The Death of High Performance Audio

SACD battled DVD audio and iTunes won. So many of my colleagues and audiophiles talk of the death of quality audio. If this so, can it be true? Does anybody care about audio quality anymore?

Let us test that assertion through the lens of history. Sony just recently retired the Walkman. The Walkman was quite a revolutionary product back in the 1970s when you could carry around an entire “album” in your hand and enjoy listening over your headphones. The iPod has always in my mind been the new millennium’s version of the walkman. So just a few years after the release of the walkman we saw high fidelity audio explode. The 1980s were a time of great growth for high end audio with baby boomers driving millions of dollars in business into growing loudspeaker companies and specialty retailers. All of this occurred simultaneously with the meteoric rise of the walkman. Of course the CD played a major part in the growth of audio, but the point is high performance audio and portable audio have always been separate markets. So is it true that no one cares about audio quality? Face the truth; high performance audio has always been a fringe activity for the hobbyist enthusiast. So do I believe high performance audio is dead? Far from it, the iPod revolution has interested more people than ever in listening to music. Invariably when people are exposed to performance that is better than what you hear from free ear pods or dirt-cheap iPod docks they respond. No, most customers don’t have $10,000 to spend on a two channel rig but the level of performance that can be obtained from the marriage of digital signal processing and a small powered loudspeaker today is nothing short of amazing. Even for the audiophiles the same revolution that created the iPod is also creating the possibility for downloads of lossless high-resolution audio without the economic factors that killed DVD audio. The future is more like the past that we think. So who will lead the next revolution for high performance audio at prices more people can afford?