Audio Research in Receivership.

@waytoomuchstuff 

Or, it could have just been a proper Swan Song for a company that’s been a major contributor to high end audio for generations?

I think it was a proper swan song for Trent...who was likely undercapitalized. ARC as a company and brand will come out the other side a healthy and viable business.

@bigkidz 

Dealers were notified last week.  Most companies fail because of sales. How many units do you think they were selling?  The high end market as we know it is almost completely gone. Counterpoint sold 10,000 units and failed.  Look at the prices of some equipment compared to upgrading those units. Much better to upgrade then to buy new.  That's why we do repairs and upgrades and modifications. The values may drop but the units can be repaired.  Another company may buy them but there is no guarantee they will continue on especially with passion.

I'm not sure your post indicates much knowledge or experience with buying and selling companies. You seem to be quite knowledgable and seem to have the perfect parts upgrade recommendation for virtually every piece of gear that gets mentioned on this forum. Mr. Johnson had his ups and downs with quality and working capital through the years and the quality of today's ARC gear far surpasses much of what is being currently built in the market.

The "high end is almost completely gone as we know it" may be a dead giveaway that you may not have a great deal of in depth knowledge or data on this topic. I speak to a number of top dealers frequently and while they will all agree that things have slowed down a bit from 2021, there are still many manufacturers for whom demand remains brisk and backlogs are still measured in 3-9 months to et something ordered today. Thats still quite healthy.

@rlstx 

Our HT integrator's sales mgr. just told me on Friday that 2 Chanel audio sales are tanking nationwide. HT is still doing okay, but the "listening room" reference system sales are way down.

Well then, it must be true! "Tanking"? whatever....

There is no guarantee of anything....

@4afsanakhan I have been led to believe that sales wasn’t the problem, it was top end overhead and debt service. Oh, and there isnt a viable business model building gear in America for the market segment you described above. The dealer network, the loyal dealer network, isn’t built to sell affordable to the masses boxes. It isn’t worth the trouble and doesn’t align with the brand equity.

@4afsanakhan 

Example of a successful brand bridging the gap; Technics (by Panasonic).

“I’m going to cross shop Technics, Devialet and Audio Research” said no one, ever. In the history of the world.

Listen, you and I can agree to disagree on the semantics of what is or isn’t high end. ARC products or even pricing wasn’t the problem. Strategic blunders by the most recent leadership, financial mismanagement and a crippling debt load each contributed to a viable business stumbling. ARC will come out the other side just fine and refocus its efforts on what its good at building. I see many here on Audiogon talk about the high end market shrinking….the fact is that the high end has never been better. Companies come and go in every industry.

I also tire of reading how bad the economy is, how there is no disposable income, how every audiophile and audio show is populated by predoninantly old men. But that was true 20 years ago and yet, here we are coming off the two best years high end audio has experienced in a couple of generations. Obviously the older generation continues to be replaced with the next generation of older consumers. There has never been a time in this hobby where there was a broader, deeper and better set of gear from which to choose. Young people today are diving in to vinyl, enjoying the interactive, tactile hifi experience.

@grislybutter Indeed…thats about 19,000 liters of fuel so cruising that size “boat” at 20 knots would yield somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200 nautical miles of range.