Why Don't More People Love Audio?

I think the ultra high end does market itself pretty well and attracts buyers into the yuppie market place. Fortunately, like us music lovers / audiophiles, even yuppies can hear the bad sound made by many of the exclusive products. Even if they can't hear it when they are told that cables and interconnect should cost about as much as a component the run for the door. People with lots of money aren't freekin stupid - the exclusive high end for stupid wannabees.

Because they just don't realize just how good it is!!! Lack of exposer.

Because you don't need anything better than a ghetto blaster for the crap which is playin out there. MP 3 is a good example. Listen to an MP3 file over a high end system and you know what I mean.
Good music - as an art - is elite stuff....so is high end gear.
Aida_w

I'm a recent convert to the high end. I think my conversion began the day I listened to and purchased a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones. For a few hundred dollars I owned audio gear that could be considered among the best in its class and far outperformed the speaker systems I'd heard in BestBuy and the like.

That purchase led me to websites like this one, where I learned about the many choices, cliques and nuances of audio gear. Granted, I am playing on a smaller scale, but I've just ordered my first SS headphone amp, and am looking into interconnects and powercables. In the future I'd like to experiment with an OTL headphone amp, and in my research I've become more interested in tubes.

Recently, I've seen Sennheiser advertisements in men's magazines. Perhaps readers will become interested and follow a path similar to the one I've found.

We're guilty of projection. Most of us are into gear as a means to the end of hearing moving, exhilirating music, on demand, in our homes (I actually believe this). We also tend to think that others want, or would want, the same experience. But they don't. Like one of the earlier posts, my wife knows good sound because we have it in our home, but she almost never goes to the big rig in the dedicated room. I have had many friends sit in my dedicated room and I have played music chosen by them on my $20k+ system. They say "WOW," sometimes genuinely amazed at the realism, power, intimacy, and immediacy of a good system, but none of them has changed their priorities to invest even a quarter of that amount in their own systems, even though they could. Music over my stereo is an ecstatic experience that gives me goose bumps and brings an occasional tear to my eye. I would never give it up! My conclusion about others, though, regretably, is that very few of them have ever been moved by music the way most audiophiles are on a regular basis, no matter how good the system. That's the main reason most people don't pursue hi-end audio, even inexpensive hi-end, which can be quite good; they just don't care that much about music. This is not elitist, it's just the way it is. The quality of their systems reflects the priority of music in their lives. High equipment prices and snobby dealers sure don't help, but they're not the main limiter of the appeal of hi-end audio. When I reluctantly came to this conclusion it saddened me, but now I don't worry about it, and instead focus on my own experience of music.