Chris writes:
When I was young, which was a long time ago, we listened to music on cheap little transistor radios. That was an external music source, and so the step up to a stereo was logical. The paradigm started to shift with the introduction of the Walkman. You listened to that through earphones. Portable music players are now ubiquitous, and they are all playing through earbuds. The logical step up is to a pair of good headphones. If I visit audio shows the demonstration rooms are full of old men, except those showing off headphones and amps for them. That attracts a much younger demographic. I suspect that the proportion of younger people who want a better sound are still moving up-market, but not into traditional speaker systems. The Hi Fi headphone forums are buzzing. Since most of us oldies listen to our systems alone it could seem odd to need to fill a whole room with sound when you could have a first-class headphone system at a fraction of the cost. For general listening the requirement is really for background music, and a Sonos type system provides that very effectively. It could be that we are looking at bringing younger people to appreciate our hobby in entirely the wrong way.
Weird confession time. I never took to headphones because when I was young, and listening alone, I always liked to dance to the music. That was difficult to do with headphones!
Bob writes:
As I have gotten back into the hobby I introduced my son to the world of audiophile music with a sound stage and better than MP3 quality simply by sitting him down one day and said “listen to this”. He immediately saw the advantage.
I gave him an old set of NHT Classic 3 speakers and with a little help from me he went out on his own and bought a relatively inexpensive Emotiva DAC/amp/preamp combo plus a Rega P1 and now sits listening to vinyl or Tidal high res streaming from his computer.
Kids just need to be shown…particularly now when memory is cheaper to buy than when an MP3 was needed to limit storage needs.
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