WOULD YOU BELIEVE ME IF I TOLD YOU ?
My fully working and quiet refrigerator IS a 1974 General Electric !!!
The only thing it needs is a new compressor switching relay 😀
I find this quite astonishing!
My fully working and quiet refrigerator IS a 1974 General Electric !!!
The only thing it needs is a new compressor switching relay 😀
I find this quite astonishing!
I (born 1997 in Germany) can’t complain, I grew up with my mums big stereo in the living room and got my first stereo and turntable when I was 8. Two of my friends also had acquired some turntables, speakers and amps so we got to listen to a lot of different music from the Vinyl collection of our parents. When we hit puberty speakers got bigger and some of my friends never stopped upgrading and tinkering on their (mostly PA oriented) builds. Sometimes we meet up and make parties with at least two stages for just like 30-70 people and the fun of it. But of course sometimes friends who are not into audio will come to these events and think we’re crazy for making such an effort to have the best sound. I think that the whole streaming, Bluetooth and reduced Bitrate has led people to get too comfortable around bad sound.. maybe that happens if all you know is low Bitrate Spotify played through crappy DAC and cheap Bluetooth speaker..
I BELIEVE YOU friend,
until a week ago I had a CRT TV that lasted for 40 years and was only brought in once by a technician about twenty years ago. You might call me crazy, even my friends made fun of me but I was fond of it.
Then delivered for RAEE disposal. Now I have a flat LCD one like everyone else...
until a week ago I had a CRT TV that lasted for 40 years and was only brought in once by a technician about twenty years ago. You might call me crazy, even my friends made fun of me but I was fond of it.
Then delivered for RAEE disposal. Now I have a flat LCD one like everyone else...
I had not thought of it in that way, but that's spot-on, and chimes with my experience. There's very little curiosity left in the world. As a child, I took clocks apart (never managed to put them back together). Later, I progressed and learned how to put things back together, then how to cut and shape bits of metal, then how to design electronics, then started getting curious about the underlying physics.
Normal to us. Probably because development took off then and things were a little out of reach to many. Today everything is there and it is available.
The high end snake oil stuff is something they laugh at, that is certainly true. I think they are more realistic in what to look at. But they still buy gear and build gear. It's just in a different way than in the 20st century, more focussed on high power dj soundssytems, BT speakers and so.
Yes. 🦕
Depends what you mean by an 'audiophile'. IIRC it was an aggravating term popularised by the subjectivist magazines that seemed to take over in the '70s as audio became almost entirely consumer goods rather than the more specialised hobby it was up to the mid-late '60s. I doubt it will go away though -what's more likely to happen is that dedicated audio systems will gradually revert back to being a more specialist interest hobby, with a few straddling the middle-ground with something like Ruark's modern take on radiograms / music systems -especially with a turntable built-in or added on.
Attachments
Similar to my 25 year old son. At 20 he bought a pair of Q-Acoustics bookshelf speakers to go with a modest Pioneer A400 and a Pro-ject turntable. He now has about 100 records and buys new ones regularly, and has upgraded the speakers to a pair of little known but good Australian floorstanders.
However, despite being quite handy (he's a tradesman) he hasn't really taken an interest in the DIY side of audio. But that's fine; he can rebuild a car (or a bulldozer) and that's his specialty.
I should have stated much earlier that I think that DIY people are NOT a dying breed, but rather just a smaller sub-set now.
"The day the music died"
It was a long agony, quite a few decades after the day referred by the song.
In the 50's, most EE messed with audio, as a day job for the most fortunate, a hobby for the rest.
In the 70's, none of my classmates did audio, all of them were into TTL/CMOS/CPU: it pays better, still does.
For me, it happened during a Ramones concert: over the full 1 hour set, they used the same key, the same structure, the same progression, but they were kind enough to announce between songs "The next song is..."; so it's a different song!
The CD era brought mediocre audio for the masses, and standardized sterility for the following decades.
The digital meanies also vanquished the production side: while I acknowledge their values, remembering my days as a soundman frantically writing down and resetting the positions of thousands of knobs on the mixing desks, the end result is also that of sterilization, best illustrated here,
When the music dies, the audio dies.
It was a long agony, quite a few decades after the day referred by the song.
In the 50's, most EE messed with audio, as a day job for the most fortunate, a hobby for the rest.
In the 70's, none of my classmates did audio, all of them were into TTL/CMOS/CPU: it pays better, still does.
For me, it happened during a Ramones concert: over the full 1 hour set, they used the same key, the same structure, the same progression, but they were kind enough to announce between songs "The next song is..."; so it's a different song!
