General Asylum

RE: hobby

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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: hobby posted by digda_beat on April 17, 2017 at 17:12:06

I get your point, and agree. My reply was to the OP, where he wrote:

"I often feel like quality audio is a dying hobby." Etc.

I don't think it ever was a hobby, except to a very tiny percentage of the population. Rather, quality audio continues to evolve from the console stereos of the 1960s, to the component stereos of the 1970s and 80s to the home theater and mega-buck components of the 90s through today.

In fact, I've read more about high end, and even mid end, stereo as a "hobby" in the past 10 years than I ever did before. Sure, the proliferation of hi-fi magazines was huge in the 70s and into the 80s, but that was more because of the fact that it was the "new thing" and everybody and their dog was buying a component stereo system, rather than it being a hobby. Think back 15-20 years (That's 1997-2002 for folks in Rio Linda): How many people had cell phones? Today, the advertising is everywhere, and every big box store has a cell phone DEPARTMENT. That doesn't make the buyers "hobbyists", although some of them are app-addicts.

The component stereo market is saturated, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a store which has more than about a dozen integrated amps and receivers on display, whereas, in the 70s, when I was selling stereo, it was easy to find multiple stores that had 20-40 such products on the shelf! But that's a new product category/sales/demand thingy, not a "hobby" thingy.

I don't believe that "high quality audio hobbyists" are any fewer or more than 30 years ago. I believe that the vast majority of people bought a component stereo system because it was the flat screen/cellphone/tablet/earbud/Netflix of the day - not because they were hobbyists.

:)

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