I am 58 years old. I lived thru the great era of audio. 15 years ago my medium sized town had 2 dedicated hifi stores. Today they are long gone and the Best Buy doesn’t even have a listening room. IMO this is due to several forces. 8 years of horrible economic conditions is the start. But, there are other forces at play as well. In the home, everyone is focused on video today, not music. Music is for "on the go". Everyone has a phone in their pocket with 100’s of hours of music on them. Headphones can be had for $10-$20. People don’t get together and do things as a group anymore. And for those of us who love audio, there are the value systems. I have a pair of Klipsch Herasy’s being driven by an OLD Jolida 202 (with new tubes), using an iPod thru a dragonfly as the source. Total cost to replicate in the used market, about $2200. Everyone who enters my office is blown away at the sound. 40 years ago to copy that sound I may have had the Klipsch speakers but the rest of the system would have been McIntosh or something designed by Bob Carver. And the source material would have been big boxes of vinyl.
And then there is the source music. My children have my grand children growing up listening to the sounds of the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Those of us who grew up listening to these artists are watching them quit playing due to health reasons or death. We need some new artists that have mass appeal. The music of this era to a great extent was happy music. The music made you smile. We didn't have artists singing about raping people and killing police.
Can an audio return to greatness? Sure. But it has to start with better economic conditions and people becoming less polarized. When people begin doing things together, good music, coming out of loudspeakers will return. Then, the days of the hifi will return.
