High End Audio-Gaining Higher Ground?

Onhwy61 expressed my feelings on the matter perfectly.

As I have watched this thread expand explosively to almost 100 reponses in 6 days, I keep wondering why there is so much being said about an amorphous, uncalibrated, utterly subjective and unimportant "standard"?

Try to step back and see how childish it all sounds.

We are aging. In another 10 years our numbers will be drastically reduced by various causes. Death, dementia, hearing loss, income loss, home loss, and loss of interest are all taking their toll gradually. I was born in 1947 and I've noticed that maybe 15 - 20% of us are older than me. If statistics are to be believed I'm near the front of the baby boomer curve. But the audiophile curve trends toward a higher average age than boomers. I'm guessing our greatest population bulge was born in the 1950s sometime. So, just do the math and read the obits. This thing is closing down. The surfeit of used audio gear will cause ridiculously lopsided supply/demand ratios and paralyze the market for new gear.
Personally, I'm about a sneeze away from going all digital and ditching the expensive gear I use and hoard. Times have changed and I am stagnating in my reluctance to change with them. How about you?

Frogman - You seem to be conflating two topics here. Just as spirituality existed for centuries before churches co-opted it, so too did music exist for eons before electricity enabled the music industry. The beauty and majesty, the spiritual uplift, that you treasure in your music does not depend on electronic conveyance of a type or quality. It emanates from the human spirit and cannot be suppressed by opinion, data or my presentation of statistical inevitability.

I've often wondered if our pursuit of an ever greater high in listening to and striving for rapture amounts to anything more than trying to capture the high without the drugs. Marijuana played an enormous role in the birth of hi-end audio mass consumption and will (if anything can) be instrumental in its revival.
Insofar as press reports indicate that headphones are the only segment of the audio hardware biz that is growing, I have to speculate that the future of music enjoyment will be more personal - just as the pursuit of spirituality trends that way. As pot gains wider acceptance, maybe, just maybe, it will return to stoned listening circles something like we formed back in the day. More likely, in this computer age, it stays portable and private. Cans and wax are the future.
We are history. We played a damned important part, though. Look back at how much of the 1960s era social change has come to fruition and how much is just unfolding. Our society will never learn to think. That doesn't prevent the human spirit from doing the right thing in spite of itself and the meddling of religions.
That's whatI'm celebrating today, the 4th of July.

Children are more qualitatively than quantitatively driven. Recognition of quality comes into thinking and evaluation as an individual evolves from child to adult. It is wrong to believe that adulthood is met at a scheduled time threshold like age 21. Some individuals are precocious enough to perceive a qualitative hierarchy early in life and most (Americans, at least) never seem to develop this ability.
All of this leads to the fact that the majority of us just don't comprehend differences in quality. The much heralded "dumbing down" that I see taking place is demonstrated by reality TV, movie quality and theming, rap, and numerous other social indicators. We are devolving through compromised education and over-control of the marketplace and media. As a result, education which used to develop the individual into a fully functioning mature person, now reaches very few effectively. And since an ever fewer number of us can perceive genuine quality any longer, the marketers are taking over and obsoleting the engineers. The product offerings contain less material and more fantasy all the time. We are forsaking substance for appearances as a society and our buying habits are slowly being altered to satisfy ever larger profit margins. This will not end well. The products are ephemera in both utility and durability and the landfills are topping out with this gradue. But we are dumb, fat and happy, fa la la la la la la.
Please see a film called Idiocracy.