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Follow the money?

I haven't been very active in recent years, but when I emerged from under a rock to get my Bryston 6B SST repaired after 13 years in place I was happy to find them pretty much unchanged. I've followed photography much more closely than audio these past few years, and that is definitely an industry experiencing an epic collapse. One of my favourite commentators, Thom Hogan, often uses the collapse of high end audio as a warning. Yet it occurs to me that to my knowledge audio journalists have never really documented this alleged collapse or even approached a quantification and parsing of the market they are involved with. This is in very sharp contrast to photographic journalism which often sports graphs showing parsed (point and shoot, mirrorless, DSLR) shipments over the past several years by unit and by dollar.

Anyway, my agenda is not to beat up on audio journalism - I haven't been following closely enough for that - but to ask whether I'm missing some cogent analysis on this topic, or whether there are insurmountable difficulties I'm overlooking. My guiding assumption has been that high end audio - just like the DSLR - may die with the baby boomers. That it has no place in a world dominated by instant gratification, portability and social media. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.


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Topic - Follow the money? - Jim Pearce 07:53:14 07/02/16 (34)

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