The CD era brought mediocre audio for the masses, and standardized sterility for the following decades.
The digital meanies also vanquished the production side: while I acknowledge their values, remembering my days as a soundman frantically writing down and resetting the positions of thousands of knobs on the mixing desks, the end result is also that of sterilization, best illustrated here,
When the music dies, the audio dies.
The death of Thomas Kurtz, one of the creators of the Basic computer language, reminds me also the times of the magazines at the newstand. There was a period at the end of the 80s when PC magazines overwhelmed...but they stayed aside the DIY magazines. There was a magazine where appeared together simple videogames for vic 20 / ZX spectrum and electronic circuits.
Then came the pc mods and the videogames...the graphics ( NVidia is now number one) and others...
Nowadays the videogame industry makes billions of dollars.
Probably the new/old nerds used videogames to test their PC assemblies, like we audio nerds like to pump up the volume to see eventual failures/fires.
There's a meta-material, the music, the games, that is propedeutical to the development of the system needed to play those.
I mean, technology is dead without the media inserted.
I want to be buried with the eight speakers systems that I've built.
Then came the pc mods and the videogames...the graphics ( NVidia is now number one) and others...
Nowadays the videogame industry makes billions of dollars.
Probably the new/old nerds used videogames to test their PC assemblies, like we audio nerds like to pump up the volume to see eventual failures/fires.
There's a meta-material, the music, the games, that is propedeutical to the development of the system needed to play those.
I mean, technology is dead without the media inserted.
I want to be buried with the eight speakers systems that I've built.
In fact, I was passionate about computers...at the time I had the Vic 20 and my cousin the CBM64. Many kids had one of these devices, and they were very expensive for the time. The best thing is that it was full of specialized magazines (and I bought a lot of them too) where BASIC programs for games, utilities, etc. were edited. It was compelling.
The old PCs were then outclassed and the magazines also disappeared.
Now they are collected and sought after by a niche of enthusiasts.
I wouldn't like the few audiophile magazines left on the market to end up the same way, including Audiogallery, Audioreview (just to name two from my country). A friend who is much more passionate then me in this field buys directly from America or Japan because he says he finds more informations and they are more responsive to his needs.
Can anyone tell me how the market is in the US for example?
The old PCs were then outclassed and the magazines also disappeared.
Now they are collected and sought after by a niche of enthusiasts.
I wouldn't like the few audiophile magazines left on the market to end up the same way, including Audiogallery, Audioreview (just to name two from my country). A friend who is much more passionate then me in this field buys directly from America or Japan because he says he finds more informations and they are more responsive to his needs.
Can anyone tell me how the market is in the US for example?
I would also see myself as an exception in my generation. Many younger people place more value on having a new PC, a new console or the latest iPhone than investing in a hi-fi system. Many young people today don't even know how good music can sound on a good hi-fi system. Unfortunately, we grew up with MP3s and Bose 5.1 speakers.
In recent years, many young people can no longer afford their own home and there are also high rents and little living space in urban areas.
In recent years, many young people can no longer afford their own home and there are also high rents and little living space in urban areas.
When the first digit of your two digit age is a "7" the answer is YES regardless of what sort of breed exactly you are asking about. Don't get me wrong, I hope and expect to soldier on for at least another decade, if I'm really lucky perhaps two-ish. But my "audiophile focus for the last decade has been those two little "components" hanging behind my ears that struggle to compensate for a wideband 50-ish dB loss. Without them I could hardly distinguish an audiophile power cable from no power cable at all. Anyway, gotta go...time to yell at those damn kids to get off my lawn!
I was happy when my teenage daughter was quite pleased being offered to get an amplifier and speakers in her room. Maybe she got some of my musical genes, who knows. (Myself being at her age, I got myself banned from playing "Confusion" ever again at home. Luckily my father just stored the 12" away, so it's still in my collection.)
I remember sitting in the office of the editor of la Nouvelle Revue du Son magazine in about 1988. He was telling me that DIY audio was quickly dying out because the younger generation had no need to DIY, with all the good products ready to buy. He said that earlier generations didn't have access to much that was good or affordable, so they had to hack their parents old tube radios and record players, thereby learning to DIY in the processes. By the mid 1980s, no one needed to DIY anymore to get a sound they liked.
Happy to say that he was wrong and DIY is still going strong. The Audiophile thing? Even back in the 60s, 70s and 80s when I was a lad, it was an old man's pastime. It still is, but now I'm one of the old men. 👴
I can't resist posting the scene in The Time Machine film in which Weena shows George the "talking rings"!