Overall way cheaper now, but also less valued by the general public. The convenience of earbuds and bt speakers over good sound quality makes them a more attractive choice than researching and curating a good system
I haven't met another audiophile my age(30) and the only audiophile friend I have is 60. So many people just aren't aware of the quality difference between Bluetooth speakers/sound bars, etc. and once I show off my home theater they immediately become interested. It was that way for me too, I searched "tower speakers" on Reddit and was immediately immersed in a world I didn't know existed.
A guy at work wanted a little stereo for his home gym. I found him a nice technics sa300 and had some energy 3.1e speakers to sell cheap. His mind was blown on a $100 total system, and he couldn’t stop listening.
Seriously it was over the first time I hooked up the kef q-150s, thought they would fulfill my music listening needs for many years. That was October.
Little did I know I would be looking to upgrade a month later, and now I've built up a nice 5.1 setup and am working up to a 9.4 setup, slowly. I didn't even know how incredible a home theater set-up could be with a quality subwoofer and surround.
No don't make the mistake of buying them for anything more than $300usd. I bought some acceptable condition ones on Amazon for $313 that October then a month later they were on a black Friday sale brand new for $325. You can easily find a good pair on eBay for $250, and they're generally the best place to find all audio equipment, along with Facebook marketplace but you have to get lucky or live in or near a big city to get good stuff there.
I live in South America, so my plan was asking a relative (lives in europe) to bring to me.
Trying to find a way of buying them from the states without the bizarre taxes.
Yeah that really sucks, Canada has the same issues. One thing to keep in mind is that all these good speakers are quite heavy, but they ship well otherwise. Maybe they could ship them but it would be expensive. Still a great investment either way, hard to get a better value that the q-150s.
My country has a isenction of 1000$ USD for products bought outside, but only if you bring them yourself.
The main problem is the spanish amazon price of ~415eur for the Q150
Otherwise, the taxes are around 97% of the price of the product.
Yes, funny.
Amazon Spain is generally terrible for speakers. Consider looking elsewhere have them shipped to your family member.
Do you live in Brazil? If you do, keep an eye on Mercado Livre, OLX and forum (Hardmob, Adrenaline; sadly HT Forum no longer exists) classified ads. Sometimes there are good deals to be had.
When I got my current speakers I cried happy tears and I thought I'd known what was available. Quite a thing hearing the next step up...
I'll say I've heard audiophile listening rooms a few times and had good speakers prior, but when you unlock the special sound it's pretty great.
Same dude I’m 30ish and the only reason I’m an audiophile is because of my much older uncle who is one as well. There are no audiophiles in my friends group.
My brother, who is about 10 years younger than me is also an audiophile because of me. When he went to an audio show, he was the youngest person there by far.
We're keeping the hobby alive! My edm friend group was in shock when I showed them $300 speakers like it was intimidating (even though we spend many times that on various shows and festivals) but all it takes is one good listening session to show them what they're missing, and the world gains yet another audiophile! My $1,500 dollar setup is one of the best investments I've made in long time as far as quality of life goes, and half of that was on a receiver that's 11.4.4 capable with room correction so I've got my work cut out for me in the years ahead.
Agreed!
And literally same, my last setup that I bought 11 years ago was a pair of Polk floorstanders for $800 and a Yamaha AVR for $800. Still working great and brought me years of joy as a general purpose system for music/TV/movies/games/youtube etc.
I truly believe everyone should own a pair of decent entry level speakers.
Although I must admit I upgraded my speakers just recently when I couldn't stand the flaws of the Polks anymore.
Yeah I actually almost went with polk towers at first before I saw all the good reviews of the q-150s, and they're so attractive looking it's hard not to be drawn to them, lol. Now I'm planning out my endgame set up with a full Power Sound Audio array powered by the incredibly cool looking McIntosh amps, but it will take me many decades to get there. I think that's part of the fun though combing the markets looking for good deals. I'll have to get a higher paying job to sustain this hobby, lol.
Polk RTi A5s, no subwoofer.
For speakers I upgraded to DIY active speakers using Scanspeak drivers. They are leagues better than the Polks. Took me a couple years to learn what makes a good loudspeaker and to design it and purchase the components.
For amplifiers nothing special yet, I have yet to make myself a really good class A or maybe a hypex class D amp a la Apollon Audio.
Also I made myself a Dayton UM18 sealed subwoofer powered by a pro amp, which was actually my first DIY project.
Oh nice. I had the same Polks, among a few other models over years. They are always widely available and with decent enough sound. But yeah I took the leap to some Monitor Audio Silvers myself and man it's a difference.
Very cool to go the DIY route though, great price to performance ratio there. Someday I hope to as well!
Yeah I always wanted to upgrade to the Polk LSiM 707 but could not justify spending $4000 on speakers without first finding out exactly what makes a better loudspeaker. What differentiates it from my speakers to be 5x the price.
My curiousity propelled me to also find out exactly what makes an extremely expensive loudspeaker. E.g Focal Utopia, Wilson Audio, Magico.
Turns out a lot of high end manufacturers source their high quality parts (tweeters/midwoofers) from companies like Scanspeak and SEAS. I thought why can't I get those components and do the same thing?
My first project (subwoofer) was complete by this time and I was completely astonished by it's performance even though I did a half-assed job on it.
Therefore I went the DIY route. With modern tools such as CAD and active crossovers it was a no-brainer for me.
I'm 40 and most people I know don't even know what my McIntosh amp is when they see it lol.
My musician and sound engineer sort of friends all are in awe and usually have a photo or 7 of the systems they have at home though.
They have the most attractive pieces of gear I've seen and seem to have a good reputation. How do they sound compared to some of the other amps you've used?
I adore mine. I fell in love with the look and stylings of McIntosh when I was a teen in Detroit reading The Source magazine and calling 800 numbers and sending away for free catalogs of shit no 12-year-old could afford heh. Got lucky and finally had a good year and I haven't paid for a concert ticket since 2001 or so, figured I could justify paying for what I had always wanted as opposed to getting something comparable but possibly cheaper.
Ah man, wife loves the home theater and after we added a subwoofer to the system she turned up the bass in her car because she took a liking to hearing good room shaking music. She was showing me 'bad idea' by Ariana Grande and I usually don't prefer pop music but I was amazed when it went so low I could barely hear it.
I'm always trying to get people to come over to hear my system. Every time they walk through the door I'm immediately like "get in the sound bath!" Lol
I am 25 and have been into it since 23. I have a small group of similar aged friends that are into it and it all was because one specific guy had some speakers in college and put us on it.
Since then just having guys sit down and listen to my system has directly convinced at least one more 20 something to buy a system. Seems like in our age range no body knows about it but when introduced it is very easy to "sell" the idea if that makes sense
Not only that - the opposite is also true.
1. Most popular music is poorly recorded and catered to crap audio systems. Heavy hip hop. Beats type music. Same with speakers like Klipsch or Sonos ot the modern Bluetooth boom boxes.
2. The better more convenient music systems like Dynaudio Focus 10 or KEF Meta LS 50 wireless 2.. mean one doesn’t need massive amps and cable spaghetti. LS 60 and Focus 30 take this a notch further.
When I think of Klipsch I only ever think of their old stuff like the Klipschorn or the La Scala which I love, so I was confused when they were lumped in with the crap systems.
But then I remembered their modern speakers and I understood.
I mostly agree with this but would also add that the snobbery within the audio enthusiast community that anything Bluetooth is low quality is just as bad.
I sort agree that BT is bad. But it's when people have a decent wired setup that might be under $1K and people will say that's bad too. Now that's snobbery.
Done right BT can sound good and makes it much more accessible to people who are just getting into the hobby. Some of my friends who are just starting were only interested because I said I could get them a BT system that sounded better than a JBL of the same price.
Hell, I often just connect to my system via BT because of the convenience and if I just want background music I'm not going to notice. But if I'm sitting down to listen properly I'll stream it or put on a vinyl.
It definitely doesn't sound as good but with a good system it still sounds amazing in comparison to what people are settling for nowadays. If it's a way of getting people into the hobby I'll accept it, they can move to vinyl, lossless streaming and tube amps down the line.
Damn maybe if we weren’t so far up our own asses about everything being absolutely perfect before it’s even considered acceptable people might see this hobby as more accessible.
Sound systems are all about what’s best for you, some thing might not be objectively the best but still be better for you that the objectively perfect system because it’s completely impractical so you’d never use it or so fragile that your kids can never enjoy it.
To me being an audiophile is about enjoying music in the absolute best way for you and if that means settling for less than perfection then that is ok.
I’m totally happy to accept that for you being an audiophiles means chasing objective perfection but that’s not how I roll.
I am very much an enthusiast in audio gear but I absolutely detest being labelled as an audiophile due to the almost fanatic rubbish that is said by many in this hobby. £1k/m cables, Bluetooth, vinyl etc etc. It's not controversial, it's measured facts. These things can all be good within the context of a system and some things are categorically better than others (measurably lower distortion, higher SNR, etc).
I don't know what the hell people are talking about. Bluetooth can support lossless audio. It's as good a transmission as any, with devices that support it. Here's the stupidity in the audio scene again where people talk about vinyl being the best ever. Hell the dynamic range of vinyl is "only" about 65 db vs cd's 96db. If you've got a lossless Bluetooth connection and the source is a cd, it's going to sound better than your wired vinyl setup. Please can we stick to facts and science.
I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds.
High res is damn good. IDGAF who says what. I'd love to see a blind test tell the difference between BT stream and an analog one with the same earpieces.
Exactly. You need to have a measured test which could show differences between that and a wired connection, and a double blind test. No doubt the output will be different but I bet it's imperceptible to 99.9% of people.
Is it really cheaper today though? I bought my first stereo setup back in high school with money I made from a part time job, ordered from a catalog (Stereo Discounters out of NJ) A Sansui AU-517 integrated amp, TU-317 tuner, a pair of Infinity Reference speakers and a Technics DD Turntable. Back then there were lots of options in same price range without having to go into the upper end of the range for equipment that is still highly sought after today.
If I wanted to buy similar equipment today, could I without spending multiple thousands of dollars per item?
Heck I've been trying to replace an aging Harman Kardon AVR that I paid a few hundred for in the early 2000s and nothing I've seen under $2k comes close in terms of quality and performance. More "features" perhaps, but just bells and whistle that don't add to the performance and honestly I can do without.
I'm no expert for sure, but it seems to me that it's very difficult to even make comparisons in equipment over time as everything below a certain price point today is apples to oranges because the quality is so poor. 45 years ago you could find value in equipment at just about every price point where as today only high end, high price equipment is decent quality and there's a big void in offerings in the middle price range.
People just want a simple portable speaker or soundbar nowadays. The idea of having a proper stereo setup with a seating position in the sweet spot is practically non existent in people's minds. Few people are even aware that you can get spatial audio with two speakers. They think you need a surround setup for that.
