Up to 37% in savings when you subscribe to hi-fi+
hifi-logo-footer

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

A Middle Way…

A Middle Way…

I was born about 250 hours after the assassination of JFK. That means two things:

1.     I have a seriously good alibi

2.     I’m part of the last Baby Boomer cohort

Coming in at the tail end of the Baby Boom has strange implications for the editor of an audio enthusiast magazine, especially someone editing an audio enthusiast magazine in the mid 2010s.

Why ‘strange implications’? Because when I go to an audio show, if I walk into a traditional audio room, I’m often one of the youngest people there, but when I walk into a headphone demonstration, I’m frequently one of the oldest. Exceptions are rare enough to say there are almost no points of contact.

The audio scene can be neatly (although not entirely accurately) divided into Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1964) and Millennials (born between 1981-2000), with not a lot in between. The Boomers are the traditional buyers of traditional audio, while the Millennials are the principle purchasers of headphones, headphone amps, and associated ephemera. Vinyl might cross the divide, but if you see a collection of CDs, the chances are that collection belongs to a Baby Boomer, because most Millennials grew up in a time after polycarbonate; the oldest Millennial was still a teenager (just) when Napster nuked the music biz.

 

The audio traditionalists think headphonistas are either uninterested in audio or loudspeaker lovers in training, while the headphone enthusiasts think traditional audio enthusiasts are dinosaurs waiting for the next big meteor.

They are both right, and both wrong.

Today’s music lover has all the music there ever was at their fingertips. I can casually delve into a variety and range of music on a Saturday evening that would have been the stuff of dreams 30 years ago, and beyond the dreams of princes and emperors of seven generations past. Recorded music gave us all the ability to acquire music at a ferocious rate, and we lapped that up. The 21st Century equivalent potentially cuts out the need for collecting, as streaming sources like Spotify and now high-resolution subscription services like Tidal give us access to unfeasibly large musical collections in seconds.

, A Middle Way…

The Boomer grumble – “young people aren’t as interested in music as we were” – fails to stand up to investigation, because it’s those same young people who spend hours listening to an extremely broad range of musical genre… because they can. If you index-link my first new LP purchase (which still has a £4.99 sticker on the front, almost 38 years later) to today’s prices, that’s roughly equivalent to almost six weeks of Tidal account. Coincidentally, as a teenager it took me about six weeks to afford a second album at that rate. If you think of how much music you can cram into six weeks of a subscription service, and compare that to my teenage self with one LP and a radio, it’s clear to see this ‘uninterested’ idea is a touch nonsensical. OK, so there are more distractions aside from music today, and the pace and pressure of life makes it harder for someone to just sit back and get absorbed in the music for a couple of hours, but the interest is still there, and the whole concept of using headphones is, in part, to drown out the ever-present world of ‘out there’.

, A Middle Way…

The headphone revolution began with little white Apple buds for the iPod and the market has grown and matured with those users. The jump from in-ear to in-room is significant, but not insurmountable, and has happened before; those last-gasp Boomers (like me) spent their formative years glued to a Sony Walkman, and ended up buying bigger and better traditional audio systems in the late 1980s. The same is happening now, albeit in a far smaller setting. However, this prospective new market for old technology won’t make the jump unless there are the right products to meet their demands: high-performance systems, priced and designed for people who aren’t 1970s African Dictators. Fortunately, it seems that the audio market is beginning to remember who its core buyers are, and there’s increased interest in the value end of things, with products like the KEF LS50 leading the charge. Of course, it’s entirely possible that headphone lovers will stay with their headphone products, and traditional audio manufacturers need to adapt or die. There are signs that both results are already playing out.

Meanwhile, at the traditional end of things, there’s some movement, too. Those ‘dinosaurs’ have begun to wake up to the idea that the CD might not be around forever, that its ‘replacements’ might not be physical discs, and that there’s good sound to be found from the resultant networked or computer audio front ends. And there has even been a cautious investigation of all things headphone, even to the point of a few silver-haired head-fi zealots emerging. Nevertheless, the default position for many audiophiles is to pretend the 21st Century is just a temporary setback and normal service will be resumed as soon as we can find the keys to the time machine.

On both sides, though, this is small beer at the moment. There must be a middle path, and it needs to be better trodden. Those Boomer headphone converts have not abandoned their audiophile credentials by discovering the in-head world, and a 28 year old buying a pair of loudspeakers need not be buying them for his father. There is nothing about headphone-based and loudspeaker-based systems that make them mutually exclusive. So, why the animosity? There is still a group of audiophiles who think the mere mention of a headphone brand is like an abandonment of duty by an audiophile journal, and the inclusion of anything apart from the Holy Trinity of headphonista devices (headphone, headphone amp, and DAC) summons up visions of old geezers dozing along to Harry Belafonte records on the other side. The fact is there is a lot of meeting in the middle; it’s just not publically discussed.

 

I think part of the problem is what interests one group is of little or no interest to the other, and vice versa. It’s like discussing a new Ducati in a Ferrari forum, or a new Leica lens in a meeting of Nikon users. Possibly worse. There are a few products that cross the great divide, but the accent is on the word ‘few’; Devialet and Stax seem to have traction in their respective opposing camps, for example, but not a lot more. Personally, I think both worlds have exciting new devices that open up our audio oyster, and we are diminished for limiting ourselves by taking sides here.

, A Middle Way…

I’d love to see the energy that has gone into making great headphones and headphone amps break into the traditional audio world. And I’d also love to see what those decades of maturity that a brand like Audio Research brings to the headphone party. But with a few exceptions, this simply never happens.

Some of that reticence comes down to reacting to the enthusiasts themselves, and their tendency to view such crossover products as an act of heresy by the manufacturer. This has, in no small measure, paralysed some development cycles. What company is going to make a product that at once gains it new customers potentially at the expense of its old customers? But ultimately, that old guard is going to be ignored, by an ever-expanding group of manufacturers, distributors, and vendors.

In fact, I hope that soon this false wall between ‘traditional’ and ‘headphone’ audio melts away. It’s all just sound—good sound, regardless of where it comes from. There are bigger monsters to fight.

Tags: FEATURED

Adblocker Detected

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."