More potential bad news for some big names...

There's not a lot of point to be made discussing what young people today are going to do with their money.  Their seniors (you and me) grew up with terrible products and experienced a revelation when they almost accidentally found themselves in a high end audio place.  For me it was when a friend and I cruised down to Jacksonville and I heard Dahlquist DQ-10's.  Nowadays it is an easy matter to get acceptable audio at low cost, and it's ubiquitous.  Also, things are tighter for this generation and the entertainment options broader and widely distributed.  How many of us would have gone crazy over audio if we had had computers to play with?  We had the opportunity to access audio as an art form, literally.  I can see where today's up-and-comers have more things to get involved in, and I imagine some will become audio nuts, but the numbers will be smaller and the days of the revolutionary engineers are probably over.  What's out there now is excellent and affordable, making the hobby aspect of it less attractive.  One more thing:  the quality and diversity of the media.  Classical music used to be a widespread thing.   Now it is most definitely not, and if you know a young person with any knowledge of such whatsoever of it you are dealing with a music major.  That's just one example. Popular music is dominated by low quality artists doing low quality things. And it sells.  There are still great recordings made, and the technical abilities are better than ever, but the stuff that makes money, the stuff inputted into it, is mediocre.  So who needs fancy equipment when earbuds will do?  In the meantime, enjoy what you have and don't worry about everyone else.  You can be a niche.  It's ok.  

It is interesting to me how every commercial has a silver faced 70's era receiver, turntable and speakers in the background. It's considered cool I guess but for looks more than real function. I have a collection of older equipment from the 70's that I still use to this day. All of that stuff is worth 3-4 times what I paid for it. There are also plenty of audio companies trying to capture the retro vibe market with components that have the vintage look. Maybe the younger generation will latch on to that once they get into the working world. I think college kids with a stereo are rare as hens teeth. Polar opposite of my years in school. 

This may be a little off topic  but I would like to point out. The world has 8 billion people, And from the 1970s to the 2000. The tv brand's were RCA, Toshiba, Panasonic,  Quasar, Electrahome, Zenith, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi. Not to mention a number of early MIC brands. So the question I have is with how large the population is now versus then, what drove all the above brands away or to a fraction of what they were?

As I contemplate the audio market I am unsure as to why better quality has gotten so expensive.  My frame of reference is televisions.  If you look at the price history of TVs against their quality and feature history, it is clear that the quality and features have gone way up as the comparative cost has come down.

The first color TVs were about $500.  Today $500 will buy you a very nice quality and size TV, and inflation has driven the value of the dollar down considerably in that time.  Now tell me why audio has not followed that path.  Solid state audio equipment should not be mega dollars, I will leave tubes out of the discussion for simplicity of the question.

1) High end audio has always been a niche market. I've been buying high end gear for 45 years and I've rarely found any of my friends or acquaintences who were into the hobby like I was. Also, there is no similarity between Apple earbuds and the enthusiast audio market. Apple is a mass market company. Denon and Marantz are the proverbial fly on the elephant's butt.

2) High end audio has been dying ever since I entered the hobby. Oh, wait, it's bigger than it has ever been....

3) New companies have been entering the market and established companies are expanding their product lines. This is not indicative of a dying industry. Look at the Music Direct catalog and tell me that the industry is shrinking and dying.

4) The ultra high end is exploding. We may sneer at speakers and amplifiers that cost $100K but someone is buying this stuff.

5) The value end of the industry is solid and growing. Schiit, Topping, and SVS are excellent examples of companies that are selling tons of very high quality gear at reasonable prices.

6) The chances of Denon and Marantz disappearing are zero. These companies have the most recognizable brands in the industry, they are selling hundreds of millions of dollars of gear, and they have a strong dealer network. Masimo will sell their audio division for much less than they paid for it but it will survive and prosper.

7) I'm running high end gear from the 90's (Krell and Thiel) and I've been to 3 audio shows. My observation is that the state of the art has not improved much from 30 years ago. I've listend to many systems where the cables cost more than my entire rig and the sound did not equal my setup.

8) This is the golden age of audio. There are lots of very high quality components available for reasonable prices, you can stream millions of titles of high resolution music for an absurdly low monthly price, and there has never been more used luxury gear available. But nevermind, the sky is falling.