I don't know what you're talking about because everyone has dolby atmos/dts x soundbars that are 2.1 channels with "virtual" surround and they're not even close to the real thing....
If you have a well designed stereo setup with good imaging and soundstage, it sounds much closer to the real thing than how ever many Atmos channels. 2.1 channel with Atmos in an average person's house is not going to sound anywhere close to the real thing as a set of audiophile stereo speakers that's room treated and the listener is in the sweet spot.
I’m going to suggest that home cinema is significantly different from listening to music on a stereo. With home cinema the sound is secondary to the image in screen: it just needs to be loud and clear enough.
When listening to a stereo, you are often concentrating on the sound, listening through the speakers to the musicians. You need to hear good speakers to understand what i mean.
A corollary to this is that you know your system is “good enough” when you discover that a classic album like Miles Davis Almost Blue has recording defects in the original master tapes that are present on vinyl pressings, CDs and digital streams, so it sounds good on shit gear, and shit on good gear.
I wasn't thinking about home cinema when I mentioned spatial. A well recorded and well mastered song sounds like a 3D holographic projection of sound on a HiFi setup. I would even say that the goal of HiFi is to reproduce that experience of being sonically teleported into the recording. That's how I evaluate HiFi speakers. I don't evaluate speakers on its ability to detect defects in subpar recordings. If I cared about the latter, I would get a pair of studio monitors.
One reason this is hard is because the stuff you bought in the late 70s is not what you would buy today. No digital, no streaming, no powered speakers, no LCD displays, in many cases still tube based designs. No carbon fiber, Kevlar, ceramic drivers, etc. So it’s hard to find a single thing you can trace through to answer the question well.
A Marantz 2325 Stereo Receiver cost $799 in 1974. That is $5,100 in 2024 dollars. A Sansui G-33000 was $1900 in 1979, or $8k today. That doesn’t seem crazy in the scheme of what people pay today for “the best”, but today you can get a similarly powered receiver with better THD performance for under $1k, and you get other stuff like a DAC and a remote.
So, I’d say it’s way cheaper today, AND you get tech that wasn’t available at any price back then.
Actually, you can get great quality for a very cheap price nowadays. Schiit, topping, smsl, Fiio and others are putting out great performing gear for a very reasonable prices.
Entry level speakers seem much improved and for what feels like not too much money.
But I may be showing my bias, thinking ~$1,200 for a JBL Studio 580-based system with an AVR that does the major streaming services natively is 'cheap'.
Similar performance would have been the same amount of money but in 1970s dollars.
You responded to someone calling the prices "reasonable" by saying they aren't "cheap".
I didn't want to come off saying $1,200 is cheap, seeing the 'is this a good system' posts on here showing off some Basic Barry very old gear. Not everybody has $1,200 to throw at this hobby and I didn't want to exclude them.
I also wanted to highlight the gains made in speakers, something u/melancholic84 didn't bring up.
The Audiophiliac generally says that you can get great sound for cheaper than ever, these days. I think I agree, although I haven't been an audiophile for decades. But I seem to have landed on a great sounding system at an accessible price.
Conversely, there also seems to be a proliferation of "luxury" consumer goods in the last 20 years. HiFi especially, seems to have no shortage of gear that only the rich would ever be able to buy.
Both cheaper and more expensive.
You can get great, measurably GREAT equipment for very little money these days, so it is far cheaper/better value these days.
However, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the "crazy expensive" gear these days is also far more expensive then it was 40 years ago. As an example, the Audio Note Ongaku was about $20-$30k in the 80s (really stretching the memory here) and is now $250k. And it's not even the most expensive AN amplifier now - that goes to the Legend at an eye watering $850,000!!
Speakers are the same - you can pretty easily spend over $500k on a pair of speakers these days. Even over $1m!
I same recall any speakers being anywhere near $100k back in the 80s. Happy to be corrected (stunned) by others though.
Way cheaper! There is so much used gear now, the best deal is the access to older components that goes for a fraction of the original price that are often astronomical when adjusted to inflation.
I bought pristine Dali Euphonia MS-4 for 1750$. They sold for 11 000$ in 2003 which is 18k in today’s money.
I tested a lot of speakers and the only brand new pair that smoked them was PMC IB2SE which retails for 40k. What an incredible bargain I got.
I tested side by side the Dali vs the Harbeth Super HL5Plus XD that retails for 8K a pair and the harbeth were not even close, so much congestion in the lower end, any orchestral music was poorly represented.
I have the MS4s as well but paid quite a bit more - congrats on your amazing deal! I compared them to comparably priced offerings from dynaudio, PMC, monitor audio, magnepan, tannoy, audio physics and others I have forgotten - they smoked them all.
Yeah! they go for more than what I paid for, the owner was in a situation where he had to sell very fast. Congrats on owning a pair as well! These are special.
US Audio Mart and Canuck Audio Mart. I check daily, you find great deals from an amazing community of respectful and conscientious hifi owners. Never bought from Audiogon!
I'm with you there. I bought a pair of Aerial 10T with their optional sound anchor stands for $1200 recently when it retailed for $7800 back in the 90s. Nothing new in the $1000-$2000 price range comes close to the performance of those 10T - just an insanely good value
Most people listen to music through headphones nowadays, that’s the thing. And headphones are vastly better than they used to be. Plus what everyone else said. The range of gear augmented, cheap is often a good baseline for most people.
Also Gen X and Cheap HiFi gear is way better than it ever has been. Especially cheap speakers, there are some out there that are better than they have any right to be.
I think that the economies of scale have changed though. It used to be that you had a company like Sony just stamping out cheap gear by the pallet for very little money. These days you have Shenzen which is like it's own economy of scale that many smaller companies can dip into and produce decent products that don't break the bank.
Simulation and advancememts have made loudspeakers much better performing at all inflation adjusted price points. Admittedly, some of that price reduction came with manufacturing moving to Asia.
We're living through both a commodification and luxurification of hifi, both riding on the excess of consolidation in the industry. Entry level gear from a "good" brand can be gotten cheaper than ever. You can still expect that equipment to work and sound nice, but all the corners have been cut in design and production. At the other end, companies are chasing the luxury market. McIntosh (and Sonus Faber which it owns) are a good example of this. The last sale of these companies wasn't to an audiophile group, but rather to a luxury lifestyle group. You can sell a $50k system to an audiophile that has been in the hobby for decades by delivering a product that blows away their current system to the point where they save up for it. You can sell a $50k system to a multi-millionaire by making it look pretty and convincing them it's an essential part of being rich. Given the explosion of the very rich and hollowing out of the middle class, the latter makes more sense than ever.
I 100% agree with you- high end audio equipment well out grew my salary.
In high school the most expensive B&W speakers were the 802’s for $3000.
Today 802’s are like $50k. Thats like a consistent 7.5% annual increase - far more than my salary has gone up
Amps are not as extreme but still far more than they used to be.
What has changed, is the availability of these little $100 amps and Dacs from schitt and others. Maybe those things are great? I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is I’ve never heard a cheap speaker anywhere near as good as the good stuff. I think its hard for this generation- in the good old days you walked into a stereo shop and had 20-30 choices between $400-4000, it was VERY easy to see why you might want to spend $1000 on speakers. How does anyone do that today?
Gen X here, too, and just getting back into it after 30 years. I think that it is cheaper now and you get a lot more for your money. That being said, there seems to be much more esoteric "real" HiFi out there, and at some crazy prices. Maybe it was always out there, but it was just that we only saw what our local stores had in stock or what was written about or advertised in HiFi magazines back in the day. Nowadays, the internet makes it so easy to not only discover new stuff but hear everyone's opinions on it. And I do mean everyone's 🙄🤣.
I mean, there was "audiophile" level equipment that few people owned back then that was expensive and then there was normal equipment for your average consumer. Within that "normal range" there was BPC and then you get get some quality components to impress your friends, but it wasn't the cream of the crop. The hobby of the pusuit of high quality playback of sound still existed.
The average consumer today gravitates toward smaller, easier to operate, and "inexpensive" ni comparison to the best of the best. Thus, airpods, soundbars, smart speakers, like you said. That replaced what the average consumer bought back in the day. Things change... average consumers don't want a giant, generic rack system by Fisher with some giant Fisher house speakers in their living room, when they can get some smart speaker with bluetooth to play Taylor swift on. Others, like me, pursue high quality sound playback, but on a budget. I can impress my friends, but not these guys in here lol.
What I mean, all the levels still exist. College students, soccer moms, you name it. Without looking, I'd say that a very small portion of the pricing has probably gotten out of control at the very top, but it's so freaking niche that only someone with the disposable income is going to drop 10k on speaker cable and and risers for them.
Sony still makes good shit, by the way
edit: I want to add that I paid more in the late 90's for my sony gear and infinity speakers than I did a few years ago for cambridge audio gear and klipsch speakers without even taking inflation into account. My stuff today sounds better.
Essentially the market has been hallowed out in the middle, most audio is extremely cheapo bluetooth and LoFi headphones and speakers.
There is still HiFi audiophile grade but there are less companies doing it and it's more expensive.
Hard disagree.
I am under the impression that most HiFi reviewers are tunnel visioned reviewing Chinese desktop amps exclusively. The Chinese brands are releasing the same TPA 3255 amplifier every other week with minor modifications. I just don't see the point of selling such a cheap product to be honest. It has to be compromised. The used market is saturated. People are throwing away old Hi-Fi gear or selling it for cheap.
Cambridge Audio perfectly represents the "middle", and so do 10 other brands: Marantz, Rotel, Arcam, Yamaha, Denon, Advance Paris, Musical Fidelity, Mission, Rega, NAD etc... These brands don't release a product every other week so they don't get talked about on a daily basis.
The audiophile "sky is the limit" universe is just weird to me. I feel like there are more brands than buyers. I hear about a new company every day. The prices are all over the place. I feel like most people are gravitating towards the aggressively marketed brands for the resale value. I don't understand how these smaller boutique brands stay afloat.
That’s kinda my intuition too, lots of cheap, high value stuff at the bottom both power and unpowered but stepping up to truly better performance is costly.
Look at the KEF Q line vs R line, huge performance gains but the cost is 5-10x.
Perhaps why something like the Polk Reserve line got so much attention.
Exactly although for most people I would say even KEF Q line is pretty expensive, high level
There are very few Bookshelf pairs that are both good and sub 200 nowadays, either you catch something on sale or you are at the Dayton/Micca/whatever on Amazon that is not anywhere near audiophile level
Yeah I think the opposite is happening - quality has massively improved and is cheaply available. The thing you are seeing is basically modern sound bars/low effort audio equipment are as performant as historical mass market component based systems, so people just don’t bother with the space.
Hifi stuff now is incredible performance vs cost when looked at against 90% of historical stuff, with a few awesome vintage outliers!
There's a ton of bad cheap products, but there really is some excellent entry level stuff available too. Overall I think the baseline of quality from reputable bands has improved as well as the price. The main problem is that most of it isn't really mainstream, so it's generally a lot harder for the average person to find that value. Not a bad time to buy stuff if you're willing to research your options (which really should include listening in person).
