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"Will COVID-19 Take Out High-End Audio?"

Weekender said:
We've used a ew of them in holiday lets..they're really nice to cook on and add something wonderful to the home with the way they heat the kitchen. One of our retirement dreams. £150 per month is slightly eye-watering.
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I do agree there is something about how they heat the room that is nice. In this day and age of climate change I cannot see how they can continue. As the government cracks down on things like woodburning stoves that Joe public can use sensibly as a clean source of heat things products like range rovers and supercars and yachts are deemed OK.

I visited the Munich show a couple of years ago and it made me realise that the UK audio scene is pretty conservative and sensible in comparison. There were turntables there that looked like they were for truing up articulated lorry wheels such was their size. It made my well tempered reference deck(30kg) look like it was for playing 7" singles. The new relentless D'Agostino amp was there. From outside the room I thought there was some sort of optical illusion going on such was it's size. I say this having owned a NAP500, a Bryston 14BSST2. This thing was massive, aimed at the people with the yachts I guess rather
 
Personally don't care about the uber one-upmanship end of the market, one way or the other. Firstest of first world problems.

I just hope the more honest and customer-supporting manufacturers and sellers, of whatever scale, get through this.
 
FWIW, I think Covid will bankrupt a lot of businesses & shops, & hifi won't be immune.
Maybe some of the Chains such as Richer, Sevenoaks etc will be ok via temporarily shutting down their stores & living off the internet business.
But for some of the more Niche, higher end one off shops, cash flow could be very difficult. And then the knock on effect to some of the smaller brands may suffer as well?
I'm not an expert in any of this kind of stuff mind you, so I may be off base.
 
DGP said:
Interesting myth this - Ken Kessler never wrote for Hi-Fi Answers. He wrote for Hi-Fi News.
DGP
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A long, long, time ago, before Ken was famous, he supplied the dealer answers to readers questions in an edition of HFA. I think they were mostly 'wrong'.
 
manicatel said:
FWIW, I think Covid will bankrupt a lot of businesses & shops, & hifi won't be immune.
.
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Unfortunately that's most likely. Although unlike KK I have no desire to hear or see anyone going out of business whether a multi national or cottage industry company.
Being totally honest I find the vast majority of the veblen or extreme high end products, ridiculous in price and physical size and ugly and vulgar in design and finish but then I think the same of their super yachts, watches, big ugly houses and generally all that Holywood, diamond encrusted gold plated bling.
 
dna audio said:
With an Aga the buy in price is only the start. You then have another £150 a month for gas or oil. My friend has one and he loves it but did say you have to change your cooking style to match how the aga works.
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I wouldn't take the gift of an Aga, it has to be the most expensive way to heat a room and cook, the Rayburn is much better as it heats the whole house and water.
 
A lot of people with influence in audio like to keep the ladder firmly up. Large wealthy companies can offer nice perks to those with influence, something many smaller companies cannot do, so putting smaller companies down can be advantageous. However, smaller companies are often more agile and can adapt very quickly to market conditions and are not always stifled by design, so interesting products can come from these smaller companies.

This is sort of "reverse" happening in the car world, as the smaller one-man car "influencers" on YouTube are now seen as a valuable marketing tool and are helping to generate car sales.
 
Small scale influencers can be very useful, once they reach a certain size the adverts that they attract can then take away from their impartiality.
 
I think a reduction of manufacturers is inevitable. When money is tight, hi-fi isn't very high on the list.
 
Rick_F said:
I think a reduction of manufacturers is inevitable. When money is tight, hi-fi isn't very high on the list.
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Agree 100%. And that’s one of the reasons why I buy hi-fi stuff that use standard components and are long lasting so always easily serviceable over time.
 
Weekender said:
I'll give you that, though there are ancillary factors such as accuracy, how well a watch maintains time...I'm no watch expert...
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I think I paid about £250 for my Apple Watch, it keeps time as well as the very best mechanical watches, also give me message notifications without me having to reach for my phone and tracks my exercise routine and calorie burn with surprising accuracy, it helped motivate me to lose 25kg last year... what most could you want out of a watch, beside bling factor?
 
vln said:
I disagree with Ken Kessler on many things, but I couldn't help agreeing with some of the stuff he writes about high end audio here:

https://www.soundstagehifi.com/inde...uk/1394-will-covid-19-take-out-high-end-audio



Specifically,

I dunno but for some crazy reason the phony documentary "Mondo Cane" popped into my mind, especially when I read the "live and let live" answers. High-end audio owes more to jewellery than proper sound reproduction. The bulk of the outfits creating these components can disappear with a "poof" and I would never lose a wink over them.
Proper reproduction is all I am after and learning about and enjoying artists and music heretofore unknown to me is what drives me.


and



When browsing sites such as monoandstereo.com and others, I am baffled at the amount of high end brands even I have never heard of, offering product costing tens of thousands. I don't necessarily oppose those prices (although many many times there are good reasons to do so) but giving that amount of money to a company where you have no idea if they will still be around a couple of years down the line.
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vln said:
I disagree with Ken Kessler on many things, but I couldn't help agreeing with some of the stuff he writes about high end audio here:

https://www.soundstagehifi.com/inde...uk/1394-will-covid-19-take-out-high-end-audio

Specifically,



and



When browsing sites such as monoandstereo.com and others, I am baffled at the amount of high end brands even I have never heard of, offering product costing tens of thousands. I don't necessarily oppose those prices (although many many times there are good reasons to do so) but giving that amount of money to a company where you have no idea if they will still be around a couple of years down the line.
Click to expand...
 
Darren L said:
I wouldn't take the gift of an Aga, it has to be the most expensive way to heat a room and cook, the Rayburn is much better as it heats the whole house and water.
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A mate of mine would back this up. He bought his current house a few years ago and both he and his wife were drooling over the Aga. It was marvellous, the kitchen was so toasty and nice. Then the gas bill landed and he nearly puked. This is a wealthy man too, the thing was gone in weeks and replaced with a very nice conventional cooker.

Also I wouldn't worry about the footballer market at all. The rich will always be rich. There will always be people with money to burn, cottage industries springing up, and there will always be people coming up with their own vanity projects. The comment earlier about a lot of boutique gear being generic PCBs screwed into an enormously expensive box with gold feet struck a chord with me, I see a lot of that in the Munich High End sector of hifi. It's like the shops in Dubai that will sell you an entirely gold plated bicycle. Nobody wants to ride the thing, if you want a bike to ride you go to a bike shop and buy whatever model you fancy. That's not what a gold bike is about. Likewise a hifi with monoblocs machined from billet aluminium with stacked 300B tubes and 1000Wpc isn't about music. There will always be people wanting to buy stuff like that, and there will always be people prepared to take their money.
 
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