Why Don't More People Love Audio?

The concern, Mrtennis, is that high fidelity audio has become such a niche market that people are settling for sub-standard MP3 quality. Ergo, the CD market is dying and high fidelity will surely die along with it. Eventually no new music will be released on CD. Even engineering techniques have taken a turn for the worse. Check out "The Death of High Fidelity" in Rolling Stone's 2007 Yearbook issue.

I do part-time work for a computer audio lab at my local University and am astonished to find my colleagues, and even my professor, have no idea about high-end audio reproduction or just don't seem to care.

I too was young when I heard my first audiophile system and I've been hooked ever since. There's something incredibly therapeutic about being able to sit for hours on end listening to your favorite music, sipping on a cognac, and not once having the urge to crank the volume or go and do something else. I'm sure if more people were exposed to the aural pleasures of high end audio, they'd be hooked as well.

What it comes down to is convenience, exposure and of course, cost. Most people want something to listen to while riding on the bus or doing the dishes. I found it amusing how people used to brag about the convenience of their 100+ multidisc cd players without once questioning how WELL the disc's played. Or later the convenience of the MP3 and how the mid-fi magazines toughted them as "near cd-quality" at a fraction of the size. Now we're able to conveniently store our entire collection of music onto a tiny player and carry it around wherever we go at the sacrifice of quality...and no one seems to care except for us audiophiles who have seen the light.

Mrtennis: Coercion??? Who says we're trying to force people to love hifi? Are we jamming people's heads against a speaker and saying "this is what it's supposed to sound like now love it or else"?

Of course discussing it won't change anything. Listening will. If you have a hifi, invite friends, coworkers, family members, etc. to bring their favorite recordings over and have them listen to them on your system. Chances are most people won't take up the hobby, but some will. Word of mouth advertising doesn't work here, direct exposure does.