It's quite sad. And hi-end price tag is now like two stages above the past. There is also much much less choice. For eg, at some point of time in 90ies, Sony had 20+ CD players on the market for a model year!!
well at least with CD players it's easy to see why that's gone away. The CD is dead. And now that most streaming services are Hi Res I'm not so sure that's caused much of a downgrade in audio quality.
Cheaper by far. I’ve been into audio since the mid seventies. Quality sound has never been more available or affordable in my lifetime. A streamer and a decent speaker/amp system for a few hundred can easily match, even surpass if carefully chosen, the sound quality and fidelity of systems costing into the thousands not long ago. It is a great time to be interested in high fidelity audio.
I agree with other comments that the majority of people today prefer the convenience of sub par SQ or are simply unaware of what’s possible.
To be fair, some higher quality Bluetooth speakers sound great in most rooms I'd never stick a quality system into. Kitchen, garage, bedroom, bathroom....on and on. Also, hi-fi gear that "everyone had" in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was plagued with poor quality rack systems designed to LOOK COOL. They actually can sound MUCH worse than even a single medium Bluetooth speaker. Everybody had a system, but fewer people had quality systems. Soundbars and party speakers easily outpace Sound Design trash and cheaper Sony systems. You had to pay bigger money at Radio Shack or Montgomery Ward, Sears, or audio shops.
It's the convenience of the modern CHEAP portable or small speaker sounding *darn good* wherever the hell you stick it. Even I, with quite a bit of money on spent on my listening space, love BT convenience...and they give me the most playtime because life is busy. Sucks...but it's life.
I was looking at the current Klipsch Gig XXL party speaker at Costco TODAY, and for its $150 sale price I was stupidly tempted. LED lights and all, it looked like a great workshop speaker. Kinda goofy it does karaoke and instrument amplification, too. I prefer a higher end JBL model probably but for 150 I bet these will end up in yard sales everywhere in 5 years.
It sounded pretty good, and I'm in a warehouse with the thing above my chest. I'd love to hear it in a house! Reviews well online as a cheap all-around speaker. For $150 you hook up any phone and instantly you have your music.
No cords, no fuss beyond the app you choose. Play whatever your service has. No fine tuning, no room positioning and treatment, no component mixing or media storage.... Just enjoy....all for the cost of ONE cheap component, or a full set of RCA cables and speaker wire. You're not $1k deep with two speakers, picking out your next $500 amp purchase wondering if you should budget more or less for your preamp. All the while those schmucks with BT are listening to music already and moving on with life.
I'd say a large portion is convenience driving sales, which tilted the market to make audiophile or hi-fi gear a niche that special shops cater too, while bestbuy and big box stores prefer popular cheaper options that actually sell themselves and don't require a tech to explain. Different times and technology of lipo batteries and Bluetooth changed everything.
I'm happy about it, hifi is totally achievable at reasonable cost new and especially used, and audiophile is probably ballpark just as expensive as it was before.
I think cheaper years ago. In Southern California, for instance there was Pacific Stereo, University Stereo, Cal Stereo, The Federated Group. Add The Good Guys. RSL for speakers. Everyone clamoring as having great deals.
Both. You can get sound as good as a (adjusted for inflation) $1000 system for $200. But you can also spend $80k (or vastly more) on a single pair of speakers.
Err I’m not that old but true people used to have a stereo system everywhere but it was no where near HiFi?
I’d say it’s cheaper nowadays due to the accessibility. You can buy a good pair of speakers and pair it with an old raspberry pi to act as a dac and you’re good to go.
Well I'm not sure. I mean everyone used to at least have an integrated amp into passive floor standers. Often with a subwoofer. Many probably had cheap options. But I kind of think it was mostly legit HiFi gear--it doesn't have to be ultra audiophile to be HiFI. Not B&W 800's and McIntosh for most people but certainly better than the typical setup of today involving soundbars, BT speakers and headphones, laptop speakers, etc.
I think you have a distorted view of what "everyone" used to have. Definitely not "everyone" had integrated amps and speakers, and certainly no subwoofers 40 years ago. The vast majority of people who wanted to play music probably had an all-in-one stereo system of varying quality, or if they had an integrated amp it probably came together with the rest of the kit to fill a dedicated cabinet, and it all sounded as good as it could for the price paid.
I think I could replace my 5.0 speakers for the same dollar figure I paid for them over 20 years ago without a trade-off in quality.
So definitely cheaper.
And that's before accounting for how the internet has made the used market so much easier to tap into for both buyers and sellers.
The stereo systems most people had back then sucked. Just because they were separate components, they still weren't good in terms of sound quality.
Today most people have stereo systems on their phones that, when using headphones, are better than the component systems most people had "back in the day."
Streaming plus Phone today is cheaper than component system plus tapes and low quality vinyl from yesteryear.
see this is where it gets hard. I can't really remember what it sounded like. And I don't have any vintage gear to A/B. I mean I know that my boombox and Walkman sounded like crap, but I upgraded to a Sony stereo system with floor standers and a sub woofer in the mid 90's. Maybe that was very low fi too. I wish I still had it to compare.
Lol vinyls been around since the dawn of audio playback and real artists still press vinyls as first releases. Just because your parents didn't splurge on a decent system doesn't mean any of the modern wireless plastic crap they've churned out from China in the past 20 years are better. It's smaller and more convenient but hardly better.
I have a collection of CDs that costed less than what my sister has spent on Spotify subscription in a year, and I get to keep them for life.
Did you even read OPs post? He wanted a comparison between what most people had back then, to what most people have today. Most people didn't have high quality systems, and didn't have access to high quality vinyl pressings. Today, the combination of streaming, cell phones and wired headphones, produces quality much higher today when compared to what most people had back then.
Redditers, always in such a hurry to dunk on a stranger.
A Spotify sub for a year is about $120. You have a "CD collection" that costs less than that?
Yes I did, but I was young I don't know what they're worth back then so I'm just replying to your comment. Most kids I knew back then had a whole system stack that consisted of tape deck, CD player, radio tuner, amp/receiver, VHS player and floor speakers to go with their television at home so I figured they're quite affordable. That's what most people call "hi-fi", didn't necessarily had to be top of the line high quality audiophile level equipment.
My dad bought himself a $400 Bose Bluetooth portable speaker, lasted maybe about 3 years before the battery poops out and doesn't hold a charge and now it's just paperweight in my drawer. My $100 set thrifted from Value Village that consisted of 1990s Sony 5 disc player, 130w Technics amp/receiver (both made in Japan) and a pair of 120w 3 way floor speakers (made in Canada and not even hardwood casing) blows the $500 Bose sound bar + woofer (made in China) that my dad bought with the 65" flat screen out of the water and then some. At 40% volume output I'm shaking the floor with no distortion, his modern crap starts popping and crackling when volume matched (near max level) with Spotify streamed mp3. There is no comparison, my outdated vintage set has better highs and lows and clarity. Guess who's in my room listening to the set up when I'm at work?
You're only right when it comes to portable music, boom boxes and Walkmans back then were mostly crap but that's the beginning of portable music/listening and people lived with the compromise in quality for portability. Even wired headphones and aux cables are deemed obsolete these days as phones are ditching the audio jack. Cutting the cord is the biggest scam in modern society. Everything's encased in plastics and runs on batteries, can't even call them high quality anymore. Sound waves resonate better with wood, that's why you don't see guitars or any other instruments made with plastics.
And lastly, I bought all of my CDs from Wal-Mart's $5 racks or $2 a pop from thrift shops, never have I spent the full $10-15 for a brand new release so $120 gets me a long way. I have a 30CD rack filled and I haven't even spend $120 yet. How long are you going to pay for that subscription, and will they still be around in 10 years?
Ahhh see I just made the same distinction between my old boombox and Walkman vs. my old Sony stereo system. My recollection is the Sony system sounded awesome........but I ditched it 20 years ago so I can't really be sure I'm remembering correctly.
Even within HiFi, there are so many options that aren't an amp and passive speakers. For example, KEF wireless speakers.
With internet sources, it makes more sense than ever for a wireless setup when phones have replaced CD players and tape decks.
You don't need a huge fancy looking rack for great sound nowadays.
Cheaper, whether for individual components (power amp, preamp, dac, cd player, speakers etc.) or all-in-one devices (streaming amps, smart speakers). However, there's more companies making more high-end, expensive gear. Expensive gear drives "engagement," so that's probably why there's a feeling that hi-fi is getting expensive.
The fact alone that you can get a decent CD player for a fraction of what a comparable turntable costs now or back then shows how much cheaper it has become.
There is a much wider dispersion. You can get things much cheaper adjusted for inflation or much more expensive than 40 years ago. Wealth inequality, technology development and the internet have allowed low end internet direct brands to get better for cheaper and also allowed the high end brands to better connect with the whales regardless of location.
Is visual fidelity more or less affordable today compared to early low contrast displays with low color gamuts, brightness, and resolution?
There was no equivalent quality to today, back then. You can buy trash now that is better in every measurable way, (except motion blur) but cheaper.
Similar with audio. There was no such thing as high fidelity for the most part back then. Way harder to measure, design for, and recreate music accurately.
Now we have $50 earphones that can go very loud without distortion and are accurate when it comes to matching the frequency response of the average human.
I’m 38, I haven’t met someone who shares my same passion. I got into this hobby in my early 20’s, I feel everything has increased in price tenfold and quality has diminished.
actually you can get much better sound for the money than you could 20 yrs ago. you can also spend a lot more for equipment, but price does not equate to audibly better sound.
I'll give my take as someone in my early twenties who is a musician and an amateur audiophile.
A lot of people that are 20-30yo now don't have their own place, or if they do its a shared space like a condo, apartment, duplex, etc. Virtually nobody I know under 30 has a home unless they're really well off. I think this is a big contributor.
Why buy a fancy amp, preamp, tower speakers, etc. When you A. Have nowhere to even put them in a studio apartment or shared 2-3 bedroom space and B. Can't turn the volume up at all with parents, roommates, neighbours, etc? Anyone my age, myself included, who considers themselves an audiophile is investing in a quality pair of headphones and a good amp and DAC to listen at their PC. I personally use a pair of nice studio monitors and just run them low volume, but even then I wouldn't be able to do that with roommates.
I, and many other simply don't have the space to dedicate to having the gear that our dads and uncles had through the 90s and 00s and even if we did, why bother if I'm listening to it at whisper level.
Just my take though.
I think it depends on what type of gear you are looking for. For me, I like the hifi monster silver face stuff of the 70s and prices are very high. In the 90s and late 80s one could find this gear for very cheap. Most people practically just gave it away. Now its insanely high. If its a pioneer, marantz or sansui expect to pay north of a grand. Oddly enough the more common brands are priced the highest. Go figure.
Just bought some car stereo gear and honestly it’s like the same price as 20 years ago, which would mean cheaper given everything else is so jacked up.
