Why Don't More People Love Audio?

I have a couple of friends who make absolute nuisances of themselves hinting and hemming and hawing for invitations to come over and listen to my good system. They wanna bring stacks of their own CDs (and wow does one of them have terrible taste) and sit for hours in rapt attention to Sousa marches and tribal music from Outer Barudisplatt.

Now, both these guys have beaucoup bucks--helluva lot more than I do--yet they won't spend a dime on their own systems. One has little more than a Technics boombox while the other has some ancient electronics and a pair of Advent "bookshelf" speakers with the grill cloth literally rotting away from the frames.

Both these guys have healthy personalities and reasonably good ears. Neither is cheap. I think they are just daunted by snotty salesmen, incomprehensible jargon, and the challenge of struggling for that synergy we all keep talking about.

I think it would help a lot if we would try harder to introduce people to our hobby in ways that seem to them realistic. Help them to start with some just-above-entry-level gear and grow into the hobby, as most of us did.

Telling a newbie to budget as much for cables and ICs as for components is an utterly absurd thing to do. We wouldn't have believed it at that point in our own lives and many of our most golden-eared colleagues don't believe it now. Condescendingly referring to $3K speakers or $2K amplifiers as "mid-fi" doesn't help matters, either. One afile friend of mine told an enthusiastic newbie that if he didn't have ten grand to spend right off the bat he should just forget it and stick to his boombox.

That, brethren and sistren, is a big chunk of (1) why high end remains a niche market and (2) why people think we're nuts.

Have fun anyway.

Will

Good points, KT. When I have fairly naive (aka Bose or boom box) listeners over, I usually play music through my HT system (Paradigm/Parasound) rather than my music system (JMLab Utopia/Belles/Rega). I do this for two reasons. First, the warmish, somewhat colored sound of the HT system is more inviting and friendly to the inexperienced listener whereas their initial experience of the music system may be that it is cool and analytical. Which it is, of course; that's why I chose it. Also, the price of the HT system seems much more do-able than the price of the music system which, while not very high by High End standards, seems totally absurd to beginners.

By all means play the music THEY like, not the music YOU like. Volunteer to go with them to shops, not just to help with the listening but to ease the interface with arrogant, know-it-all salespersons....

And for goodness sake, show them that this hobby is supposed to be FUN. I.e. keep them away from your audio-is-my-whole-life friends until they have built up some antibodies.

Will

Perhaps a point that is being missed in the exchange between Cdc and Rex is that nobody really knows what "real" rock sounds like because it is an entirely invented phenomenon; different for each performer, each band, each session, each performance. There is no "real" electronic keyboard or bass guitar sound in the same sense that one can discern the "real" sound of a violin or a piano. Thus, what one must, by definition, seek in a system designed to play rock is what one finds personally appealing rather than what one finds acoustically "correct." When I listen to a recording of a Bosendorfer Halb-Konzertflugel, I can, if my ears are properly trained, determine the extent to which the reproduction sounds like the real thing. On my current system, I can get reasonably close; on Albert's probably a lot closer. But no one can say that any particular recording of the Thirteen Screamin' Wombats sounds like the 'bats really are because how they really are depends on who is twiddling which knob at which moment. That's not to say that rock is bad music or that high end equipment is wasted on rock afficionadi, only that they may be expected to apply different listening criteria than those of us with a taste for acoustic instruments.

Have fun anyway!

Will