer boxes, which will still exist [for gamers, CAD workers, programmers, etc], will be much more expensive – given as how the economy of scale which makes them cheap now will no longer exist.

So all these changes are just what is – not gloom, not doom – and they are no where near as bad as getting old and going bald and gray.

🙂

Each forum is different – but rarely are they about the pursuit of the associated topic and always they are about the socializing.

Some examples.

Some months ago I was trying to find some more blogs about Audi for the Audi news channel. Neli and I have owned a lot of Audis, and this seemed like it would be fun. So I posted as much on one of the Audi forums.

First, one of the moderators deleted the link in my signature that I had added a year ago, to the Cool Car Photo Magazine. When I brought up how the Car magazine was just photos of the Denver Auto Show a different moderator said it must have been because we had adds in that magazine [we didn’t], and, then asked ‘What is a Blog?’.

Feeling he wasn’t being existential, I proceeded to check out my previous post about the bumpers on the Audi S8 always getting into trouble. And similarly there an very angry forum member insisted I get rid of my [no deleted] link to the commercial-less magazine 450 photos of the auto show – which happened to focus quite a bit on the Audi TT and R8.

*** Forum Pattern #1: The moderators are assholes and the members are likewise. The topic of the forum is only a lure to get innocent people to venture inside where they can practice their skills at being jerks.

Familiar? You can see a lightweight version of this at Audio Asylum. After about 2003 or 2004, every show report I posted about over there, with great personal trepidation and often to the tune of nasty comments and innuendo, got less than 20 visits from Audio Asylum. Given that the show reports get a lot of traffic, this just reinforced the fact that the Asylum was not about high end audio but about people using audio as an excuse to chat amongst themselves.

Audio Circle is quite a bit different. There I have found the moderators to be quite nice – but the members to be less so. A few examples.

I posed news of the high end audio and audio pages at Mattters late last December:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=75761.msg712686#msg712686

The only response was Jeff at Tone Magazine saying we were a clone of the Daily Audiophile. So instead of welcoming a new magazine to the small, friendly hobby we all love, it is instead attacked [and Spintriicty was even worse].

In reality, the Daily Audiophile:
http://www.dailyaudiophile.com/

is a clone of alltop:
http://audio.alltop.com/
which itself is a clone of original signal:
http://gadgets.originalsignal.com/
and who knows about the Daily Reviewer:
http://thedailyreviewer.com/top/audio

Given that the high end audio news on Mattters is WAY different than these, obviously, ‘clonage’ is not what the criticism was about. He did write later in a more agreeable tone but still the public position is still so very indicative of the MO, the standard approach, to new publications and dealers etc. in our hobby.

And another example of just how the people at Audio Circle, even with nice moderators, treat people trying to grow and understand the industry, in this case we can cringe at how people treat the very nice Rachel from Grant Fidelity:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=79139.0

*** Forum Pattern #2: Nice moderators, hostile forum members not so interested in the industry the forum is purported to be about.

Recently I posted a question over at AVS Forum look for more blogs for a Home Theater channel. So far so good, the moderators are invisible and people actually try to come up with some blogs.

*** Forum Pattern #3: A real forum with helpful people [at least most of the time :-)].

Here is a thought experiment [we can’t do the experiment in reality because we are in the industry and getting banned from a forum or two would be a real pain].

What if I posted the same question I posted on AVS Forum on all the other forums and compared the responses….

Audiogon?
Asylum? [Deleted for sure]
Audio Circle?
etc.

Anyway, think about it. And as the Audi example showed, perhaps it is not that audiophiles are in general more likely to be assholes, but that certain types of people congregate in various forums who may or may not be civilized. Forums, which are kind of the gateway for both people new to the hobby and people who are trying to get a helpful message out to a wider audience.

Now you wonder why the hobby is not growing?

There is a little bit of a wee hissy fit by bloggers and ‘pro’ writers who write about wine.

Here is one article that kind of provides an overview:

Wannabe Wino

First, note that winos have 1000s of blogs while we audiophiles have maybe 10. You can take that to mean there are not many audiophiles, or that we are very passive and apathetic, or we are on average Luddites. [Think the 1st two explanations are close to the truth].

Second, what has bloggers all upset is that someone, a pro-writer [but this is really beside the point – something that the wine bloggers do not grok. It is really passionate and knowledgeable versus casual and novice… NOT old school writer versus bloggers… that ‘about’ was NOT talking about the blogger I linked to who seems to have quite a bit of experience and passion], pointed out that a lot of people are posting their opinions even though their breadth of experience is quite lacking. I.E. they really do not have any real perspective with which to determine and describe what a wine is like … or a piece of equipment sounds like!

And this last is certainly a pet peeve of mine – that many reviewers and most forums post reviews by people who have no clue what they are talking about. For example, how many times have you read ‘Best XZY that I have ever heard!!!’ and then checked out there previous reviews and associated equipment and find out that their system really sucks compared to the piece under review. That YOUR system is way better than theirs… and that YOU would have been able to hear a lot more into what the component can do than they did.

So why do people even read these reviews? Perhaps, as the linked to wine blogger indicated, it is mostly industry types who read them, and, unfortunately, people trying to make a quick buying decision using Google and reviews by anyone who can bang on the keys on a keyboard.

What those people trying to make a buying decision need is a way to rate the Reviewer. Lijit started with this idea, but has changed their business model more often than Fremer changed LPs. Vut the idea is to make a list of quality wine reviewers, quality high end audio reviewers,etc. somewhere so that the internet babel-verse makes some sense.