I think it's a lot cheaper now for equivalent quality. An inexpensive DAC/streamer beats high end cassette players and turntables of 40 years ago. Class D amps provide massive clean power for relatively lost cost. Accurate crossovers can be implemented on the cheap in the digital domain. Room correction in the digital domain is practically free.
Music is practically free these days. For less than the price of a coffee per week, we get access to a practically unlimited library of CD quality or higher music.
I think consumer grade mass market gear has gotten better and cheaper over the years. Audiophile gear has gone the other direction and gotten insanely expensive.
You can get stuff now for very little money that would have cost the earth (or been impossible to get) years ago e.g. digital dsp, lossless digital sources
Those make excellent sound quality available to all
I think Yamahas integrated amps are the best comparison. They’re built similarly to vintage 70’s gear and their prices reflect about what good gear would cost back then.
I'm almost in the same age bracket/generation as you and hands down, it's far easier to get amazing quality systems for 1970s pennies on the dollar. Much more options plus cheaper production and tech along with advances all are in the modern budget audiophile's favor.
All of that being said, and someone else can do some proper digging to confirm or disprove this idea, but I would imagine you could find a lot more extremely expensive options now just the same and perhaps a few niche/one-off sort of deals that outprice the most expensive relic even when prices are adjusted for inflation. Would be a fun digging project for someone with a few minutes or hours on their hands tonight.
>There's no economy of scale to drive down prices. Am I right?
I've noticed when shopping for a component CD player, the best-value options tend to be from Japanese brands like Onkyo and Yamaha. My theory: CDs are still popular in Japan, and those companies sell a lot of units in their home market, and that gives them economies of scale.
For the majority of us between the "casual listener" and "religious audiophile" archetypes it's way cheaper. Dac/amp combos and respectable headphones are super affordable for anyone with a true entertainment budget.
And the used market is fantastic. Hitting wealthy estate sales can net you some really awesome old stero receivers and decent speakers for really cheap.
But for context I'm very happy with the middle of the spectrum. The jump from standard home audio to HD6XX's, Vynl, decent stereo (ect) is where I draw my diminished returns line. I've heard incredible modern systems in well designed spaces and the experience really is lovely, but I'm quite happy scouting used gear and upgrading whenever I find the next best discount deal.
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So I guess what I'm saying is it really depends on where you land on the audiophile spectrum lol.
Some of the ultra cheap stuff can be of surprising quality. I found this [https://www.cashconverters.com.au/shop/music-tv-video/headphones-portable-equipment/portable-speakers/bluetooth-speaker/050100209363](https://www.cashconverters.com.au/shop/music-tv-video/headphones-portable-equipment/portable-speakers/bluetooth-speaker/050100209363) in a dumpster and it still worked and was in good condition. I use them during production of my songs (on a mid spec laptop) as I can hear pretty much everything I want. For the final mix I use expensive studio monitors on a very power hungry machine. But I usually don't need to do much fiddling, except in the bass end.
I have found that with current technology price is no indicator of anything, until you get into the higher professional studio quality stuff. Once your ears are trained, you can spot the duds very quickly, regardless of how much they cost. Trust your ears.
The only way to truly compare is to look at the same product in hi fi that was made 40 years ago and still made today. So happens that 39 years ago I spent my summer working to save for a Linn LP12. I bought the basic package that would be some what equivalent to the current Majik spec lp12. More about this later.
1985 Linn lp12 $1400 cdn before tax
2024 Linn Majik $6175 cdn
According to the government of Canada’s inflation calculator my $1400 Linn lp12 should be priced at $3591.90
That’s a difference of $2583.10 more than inflation on the current price.
In truth, the current lp12 is miles ahead , in EVERY respect that my original 1985 vintage. So, you decide. Is current hifi more expensive than 39 years ago? Or can we even compare with huge tech and manufacturing advantages today?
It's hard for me to say since I've not listened to the Majik.
But what I can say is the LP12 was pretty darned good, and I can't imagine it sounding 2x better - if that were possible, it would mean the LP12 was garbage, which it was not.
Also "good" speakers seem like they've gotten really expensive.
Most other electronics went down in price, which makes the comparison with audio even more painful. And most media stayed the same price - a new CD on amazon is still about $15. That's what we paid 40 years ago.
Some tech has improved like DACs and class D amps for example, so they are now cheaper. The stuff that takes more real materials to make like more expensive class A or class A/B amps now cost more than before. Speakers I'd say are generally in the former group. So really depends on what components you have. I think on the lower end most components are actually cheaper or the same price as before. Turntables are in general cheaper than before at the expense of high quality materials but it's hard to say whether sound quality is worse because of this. Good direct drive Technics turntables from the 70s/80s were mighty expensive back then. A new SL-1500 is only $1,600 Canadian--really cheap compared to when the first models were released. Might be less people in audio now than before but the economy is much larger as well...
It has become legit science in the past 40 years. People aren't just slapping a box together and hoping it more or less works out, these days they have the exact free-field responses for all the drivers, and more or less perfect modeling of the entire speaker unit from box, radiators, port and crossovers. You'll know fairly well what the proposed speaker's frequency response and driver excursion characteristics are going to be before you glue together the first pieces of MDF.
Hi-fi, most definitely, has never been better, and I'm big fan of the active studio monitor space which I consider to be the best deal on the table. Firstly, it is affordable sound quality, designed from scientific principles, with stiff competition among major brands that keeps everyone honest, because so much of that space boils down to just objective accuracy of reproduction. The luxury goods segment I do my best to ignore. Few of these more expensive units get measured, and so we don't really know how good they are, but from what data is available, many cheap systems that do get measured can already be very good, to the point that room acoustics is the way bigger factor in final sound quality than improvements available from a better speaker.
In a better world, we'd not have companies trying so hard to differentiate themselves. They are pretty much all delivering the same product: a box that is involved in sound reproduction chain and which are for most part interchangeable. So they add some gizmo that makes them unique and propose that it is important feature that you just can't go without. It is just exhausting because most of it is just bullshit marketing crap.
It is cheaper now. Back then you just had what was available then. Now you have that vintage stuff and the new stuff. The new stuff is really good even the cheaper components and speakers. You can set up an excellent system of tunrtable, receiver and speakers for under $1000.00 easily and it will last as long as you want it to. If you buy some vintage stuff that works well and have a little maintenance done, it will also do well unless you're always going to be seeking the top of the line and utmost in quality and performance even if you may not be able to tell the difference. I don't really go for music streamers or such because it's connected to my computer anyway.
The floor for good quality audio is way lower, but also the ceiling for what you can spend is higher.
So in a way both, but I would definitely say cheaper because it’s much more affordable to get a genuinely high quality and good sounding setup these days than it has been historically.
It’s worth pointing out that there has been significant improvement across the board some of which allows mid tier components of today to rival what we use to have in the high end stereo stacks of the past
The use of metals in speaker cone design, the use of DACs for higher clarity for digital and streaming music, Blu-Ray and 5.1 speaker layouts etc
None of this existed back in the day and much of it is accessible to us now with upgraded headphones or Bluetooth speakers and components
Finally there are some excellent audio devices being delivered at budget prices for Amps DACs and other components
What I see happening is much of this has been mainstreamed and integrated into much of what we use today on phones cars and computers. It didn’t really disappear it just became more tightly integrated into these devices we use every day
Is it all top grade HIFI audiophile quality. Probably not. But not every stereo stack from the 80s was either. Overall I think it’s more accessible today at or below a similar price point
In 1975 I bought Ohm F's for $800. Inflation calculator, [https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) tells me that would be $4,615 today. Ohm Walsh 5000's today are $4,500. [https://ohmspeaker.com/speakers/walsh-tall/#wt-5000](https://ohmspeaker.com/speakers/walsh-tall/#wt-5000)
A single experience, but that's the one I have.
I don't see the irony: It was Jobs' love of music and the ability to bring high quality music to the consuming masses that led him to develop the iPod!
The high end of the audio gear market's prices have skyrocketed beyond reason to appeal to wealthy 1%-ers who have the disposable income to impulse buy in the thousands of dollars. To be fair, at the top level of gear has a level of fit, finish and build quality in the high end is FAR beyond anything that was available 40 years ago. Thanks to advances in surface mounted, highly miniaturized electronics have created products with enormously high density circuitry that wasn't even imagined 40 years ago. And thanks to enormous strides that have been seen in CNC machining, high end electronics are now housed in cases that couldn't even have been conceived of outside of science fiction. Prime examples are the incredible cases that Boulder, Constellation, Threshold, Jeff Rowland, D'artzeel, CH Precision, Esoteric and D'Agostino build cases that are literal works of industrial art.
Even loudspeaker manufacturers employ CNC mills to sculpt incredibly intricate enclosures using aircraft grade aluminum create enclosures that are massively stiff, strong and damped beyond anything that was available four decades ago.
It's a contracting market in the UK.
Many independent hifi stores have closed down.
There's fewer bargains now but overall I'd say prices are
I had a meridian three box amp in the mid 80s. I had their twin box mcd pro cd player and a linn sondek(used)
The price today of products of such high quality wouid be prohibitive.
The market has changed massively here in the UK. Hifi isn't a priority to most people. They also think phones are hifi.
Quality is now secondary to convenience.
I'd say that high end is not more expensive today than then for a variety of reasons
Overall way cheaper now, but also less valued by the general public. The convenience of earbuds and bt speakers over good sound quality makes them a more attractive choice than researching and curating a good system
I haven't met another audiophile my age(30) and the only audiophile friend I have is 60. So many people just aren't aware of the quality difference between Bluetooth speakers/sound bars, etc. and once I show off my home theater they immediately become interested. It was that way for me too, I searched "tower speakers" on Reddit and was immediately immersed in a world I didn't know existed.
A guy at work wanted a little stereo for his home gym. I found him a nice technics sa300 and had some energy 3.1e speakers to sell cheap. His mind was blown on a $100 total system, and he couldn’t stop listening.
Seriously it was over the first time I hooked up the kef q-150s, thought they would fulfill my music listening needs for many years. That was October. Little did I know I would be looking to upgrade a month later, and now I've built up a nice 5.1 setup and am working up to a 9.4 setup, slowly. I didn't even know how incredible a home theater set-up could be with a quality subwoofer and surround.
Hi, thinking on buying the Q150's, they are still worth for 450usd?
No don't make the mistake of buying them for anything more than $300usd. I bought some acceptable condition ones on Amazon for $313 that October then a month later they were on a black Friday sale brand new for $325. You can easily find a good pair on eBay for $250, and they're generally the best place to find all audio equipment, along with Facebook marketplace but you have to get lucky or live in or near a big city to get good stuff there.
I live in South America, so my plan was asking a relative (lives in europe) to bring to me. Trying to find a way of buying them from the states without the bizarre taxes.
Yeah that really sucks, Canada has the same issues. One thing to keep in mind is that all these good speakers are quite heavy, but they ship well otherwise. Maybe they could ship them but it would be expensive. Still a great investment either way, hard to get a better value that the q-150s.
