hi-fi+ Global Network Magazine hi-fi+ Issue 239 Back Issue

We’re in 2025, now. We didn’t get replicants or flying cars, but a quarter of a century into the millennium, we need to stop thinking like we are still living in the last one.

What’s great about right now in the audio world is we are living in an ‘it’s all good’ time. It doesn’t matter whether you want to listen to music on LP, tape, CD, SACD, streamed, downloaded, on compact cassette, MiniDisc (yes, there are still collectors) or sent by semaphore. Nobody really cares whether you listen using tubes, solid-state, IC-based, in Class A, AB, D, or F#. If you want to play music on headphones, boxes, panels, horns or by someone tapping out a rhythm on your eyeballs... there has never been such diversity of music acquisition and enjoyment.

But we fight 20th-century battles about audio. You must use a particular format or the right kind of amplifier design. I’ve even heard a heated discussion about tape formulations, comparing two brands of open-reel 1/4” tape that were discontinued 40 years ago.

A large part of fighting the battles from the last century often revolves around arguments about ‘pricing audio out of its own market.’ While the ever-increasing prices are disenfranchising existing customers, many of those customers were already ex-customers. Maybe they got bored with audio, perhaps they settled on a system that delivers all they need and only come back when bits fall off that system. And some are no longer with us. So, it’s unclear whether audio priced itself out of its existing customer base, or its existing customer base just stopped buying and the audio industry went ever higher in search of a market. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two.