How rare is an audiophile
I’ve been extremely busy lately and not had a chance to sit back and listen to music on my system for a few weeks. I’ve streamed my favorite music in the car and on a small JBL Flip-4 portable speaker; which by the way “punches way above its size class.” I continued to enjoy music whenever, wherever, and however i can during this “dry spell.”
So now its 5 am Sunday morning. I know i’ll be spending most of the day listening on the JBL when my wife and I drive out to a lake house we bought recently and are furnishing and getting ready for 4 generations to enjoy lake life this summer and for years to come.
I’ve let my system warm up and hit play on my CD player. I now find myself in total bliss listening to Chris Standing’s newest CD “The Lovers Re-mix Collection.” The effect of the quality of the sound of the music my wife and i are enjoying right now with a cup of coffee is hard to explain, but it brought literal tears of joy.
I started thinking, how many people are like us? What % of the population are audiophiles (whatever your definition of an audiophile is)?
I know the answer is heavily dependent on which country you live in. I live in the US along with ~332,000,000 fellow citizens (please, lets not get political on the meaning of population or citizen).
Are we the 0.1%ers? Are there ~332,000 audiophiles in the US?
i’d be interested in what others think about how rare our species is.
Whilst there must be doubt about actual numbers, what can certainly be said is that we are getting rarer.. Gen Xers, Zers and Millennials are not at all interested in the quality of sound, that's how MP3 and all the other competitor low-grade systems got going. Not to mention digital broadcasting and listening in cars and on computers and handphones. Almost all audiophiles are Boomers and we're fast dying out.
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@oddiofyl - Depending on what you consider local:
-Goodwin's High End in Waltham is excellent and has been my go to. They're one of very few that has a Wadax setup alongside dCS gear + others (Shunyata, Spectral, MIT Cables, Avalon, Rockport, Vinnie Rossi) -Safe and Sound in Chicopee has a good selection of gear too (Moon, Focal, B&W, Dynaudio, Esoteric, EMM Labs/Meitner) -Fidelis in Nashua, NH also good (MSB, Wilson) |
Audiophiles of any type are very rare these days. I'm 56 but when I was a young adult, almost everyone that I knew wanted to have a good stereo and collected music. As we moved along our journey some of these people stayed in the same lane, some continually collected (hoarded) and traded hardware as they loved the hardware components. Gear hoarders, not audiophiles. Some continued to collect music, but got corrupted by the crappy compressed audio wave, and strange enough, still refuse to agree that MP3 is garbage to audiophile types. So toss them out as they are not audiophiles. Some I thought were audiophiles ended up collecting LPs, but now we find them playing them on crappy gear only because whatever little turntable combo was trendy, but useless for anyone over the age of 13 probably. Remove those vinyl hipsters as they are only about a trend, not the performance of the music. Come up to the current day and it is truly uncommon to meet or talk to anyone who is really into the music, the quality of the sound, and the desire to have the best sound they can regardless of budget. I still have really good gear I bought when I was a broke kid, 40 years ago, but I also have some upgrades. I only know a few people that talk stereo or even high quality audio of any type. Most people are happy with whatever sound comes out of a Bluetooth speaker. Odd, but that's reality. Maybe .00000001 of the population? Wonder why we can no longer sustain specialty stereo/audio shops in many areas? |