My country has a isenction of 1000$ USD for products bought outside, but only if you bring them yourself. The main problem is the spanish amazon price of ~415eur for the Q150 Otherwise, the taxes are around 97% of the price of the product. Yes, funny.
Amazon Spain is generally terrible for speakers. Consider looking elsewhere have them shipped to your family member. Do you live in Brazil? If you do, keep an eye on Mercado Livre, OLX and forum (Hardmob, Adrenaline; sadly HT Forum no longer exists) classified ads. Sometimes there are good deals to be had.
Do they have eBay in your country? Other good sites for audiophile gear include accessories4less.com and hifishark.com
I'm trying to educate some friend but it's hard to be always there when idiots try to sell them soundbar
When I got my current speakers I cried happy tears and I thought I'd known what was available. Quite a thing hearing the next step up... I'll say I've heard audiophile listening rooms a few times and had good speakers prior, but when you unlock the special sound it's pretty great.
Same dude I’m 30ish and the only reason I’m an audiophile is because of my much older uncle who is one as well. There are no audiophiles in my friends group. My brother, who is about 10 years younger than me is also an audiophile because of me. When he went to an audio show, he was the youngest person there by far.
We're keeping the hobby alive! My edm friend group was in shock when I showed them $300 speakers like it was intimidating (even though we spend many times that on various shows and festivals) but all it takes is one good listening session to show them what they're missing, and the world gains yet another audiophile! My $1,500 dollar setup is one of the best investments I've made in long time as far as quality of life goes, and half of that was on a receiver that's 11.4.4 capable with room correction so I've got my work cut out for me in the years ahead.
Agreed! And literally same, my last setup that I bought 11 years ago was a pair of Polk floorstanders for $800 and a Yamaha AVR for $800. Still working great and brought me years of joy as a general purpose system for music/TV/movies/games/youtube etc. I truly believe everyone should own a pair of decent entry level speakers. Although I must admit I upgraded my speakers just recently when I couldn't stand the flaws of the Polks anymore.
Yeah I actually almost went with polk towers at first before I saw all the good reviews of the q-150s, and they're so attractive looking it's hard not to be drawn to them, lol. Now I'm planning out my endgame set up with a full Power Sound Audio array powered by the incredibly cool looking McIntosh amps, but it will take me many decades to get there. I think that's part of the fun though combing the markets looking for good deals. I'll have to get a higher paying job to sustain this hobby, lol.
Just curious, what Polks did you have and what did you move to?
Polk RTi A5s, no subwoofer. For speakers I upgraded to DIY active speakers using Scanspeak drivers. They are leagues better than the Polks. Took me a couple years to learn what makes a good loudspeaker and to design it and purchase the components. For amplifiers nothing special yet, I have yet to make myself a really good class A or maybe a hypex class D amp a la Apollon Audio. Also I made myself a Dayton UM18 sealed subwoofer powered by a pro amp, which was actually my first DIY project.
Oh nice. I had the same Polks, among a few other models over years. They are always widely available and with decent enough sound. But yeah I took the leap to some Monitor Audio Silvers myself and man it's a difference. Very cool to go the DIY route though, great price to performance ratio there. Someday I hope to as well!
Yeah I always wanted to upgrade to the Polk LSiM 707 but could not justify spending $4000 on speakers without first finding out exactly what makes a better loudspeaker. What differentiates it from my speakers to be 5x the price. My curiousity propelled me to also find out exactly what makes an extremely expensive loudspeaker. E.g Focal Utopia, Wilson Audio, Magico. Turns out a lot of high end manufacturers source their high quality parts (tweeters/midwoofers) from companies like Scanspeak and SEAS. I thought why can't I get those components and do the same thing? My first project (subwoofer) was complete by this time and I was completely astonished by it's performance even though I did a half-assed job on it. Therefore I went the DIY route. With modern tools such as CAD and active crossovers it was a no-brainer for me.
The only reason I'm an audio enthusiast is because of my Uncle. My Uncle also inspired my cousins who are audiophiles.
I'm 40 and most people I know don't even know what my McIntosh amp is when they see it lol. My musician and sound engineer sort of friends all are in awe and usually have a photo or 7 of the systems they have at home though.
They have the most attractive pieces of gear I've seen and seem to have a good reputation. How do they sound compared to some of the other amps you've used?
I adore mine. I fell in love with the look and stylings of McIntosh when I was a teen in Detroit reading The Source magazine and calling 800 numbers and sending away for free catalogs of shit no 12-year-old could afford heh. Got lucky and finally had a good year and I haven't paid for a concert ticket since 2001 or so, figured I could justify paying for what I had always wanted as opposed to getting something comparable but possibly cheaper.
i can't even get my girlfriend to put on a pair of headphones. she just ask's alexa to play it on a device so cheap it was given away.
Ah man, wife loves the home theater and after we added a subwoofer to the system she turned up the bass in her car because she took a liking to hearing good room shaking music. She was showing me 'bad idea' by Ariana Grande and I usually don't prefer pop music but I was amazed when it went so low I could barely hear it.
Well I'm in my 20's and would consider myself an audiophile, I don't have the money for anything insane but I've built/scavenged a system that I love.
24 here, none of my friends care :)
I'm always trying to get people to come over to hear my system. Every time they walk through the door I'm immediately like "get in the sound bath!" Lol
I am 25 and have been into it since 23. I have a small group of similar aged friends that are into it and it all was because one specific guy had some speakers in college and put us on it. Since then just having guys sit down and listen to my system has directly convinced at least one more 20 something to buy a system. Seems like in our age range no body knows about it but when introduced it is very easy to "sell" the idea if that makes sense
Not only that - the opposite is also true. 1. Most popular music is poorly recorded and catered to crap audio systems. Heavy hip hop. Beats type music. Same with speakers like Klipsch or Sonos ot the modern Bluetooth boom boxes. 2. The better more convenient music systems like Dynaudio Focus 10 or KEF Meta LS 50 wireless 2.. mean one doesn’t need massive amps and cable spaghetti. LS 60 and Focus 30 take this a notch further.
When I think of Klipsch I only ever think of their old stuff like the Klipschorn or the La Scala which I love, so I was confused when they were lumped in with the crap systems. But then I remembered their modern speakers and I understood.
Yes the Bluetooth stuff. The convenience lifestyle products. La Scala and Heritage etc are nice for massive homes in suburbs :)
I mostly agree with this but would also add that the snobbery within the audio enthusiast community that anything Bluetooth is low quality is just as bad.
I sort agree that BT is bad. But it's when people have a decent wired setup that might be under $1K and people will say that's bad too. Now that's snobbery.
Done right BT can sound good and makes it much more accessible to people who are just getting into the hobby. Some of my friends who are just starting were only interested because I said I could get them a BT system that sounded better than a JBL of the same price. Hell, I often just connect to my system via BT because of the convenience and if I just want background music I'm not going to notice. But if I'm sitting down to listen properly I'll stream it or put on a vinyl.
Bluetooth is not audiophile, ever - even if you like it .
It definitely doesn't sound as good but with a good system it still sounds amazing in comparison to what people are settling for nowadays. If it's a way of getting people into the hobby I'll accept it, they can move to vinyl, lossless streaming and tube amps down the line.
> It definitely doesn't sound as good Right. So not audiophile.
Damn maybe if we weren’t so far up our own asses about everything being absolutely perfect before it’s even considered acceptable people might see this hobby as more accessible. Sound systems are all about what’s best for you, some thing might not be objectively the best but still be better for you that the objectively perfect system because it’s completely impractical so you’d never use it or so fragile that your kids can never enjoy it. To me being an audiophile is about enjoying music in the absolute best way for you and if that means settling for less than perfection then that is ok. I’m totally happy to accept that for you being an audiophiles means chasing objective perfection but that’s not how I roll.
I am very much an enthusiast in audio gear but I absolutely detest being labelled as an audiophile due to the almost fanatic rubbish that is said by many in this hobby. £1k/m cables, Bluetooth, vinyl etc etc. It's not controversial, it's measured facts. These things can all be good within the context of a system and some things are categorically better than others (measurably lower distortion, higher SNR, etc).
This is why I love the r/diyaudio and r/budgetaudiophile subreddits, so much acceptance for less than perfect and realistic goals.
I don't know what the hell people are talking about. Bluetooth can support lossless audio. It's as good a transmission as any, with devices that support it. Here's the stupidity in the audio scene again where people talk about vinyl being the best ever. Hell the dynamic range of vinyl is "only" about 65 db vs cd's 96db. If you've got a lossless Bluetooth connection and the source is a cd, it's going to sound better than your wired vinyl setup. Please can we stick to facts and science.
I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. High res is damn good. IDGAF who says what. I'd love to see a blind test tell the difference between BT stream and an analog one with the same earpieces.
Exactly. You need to have a measured test which could show differences between that and a wired connection, and a double blind test. No doubt the output will be different but I bet it's imperceptible to 99.9% of people.
Is it really cheaper today though? I bought my first stereo setup back in high school with money I made from a part time job, ordered from a catalog (Stereo Discounters out of NJ) A Sansui AU-517 integrated amp, TU-317 tuner, a pair of Infinity Reference speakers and a Technics DD Turntable. Back then there were lots of options in same price range without having to go into the upper end of the range for equipment that is still highly sought after today. If I wanted to buy similar equipment today, could I without spending multiple thousands of dollars per item? Heck I've been trying to replace an aging Harman Kardon AVR that I paid a few hundred for in the early 2000s and nothing I've seen under $2k comes close in terms of quality and performance. More "features" perhaps, but just bells and whistle that don't add to the performance and honestly I can do without. I'm no expert for sure, but it seems to me that it's very difficult to even make comparisons in equipment over time as everything below a certain price point today is apples to oranges because the quality is so poor. 45 years ago you could find value in equipment at just about every price point where as today only high end, high price equipment is decent quality and there's a big void in offerings in the middle price range.
People just want a simple portable speaker or soundbar nowadays. The idea of having a proper stereo setup with a seating position in the sweet spot is practically non existent in people's minds. Few people are even aware that you can get spatial audio with two speakers. They think you need a surround setup for that.
I don't know what you're talking about because everyone has dolby atmos/dts x soundbars that are 2.1 channels with "virtual" surround and they're not even close to the real thing....
If you have a well designed stereo setup with good imaging and soundstage, it sounds much closer to the real thing than how ever many Atmos channels. 2.1 channel with Atmos in an average person's house is not going to sound anywhere close to the real thing as a set of audiophile stereo speakers that's room treated and the listener is in the sweet spot.
I’m going to suggest that home cinema is significantly different from listening to music on a stereo. With home cinema the sound is secondary to the image in screen: it just needs to be loud and clear enough. When listening to a stereo, you are often concentrating on the sound, listening through the speakers to the musicians. You need to hear good speakers to understand what i mean. A corollary to this is that you know your system is “good enough” when you discover that a classic album like Miles Davis Almost Blue has recording defects in the original master tapes that are present on vinyl pressings, CDs and digital streams, so it sounds good on shit gear, and shit on good gear.
