I bought my first Hifi system over 50 years ago. Most of my generation have a Hifi/stereo of some sort but the younger generation that I know use mobile phones with earbuds or speakers that they talk to.
One of the worst aspects of PFM (apart from anyone daring to question your opinions or buying choices) is learning about the demise of the industry's leading lights from its 70's and 80's heydays, most recently the excellent Glenn Croft. Can someone redress the balance and give me a list of leading lights , engineering or entrepreneurial in either mainstream companies or the cottage industry, who are under 50?
I'm not expecting a long list. No doubt the mainstream industry will continue (with more marketing and less innovation) but I fear the cottage industry will gradually disappear with the generation of talented enthusiasts that spawned it. This is very sad. One of the best aspects of Hifi is doing business direct the people actually making the equipment. Apart from artworks every thing else I buy is mass produced.
I think you are viewing the past through rose tinted spectacles.
Yes, there are and were some amazing characters with a clear vision in the early days of hifi who if anything created the market, but even at that time, the innovators were the manufacturers who worked out how to pump out cheap and reliable components at an amazing rate and put these in the hands of these hifi pioneers. The technology that goes into making a humble transistor should not be overlooked, and that's where the army of unsung engineering heroes worked their magic.
So instead, marvel at the DSP and electronic engineers who have designed the filtering in the £1 DAC included in your phone which outperforms any equipment made before 1990, who can stamp out these DACs at the rate of thousands an hour, each of them near identical, taking milliamps of power and requiring no servicing.
Consider the engineers who design pick and place machines which allow the components to be placed on the circuit boards in the mass produced products you buy. Just imagine what goes into making this work at this speed placing components to within 0.01mm:
Those are my heroes, and yes, it might be less sexy than the figureheads of the hifi companies of the past, but it's democratised the manufacture of high quality equipment and put it in the hands of just about anyone with an idea and a vision.
This sort of tech has trickled down and is now available to the cottage industry. For example, i'm repairing some old test equipment at the moment which uses an unavailable Dallas IC, and some chap has shared gerber files for a replacement part. I simply uploaded these to a circuit board manufacturer, and for something like £1 per board received a number of boards in the post, getting the machines back up and running:
There is no way I could make anything to this sort of quality myself any other way, and better still, it's cheap enough to experiment with, so getting boards made and iterating a design which opens up this sort of experimentation to everyone.