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get new people interested somehow...

first off i would like to say i agree with most everything you have stated, although i am not quite old enough to remember some of it first hand. I think the most important factor to "save our hobby" is that we need to do whatever possible to get new people interested, 90% of those in the hobby are now 50 or older, and the remaining 10% are 40 or older it seems! if we dont get new life this hobby will soon literally die out! problem i think is the hobby is partly a victum of the low quality compressed music from the loudness wars and low quality MP3s of the last few decades, when you have 4dB dynamic range and intentional clipping on MP3s for "music", i dont know how you are going to convince people that it makes sense to listen to it on a mega-buck hi-fi. the other issue is people today want to listen to music in a portable manor, hard pressed to get them to sit down in the "sweat spot" for hours on end and just listen.

now toss in the true mega-buck prices that even 90% of audiophiles think are insane, and you have an even harder pressed sell. back in the day, there were a lot more mid-fi products commonly available to the general public, although there are some today, most are not commonly know to the general public. i think mid-fi is VERY important, as this is how people get interested (as i did), and then get the fever to move up to hi-fi.

"It has to become cool to listen to stereos again"
i may get hell for this, but its true, the anal preoccupation with mega-buck cables and other oddities, just makes high end audio look off the deep end goofy to the average person, thus want to stay as far away from us as possible (just like trekkies - as much as i like Star Trek).

the key to the whole issue is that the gap between the average person and the hi-end audio has widened to the point where is appears we (the high-end audiophiles) are headed for the edge of the earth (dragons and all). there is no longer a sane middle ground, where the average person might say maybe i might like that! as stated it was not a huge gap between a 60s cabnet system and a mid-fi component system, nor from there to true hi-fi system, nor from there to a really good hi-fi system, i dont think any system in the 60s or 70s approached the cost of single family home. put into a ratio with inflation, todays systems are not generally in porportion with prices of the past. although you can get a lot of used equipment at bargin prices, you need to know what you are doing, which begineers do not.

Music, as much as i love classical, the newspapers keep reporting about the decline of classical orchestras across the nation, and sales of classical music keeps shrinking to smaller and smaller percentages, last i saw was less than 3%. however i agree that classical is one of the best for showing off high-end hi-fi. and although i think rap is declining in popularity, most of todays pop music leaves little to offer on the high-end audio system as stated above.

brick and mortor audio stores are dying, and i think many of them have killed themselves by providing an elitist atmosphere which 9 out of 10 times has turned me off as well.

IMO, high end audio is headed for the edge of the earth and looks to be headed for a slow and strange death, i really dont look forward to what it looks like in the future.

the only hope i can see is if PC Audio with high-res files can be sold to the general public once the internet allows higher speed and faster tranfer rates for these large files. still the public needs to be convinced and the music needs to be worthy, time will tell.
Give me analog or give me silence!

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