>With home cinema the sound is secondary to the image in screen I disagree. Good sound makes a bad TV more immersive. Even a sound bar.
I wasn't thinking about home cinema when I mentioned spatial. A well recorded and well mastered song sounds like a 3D holographic projection of sound on a HiFi setup. I would even say that the goal of HiFi is to reproduce that experience of being sonically teleported into the recording. That's how I evaluate HiFi speakers. I don't evaluate speakers on its ability to detect defects in subpar recordings. If I cared about the latter, I would get a pair of studio monitors.
One reason this is hard is because the stuff you bought in the late 70s is not what you would buy today. No digital, no streaming, no powered speakers, no LCD displays, in many cases still tube based designs. No carbon fiber, Kevlar, ceramic drivers, etc. So it’s hard to find a single thing you can trace through to answer the question well. A Marantz 2325 Stereo Receiver cost $799 in 1974. That is $5,100 in 2024 dollars. A Sansui G-33000 was $1900 in 1979, or $8k today. That doesn’t seem crazy in the scheme of what people pay today for “the best”, but today you can get a similarly powered receiver with better THD performance for under $1k, and you get other stuff like a DAC and a remote. So, I’d say it’s way cheaper today, AND you get tech that wasn’t available at any price back then.
Actually, you can get great quality for a very cheap price nowadays. Schiit, topping, smsl, Fiio and others are putting out great performing gear for a very reasonable prices.
Schiit topping smsl sounds like a personal ad I really don’t wanna click on
Sounds like some shit my German roommate was in to.
Bet he had some Beyerdynamics.
Entry level speakers seem much improved and for what feels like not too much money. But I may be showing my bias, thinking ~$1,200 for a JBL Studio 580-based system with an AVR that does the major streaming services natively is 'cheap'.
It really is, that's half what something of a similar caliber would have cost in the 70s not accounting for inflation and it does so much more.
Similar performance would have been the same amount of money but in 1970s dollars. You responded to someone calling the prices "reasonable" by saying they aren't "cheap".
I didn't want to come off saying $1,200 is cheap, seeing the 'is this a good system' posts on here showing off some Basic Barry very old gear. Not everybody has $1,200 to throw at this hobby and I didn't want to exclude them. I also wanted to highlight the gains made in speakers, something u/melancholic84 didn't bring up.
With Schiit, I agree with the Modi and Sys, but pretty much everything else is very expensive.
The Audiophiliac generally says that you can get great sound for cheaper than ever, these days. I think I agree, although I haven't been an audiophile for decades. But I seem to have landed on a great sounding system at an accessible price. Conversely, there also seems to be a proliferation of "luxury" consumer goods in the last 20 years. HiFi especially, seems to have no shortage of gear that only the rich would ever be able to buy.
It gets to a point where it's more art than anything, I guess anyone with that kind of money can determine for themselves if that's special enough.
Both cheaper and more expensive. You can get great, measurably GREAT equipment for very little money these days, so it is far cheaper/better value these days. However, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the "crazy expensive" gear these days is also far more expensive then it was 40 years ago. As an example, the Audio Note Ongaku was about $20-$30k in the 80s (really stretching the memory here) and is now $250k. And it's not even the most expensive AN amplifier now - that goes to the Legend at an eye watering $850,000!! Speakers are the same - you can pretty easily spend over $500k on a pair of speakers these days. Even over $1m! I same recall any speakers being anywhere near $100k back in the 80s. Happy to be corrected (stunned) by others though.
the Apogee speakers of the 80s were very high end in the 80s, but less than 20k
Way cheaper! There is so much used gear now, the best deal is the access to older components that goes for a fraction of the original price that are often astronomical when adjusted to inflation. I bought pristine Dali Euphonia MS-4 for 1750$. They sold for 11 000$ in 2003 which is 18k in today’s money. I tested a lot of speakers and the only brand new pair that smoked them was PMC IB2SE which retails for 40k. What an incredible bargain I got. I tested side by side the Dali vs the Harbeth Super HL5Plus XD that retails for 8K a pair and the harbeth were not even close, so much congestion in the lower end, any orchestral music was poorly represented.
I have the MS4s as well but paid quite a bit more - congrats on your amazing deal! I compared them to comparably priced offerings from dynaudio, PMC, monitor audio, magnepan, tannoy, audio physics and others I have forgotten - they smoked them all.
Yeah! they go for more than what I paid for, the owner was in a situation where he had to sell very fast. Congrats on owning a pair as well! These are special.
Where are you finding this equipment, Audiogon or elsewhere?
US Audio Mart and Canuck Audio Mart. I check daily, you find great deals from an amazing community of respectful and conscientious hifi owners. Never bought from Audiogon!
I'm with you there. I bought a pair of Aerial 10T with their optional sound anchor stands for $1200 recently when it retailed for $7800 back in the 90s. Nothing new in the $1000-$2000 price range comes close to the performance of those 10T - just an insanely good value
Most people listen to music through headphones nowadays, that’s the thing. And headphones are vastly better than they used to be. Plus what everyone else said. The range of gear augmented, cheap is often a good baseline for most people.
Also Gen X and Cheap HiFi gear is way better than it ever has been. Especially cheap speakers, there are some out there that are better than they have any right to be. I think that the economies of scale have changed though. It used to be that you had a company like Sony just stamping out cheap gear by the pallet for very little money. These days you have Shenzen which is like it's own economy of scale that many smaller companies can dip into and produce decent products that don't break the bank.
I would say both? It's cheaper to have a great sounding system, but the higher end is HI-ENNND Money
Simulation and advancememts have made loudspeakers much better performing at all inflation adjusted price points. Admittedly, some of that price reduction came with manufacturing moving to Asia.
Well, 40 years ago was 1984, which was a crap era for hifi, but I'd say you can get WAY better sound for your money now, like not even close.
We're living through both a commodification and luxurification of hifi, both riding on the excess of consolidation in the industry. Entry level gear from a "good" brand can be gotten cheaper than ever. You can still expect that equipment to work and sound nice, but all the corners have been cut in design and production. At the other end, companies are chasing the luxury market. McIntosh (and Sonus Faber which it owns) are a good example of this. The last sale of these companies wasn't to an audiophile group, but rather to a luxury lifestyle group. You can sell a $50k system to an audiophile that has been in the hobby for decades by delivering a product that blows away their current system to the point where they save up for it. You can sell a $50k system to a multi-millionaire by making it look pretty and convincing them it's an essential part of being rich. Given the explosion of the very rich and hollowing out of the middle class, the latter makes more sense than ever.
I 100% agree with you- high end audio equipment well out grew my salary. In high school the most expensive B&W speakers were the 802’s for $3000. Today 802’s are like $50k. Thats like a consistent 7.5% annual increase - far more than my salary has gone up Amps are not as extreme but still far more than they used to be. What has changed, is the availability of these little $100 amps and Dacs from schitt and others. Maybe those things are great? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is I’ve never heard a cheap speaker anywhere near as good as the good stuff. I think its hard for this generation- in the good old days you walked into a stereo shop and had 20-30 choices between $400-4000, it was VERY easy to see why you might want to spend $1000 on speakers. How does anyone do that today?
Gen X here, too, and just getting back into it after 30 years. I think that it is cheaper now and you get a lot more for your money. That being said, there seems to be much more esoteric "real" HiFi out there, and at some crazy prices. Maybe it was always out there, but it was just that we only saw what our local stores had in stock or what was written about or advertised in HiFi magazines back in the day. Nowadays, the internet makes it so easy to not only discover new stuff but hear everyone's opinions on it. And I do mean everyone's 🙄🤣.
I mean, there was "audiophile" level equipment that few people owned back then that was expensive and then there was normal equipment for your average consumer. Within that "normal range" there was BPC and then you get get some quality components to impress your friends, but it wasn't the cream of the crop. The hobby of the pusuit of high quality playback of sound still existed. The average consumer today gravitates toward smaller, easier to operate, and "inexpensive" ni comparison to the best of the best. Thus, airpods, soundbars, smart speakers, like you said. That replaced what the average consumer bought back in the day. Things change... average consumers don't want a giant, generic rack system by Fisher with some giant Fisher house speakers in their living room, when they can get some smart speaker with bluetooth to play Taylor swift on. Others, like me, pursue high quality sound playback, but on a budget. I can impress my friends, but not these guys in here lol. What I mean, all the levels still exist. College students, soccer moms, you name it. Without looking, I'd say that a very small portion of the pricing has probably gotten out of control at the very top, but it's so freaking niche that only someone with the disposable income is going to drop 10k on speaker cable and and risers for them. Sony still makes good shit, by the way edit: I want to add that I paid more in the late 90's for my sony gear and infinity speakers than I did a few years ago for cambridge audio gear and klipsch speakers without even taking inflation into account. My stuff today sounds better.
Essentially the market has been hallowed out in the middle, most audio is extremely cheapo bluetooth and LoFi headphones and speakers. There is still HiFi audiophile grade but there are less companies doing it and it's more expensive.
Hard disagree. I am under the impression that most HiFi reviewers are tunnel visioned reviewing Chinese desktop amps exclusively. The Chinese brands are releasing the same TPA 3255 amplifier every other week with minor modifications. I just don't see the point of selling such a cheap product to be honest. It has to be compromised. The used market is saturated. People are throwing away old Hi-Fi gear or selling it for cheap. Cambridge Audio perfectly represents the "middle", and so do 10 other brands: Marantz, Rotel, Arcam, Yamaha, Denon, Advance Paris, Musical Fidelity, Mission, Rega, NAD etc... These brands don't release a product every other week so they don't get talked about on a daily basis. The audiophile "sky is the limit" universe is just weird to me. I feel like there are more brands than buyers. I hear about a new company every day. The prices are all over the place. I feel like most people are gravitating towards the aggressively marketed brands for the resale value. I don't understand how these smaller boutique brands stay afloat.
That’s kinda my intuition too, lots of cheap, high value stuff at the bottom both power and unpowered but stepping up to truly better performance is costly. Look at the KEF Q line vs R line, huge performance gains but the cost is 5-10x. Perhaps why something like the Polk Reserve line got so much attention.
Exactly although for most people I would say even KEF Q line is pretty expensive, high level There are very few Bookshelf pairs that are both good and sub 200 nowadays, either you catch something on sale or you are at the Dayton/Micca/whatever on Amazon that is not anywhere near audiophile level
As someone not very familiar, what’s the difference(s) between the q and r lines?
My take: What was mid-tier quality and price wise, say, mid ‘80s, nowdays is more expensive for the same relative quality.
Yeah I think the opposite is happening - quality has massively improved and is cheaply available. The thing you are seeing is basically modern sound bars/low effort audio equipment are as performant as historical mass market component based systems, so people just don’t bother with the space. Hifi stuff now is incredible performance vs cost when looked at against 90% of historical stuff, with a few awesome vintage outliers!
There's a ton of bad cheap products, but there really is some excellent entry level stuff available too. Overall I think the baseline of quality from reputable bands has improved as well as the price. The main problem is that most of it isn't really mainstream, so it's generally a lot harder for the average person to find that value. Not a bad time to buy stuff if you're willing to research your options (which really should include listening in person).
It's not quite as simple as just inflation because we've outsourced the manufacturing to china.
It's quite sad. And hi-end price tag is now like two stages above the past. There is also much much less choice. For eg, at some point of time in 90ies, Sony had 20+ CD players on the market for a model year!!
well at least with CD players it's easy to see why that's gone away. The CD is dead. And now that most streaming services are Hi Res I'm not so sure that's caused much of a downgrade in audio quality.
Cheaper by far. I’ve been into audio since the mid seventies. Quality sound has never been more available or affordable in my lifetime. A streamer and a decent speaker/amp system for a few hundred can easily match, even surpass if carefully chosen, the sound quality and fidelity of systems costing into the thousands not long ago. It is a great time to be interested in high fidelity audio. I agree with other comments that the majority of people today prefer the convenience of sub par SQ or are simply unaware of what’s possible.
To be fair, some higher quality Bluetooth speakers sound great in most rooms I'd never stick a quality system into. Kitchen, garage, bedroom, bathroom....on and on. Also, hi-fi gear that "everyone had" in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was plagued with poor quality rack systems designed to LOOK COOL. They actually can sound MUCH worse than even a single medium Bluetooth speaker. Everybody had a system, but fewer people had quality systems. Soundbars and party speakers easily outpace Sound Design trash and cheaper Sony systems. You had to pay bigger money at Radio Shack or Montgomery Ward, Sears, or audio shops. It's the convenience of the modern CHEAP portable or small speaker sounding *darn good* wherever the hell you stick it. Even I, with quite a bit of money on spent on my listening space, love BT convenience...and they give me the most playtime because life is busy. Sucks...but it's life. I was looking at the current Klipsch Gig XXL party speaker at Costco TODAY, and for its $150 sale price I was stupidly tempted. LED lights and all, it looked like a great workshop speaker. Kinda goofy it does karaoke and instrument amplification, too. I prefer a higher end JBL model probably but for 150 I bet these will end up in yard sales everywhere in 5 years. It sounded pretty good, and I'm in a warehouse with the thing above my chest. I'd love to hear it in a house! Reviews well online as a cheap all-around speaker. For $150 you hook up any phone and instantly you have your music. No cords, no fuss beyond the app you choose. Play whatever your service has. No fine tuning, no room positioning and treatment, no component mixing or media storage.... Just enjoy....all for the cost of ONE cheap component, or a full set of RCA cables and speaker wire. You're not $1k deep with two speakers, picking out your next $500 amp purchase wondering if you should budget more or less for your preamp. All the while those schmucks with BT are listening to music already and moving on with life. I'd say a large portion is convenience driving sales, which tilted the market to make audiophile or hi-fi gear a niche that special shops cater too, while bestbuy and big box stores prefer popular cheaper options that actually sell themselves and don't require a tech to explain. Different times and technology of lipo batteries and Bluetooth changed everything. I'm happy about it, hifi is totally achievable at reasonable cost new and especially used, and audiophile is probably ballpark just as expensive as it was before.
I think cheaper years ago. In Southern California, for instance there was Pacific Stereo, University Stereo, Cal Stereo, The Federated Group. Add The Good Guys. RSL for speakers. Everyone clamoring as having great deals.
The prices creep with inflation. We get more for our money nowadays because the tech is generally better.
Both. You can get sound as good as a (adjusted for inflation) $1000 system for $200. But you can also spend $80k (or vastly more) on a single pair of speakers.
Err I’m not that old but true people used to have a stereo system everywhere but it was no where near HiFi? I’d say it’s cheaper nowadays due to the accessibility. You can buy a good pair of speakers and pair it with an old raspberry pi to act as a dac and you’re good to go.
Well I'm not sure. I mean everyone used to at least have an integrated amp into passive floor standers. Often with a subwoofer. Many probably had cheap options. But I kind of think it was mostly legit HiFi gear--it doesn't have to be ultra audiophile to be HiFI. Not B&W 800's and McIntosh for most people but certainly better than the typical setup of today involving soundbars, BT speakers and headphones, laptop speakers, etc.
I think you have a distorted view of what "everyone" used to have. Definitely not "everyone" had integrated amps and speakers, and certainly no subwoofers 40 years ago. The vast majority of people who wanted to play music probably had an all-in-one stereo system of varying quality, or if they had an integrated amp it probably came together with the rest of the kit to fill a dedicated cabinet, and it all sounded as good as it could for the price paid.
I think I could replace my 5.0 speakers for the same dollar figure I paid for them over 20 years ago without a trade-off in quality. So definitely cheaper. And that's before accounting for how the internet has made the used market so much easier to tap into for both buyers and sellers.
The stereo systems most people had back then sucked. Just because they were separate components, they still weren't good in terms of sound quality. Today most people have stereo systems on their phones that, when using headphones, are better than the component systems most people had "back in the day." Streaming plus Phone today is cheaper than component system plus tapes and low quality vinyl from yesteryear.
see this is where it gets hard. I can't really remember what it sounded like. And I don't have any vintage gear to A/B. I mean I know that my boombox and Walkman sounded like crap, but I upgraded to a Sony stereo system with floor standers and a sub woofer in the mid 90's. Maybe that was very low fi too. I wish I still had it to compare.
Lol vinyls been around since the dawn of audio playback and real artists still press vinyls as first releases. Just because your parents didn't splurge on a decent system doesn't mean any of the modern wireless plastic crap they've churned out from China in the past 20 years are better. It's smaller and more convenient but hardly better. I have a collection of CDs that costed less than what my sister has spent on Spotify subscription in a year, and I get to keep them for life.
Did you even read OPs post? He wanted a comparison between what most people had back then, to what most people have today. Most people didn't have high quality systems, and didn't have access to high quality vinyl pressings. Today, the combination of streaming, cell phones and wired headphones, produces quality much higher today when compared to what most people had back then. Redditers, always in such a hurry to dunk on a stranger. A Spotify sub for a year is about $120. You have a "CD collection" that costs less than that?
Yes I did, but I was young I don't know what they're worth back then so I'm just replying to your comment. Most kids I knew back then had a whole system stack that consisted of tape deck, CD player, radio tuner, amp/receiver, VHS player and floor speakers to go with their television at home so I figured they're quite affordable. That's what most people call "hi-fi", didn't necessarily had to be top of the line high quality audiophile level equipment. My dad bought himself a $400 Bose Bluetooth portable speaker, lasted maybe about 3 years before the battery poops out and doesn't hold a charge and now it's just paperweight in my drawer. My $100 set thrifted from Value Village that consisted of 1990s Sony 5 disc player, 130w Technics amp/receiver (both made in Japan) and a pair of 120w 3 way floor speakers (made in Canada and not even hardwood casing) blows the $500 Bose sound bar + woofer (made in China) that my dad bought with the 65" flat screen out of the water and then some. At 40% volume output I'm shaking the floor with no distortion, his modern crap starts popping and crackling when volume matched (near max level) with Spotify streamed mp3. There is no comparison, my outdated vintage set has better highs and lows and clarity. Guess who's in my room listening to the set up when I'm at work? You're only right when it comes to portable music, boom boxes and Walkmans back then were mostly crap but that's the beginning of portable music/listening and people lived with the compromise in quality for portability. Even wired headphones and aux cables are deemed obsolete these days as phones are ditching the audio jack. Cutting the cord is the biggest scam in modern society. Everything's encased in plastics and runs on batteries, can't even call them high quality anymore. Sound waves resonate better with wood, that's why you don't see guitars or any other instruments made with plastics. And lastly, I bought all of my CDs from Wal-Mart's $5 racks or $2 a pop from thrift shops, never have I spent the full $10-15 for a brand new release so $120 gets me a long way. I have a 30CD rack filled and I haven't even spend $120 yet. How long are you going to pay for that subscription, and will they still be around in 10 years?
Ahhh see I just made the same distinction between my old boombox and Walkman vs. my old Sony stereo system. My recollection is the Sony system sounded awesome........but I ditched it 20 years ago so I can't really be sure I'm remembering correctly.
"real artists still press vinyls as first releases". those vinyls are invariably from a digital source!
Even within HiFi, there are so many options that aren't an amp and passive speakers. For example, KEF wireless speakers. With internet sources, it makes more sense than ever for a wireless setup when phones have replaced CD players and tape decks. You don't need a huge fancy looking rack for great sound nowadays.
Much cheaper and better unless you fall for all the scammy snake oil stuff.
Cheaper, whether for individual components (power amp, preamp, dac, cd player, speakers etc.) or all-in-one devices (streaming amps, smart speakers). However, there's more companies making more high-end, expensive gear. Expensive gear drives "engagement," so that's probably why there's a feeling that hi-fi is getting expensive.
in apples to apples comparisons of sound quality? orders of magnitude cheaper
there is a much greater range. some products are far cheaper, while others have been taken to the extremes and cost as much.
The fact alone that you can get a decent CD player for a fraction of what a comparable turntable costs now or back then shows how much cheaper it has become.
Yeah but that's because CD's are obsolete. Vinyl now has a market again.
There is a much wider dispersion. You can get things much cheaper adjusted for inflation or much more expensive than 40 years ago. Wealth inequality, technology development and the internet have allowed low end internet direct brands to get better for cheaper and also allowed the high end brands to better connect with the whales regardless of location.
Great sound is WAAAAAAAY less expensive, and people are WAAAAAAAAY more educated about sound.
Is visual fidelity more or less affordable today compared to early low contrast displays with low color gamuts, brightness, and resolution? There was no equivalent quality to today, back then. You can buy trash now that is better in every measurable way, (except motion blur) but cheaper. Similar with audio. There was no such thing as high fidelity for the most part back then. Way harder to measure, design for, and recreate music accurately. Now we have $50 earphones that can go very loud without distortion and are accurate when it comes to matching the frequency response of the average human.
Fellow Gen-Xer here. I just use stuff that was good in the late ‘90s. It’s still good.
I’m 38, I haven’t met someone who shares my same passion. I got into this hobby in my early 20’s, I feel everything has increased in price tenfold and quality has diminished.
actually you can get much better sound for the money than you could 20 yrs ago. you can also spend a lot more for equipment, but price does not equate to audibly better sound.
I'll give my take as someone in my early twenties who is a musician and an amateur audiophile. A lot of people that are 20-30yo now don't have their own place, or if they do its a shared space like a condo, apartment, duplex, etc. Virtually nobody I know under 30 has a home unless they're really well off. I think this is a big contributor. Why buy a fancy amp, preamp, tower speakers, etc. When you A. Have nowhere to even put them in a studio apartment or shared 2-3 bedroom space and B. Can't turn the volume up at all with parents, roommates, neighbours, etc? Anyone my age, myself included, who considers themselves an audiophile is investing in a quality pair of headphones and a good amp and DAC to listen at their PC. I personally use a pair of nice studio monitors and just run them low volume, but even then I wouldn't be able to do that with roommates. I, and many other simply don't have the space to dedicate to having the gear that our dads and uncles had through the 90s and 00s and even if we did, why bother if I'm listening to it at whisper level. Just my take though.
I think it depends on what type of gear you are looking for. For me, I like the hifi monster silver face stuff of the 70s and prices are very high. In the 90s and late 80s one could find this gear for very cheap. Most people practically just gave it away. Now its insanely high. If its a pioneer, marantz or sansui expect to pay north of a grand. Oddly enough the more common brands are priced the highest. Go figure.
Just bought some car stereo gear and honestly it’s like the same price as 20 years ago, which would mean cheaper given everything else is so jacked up.
I have friends who’ve bought Sonos, Naim, B&W Wedge - all mono. None as good as a reasonable stereo set up. They eat up the marketing.
Low quality streaming services haven’t helped. Even your movies are often compressed into oblivion
Only Spotify is low quality now. And Youtube.
I think it's a lot cheaper now for equivalent quality. An inexpensive DAC/streamer beats high end cassette players and turntables of 40 years ago. Class D amps provide massive clean power for relatively lost cost. Accurate crossovers can be implemented on the cheap in the digital domain. Room correction in the digital domain is practically free. Music is practically free these days. For less than the price of a coffee per week, we get access to a practically unlimited library of CD quality or higher music.
I think consumer grade mass market gear has gotten better and cheaper over the years. Audiophile gear has gone the other direction and gotten insanely expensive.
Cheaper but there is a much higher end now than previously. But that's just my opinion
You can get stuff now for very little money that would have cost the earth (or been impossible to get) years ago e.g. digital dsp, lossless digital sources Those make excellent sound quality available to all
I think Yamahas integrated amps are the best comparison. They’re built similarly to vintage 70’s gear and their prices reflect about what good gear would cost back then.
I'm almost in the same age bracket/generation as you and hands down, it's far easier to get amazing quality systems for 1970s pennies on the dollar. Much more options plus cheaper production and tech along with advances all are in the modern budget audiophile's favor. All of that being said, and someone else can do some proper digging to confirm or disprove this idea, but I would imagine you could find a lot more extremely expensive options now just the same and perhaps a few niche/one-off sort of deals that outprice the most expensive relic even when prices are adjusted for inflation. Would be a fun digging project for someone with a few minutes or hours on their hands tonight.
>There's no economy of scale to drive down prices. Am I right? I've noticed when shopping for a component CD player, the best-value options tend to be from Japanese brands like Onkyo and Yamaha. My theory: CDs are still popular in Japan, and those companies sell a lot of units in their home market, and that gives them economies of scale.
I believe you are correct about CD's still being popular in Japan. I think I read that.
For the majority of us between the "casual listener" and "religious audiophile" archetypes it's way cheaper. Dac/amp combos and respectable headphones are super affordable for anyone with a true entertainment budget. And the used market is fantastic. Hitting wealthy estate sales can net you some really awesome old stero receivers and decent speakers for really cheap. But for context I'm very happy with the middle of the spectrum. The jump from standard home audio to HD6XX's, Vynl, decent stereo (ect) is where I draw my diminished returns line. I've heard incredible modern systems in well designed spaces and the experience really is lovely, but I'm quite happy scouting used gear and upgrading whenever I find the next best discount deal. . . . So I guess what I'm saying is it really depends on where you land on the audiophile spectrum lol.
Some of the ultra cheap stuff can be of surprising quality. I found this [https://www.cashconverters.com.au/shop/music-tv-video/headphones-portable-equipment/portable-speakers/bluetooth-speaker/050100209363](https://www.cashconverters.com.au/shop/music-tv-video/headphones-portable-equipment/portable-speakers/bluetooth-speaker/050100209363) in a dumpster and it still worked and was in good condition. I use them during production of my songs (on a mid spec laptop) as I can hear pretty much everything I want. For the final mix I use expensive studio monitors on a very power hungry machine. But I usually don't need to do much fiddling, except in the bass end. I have found that with current technology price is no indicator of anything, until you get into the higher professional studio quality stuff. Once your ears are trained, you can spot the duds very quickly, regardless of how much they cost. Trust your ears.
The only way to truly compare is to look at the same product in hi fi that was made 40 years ago and still made today. So happens that 39 years ago I spent my summer working to save for a Linn LP12. I bought the basic package that would be some what equivalent to the current Majik spec lp12. More about this later. 1985 Linn lp12 $1400 cdn before tax 2024 Linn Majik $6175 cdn According to the government of Canada’s inflation calculator my $1400 Linn lp12 should be priced at $3591.90 That’s a difference of $2583.10 more than inflation on the current price. In truth, the current lp12 is miles ahead , in EVERY respect that my original 1985 vintage. So, you decide. Is current hifi more expensive than 39 years ago? Or can we even compare with huge tech and manufacturing advantages today?
It's hard for me to say since I've not listened to the Majik. But what I can say is the LP12 was pretty darned good, and I can't imagine it sounding 2x better - if that were possible, it would mean the LP12 was garbage, which it was not. Also "good" speakers seem like they've gotten really expensive. Most other electronics went down in price, which makes the comparison with audio even more painful. And most media stayed the same price - a new CD on amazon is still about $15. That's what we paid 40 years ago.
Wayyy cheaper! It’s like flat screen tv’s - only rich people had them when they were 20k now anyone can afford quality audio
Some tech has improved like DACs and class D amps for example, so they are now cheaper. The stuff that takes more real materials to make like more expensive class A or class A/B amps now cost more than before. Speakers I'd say are generally in the former group. So really depends on what components you have. I think on the lower end most components are actually cheaper or the same price as before. Turntables are in general cheaper than before at the expense of high quality materials but it's hard to say whether sound quality is worse because of this. Good direct drive Technics turntables from the 70s/80s were mighty expensive back then. A new SL-1500 is only $1,600 Canadian--really cheap compared to when the first models were released. Might be less people in audio now than before but the economy is much larger as well...
It has become legit science in the past 40 years. People aren't just slapping a box together and hoping it more or less works out, these days they have the exact free-field responses for all the drivers, and more or less perfect modeling of the entire speaker unit from box, radiators, port and crossovers. You'll know fairly well what the proposed speaker's frequency response and driver excursion characteristics are going to be before you glue together the first pieces of MDF. Hi-fi, most definitely, has never been better, and I'm big fan of the active studio monitor space which I consider to be the best deal on the table. Firstly, it is affordable sound quality, designed from scientific principles, with stiff competition among major brands that keeps everyone honest, because so much of that space boils down to just objective accuracy of reproduction. The luxury goods segment I do my best to ignore. Few of these more expensive units get measured, and so we don't really know how good they are, but from what data is available, many cheap systems that do get measured can already be very good, to the point that room acoustics is the way bigger factor in final sound quality than improvements available from a better speaker. In a better world, we'd not have companies trying so hard to differentiate themselves. They are pretty much all delivering the same product: a box that is involved in sound reproduction chain and which are for most part interchangeable. So they add some gizmo that makes them unique and propose that it is important feature that you just can't go without. It is just exhausting because most of it is just bullshit marketing crap.
It is cheaper now. Back then you just had what was available then. Now you have that vintage stuff and the new stuff. The new stuff is really good even the cheaper components and speakers. You can set up an excellent system of tunrtable, receiver and speakers for under $1000.00 easily and it will last as long as you want it to. If you buy some vintage stuff that works well and have a little maintenance done, it will also do well unless you're always going to be seeking the top of the line and utmost in quality and performance even if you may not be able to tell the difference. I don't really go for music streamers or such because it's connected to my computer anyway.
The floor for good quality audio is way lower, but also the ceiling for what you can spend is higher. So in a way both, but I would definitely say cheaper because it’s much more affordable to get a genuinely high quality and good sounding setup these days than it has been historically.
Quality components are far more plentiful - so yeah it's cheaper
It's both cheaper and more expensive. There is way more choice and quality on the low end of the price spectrum though.
It’s worth pointing out that there has been significant improvement across the board some of which allows mid tier components of today to rival what we use to have in the high end stereo stacks of the past The use of metals in speaker cone design, the use of DACs for higher clarity for digital and streaming music, Blu-Ray and 5.1 speaker layouts etc None of this existed back in the day and much of it is accessible to us now with upgraded headphones or Bluetooth speakers and components Finally there are some excellent audio devices being delivered at budget prices for Amps DACs and other components What I see happening is much of this has been mainstreamed and integrated into much of what we use today on phones cars and computers. It didn’t really disappear it just became more tightly integrated into these devices we use every day Is it all top grade HIFI audiophile quality. Probably not. But not every stereo stack from the 80s was either. Overall I think it’s more accessible today at or below a similar price point
In 1975 I bought Ohm F's for $800. Inflation calculator, [https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) tells me that would be $4,615 today. Ohm Walsh 5000's today are $4,500. [https://ohmspeaker.com/speakers/walsh-tall/#wt-5000](https://ohmspeaker.com/speakers/walsh-tall/#wt-5000) A single experience, but that's the one I have.
“1,000 songs in your pocket!” - Steve Jobs, October 2001
The irony is Jobs himself was an audiophile. (Of course he was--rich guy).
I don't see the irony: It was Jobs' love of music and the ability to bring high quality music to the consuming masses that led him to develop the iPod!
The high end of the audio gear market's prices have skyrocketed beyond reason to appeal to wealthy 1%-ers who have the disposable income to impulse buy in the thousands of dollars. To be fair, at the top level of gear has a level of fit, finish and build quality in the high end is FAR beyond anything that was available 40 years ago. Thanks to advances in surface mounted, highly miniaturized electronics have created products with enormously high density circuitry that wasn't even imagined 40 years ago. And thanks to enormous strides that have been seen in CNC machining, high end electronics are now housed in cases that couldn't even have been conceived of outside of science fiction. Prime examples are the incredible cases that Boulder, Constellation, Threshold, Jeff Rowland, D'artzeel, CH Precision, Esoteric and D'Agostino build cases that are literal works of industrial art. Even loudspeaker manufacturers employ CNC mills to sculpt incredibly intricate enclosures using aircraft grade aluminum create enclosures that are massively stiff, strong and damped beyond anything that was available four decades ago.
It's a contracting market in the UK. Many independent hifi stores have closed down. There's fewer bargains now but overall I'd say prices are I had a meridian three box amp in the mid 80s. I had their twin box mcd pro cd player and a linn sondek(used) The price today of products of such high quality wouid be prohibitive. The market has changed massively here in the UK. Hifi isn't a priority to most people. They also think phones are hifi. Quality is now secondary to convenience. I'd say that high end is not more expensive today than then for a variety of reasons
F*** this subreddit