Audio

Hey

good points!

i totally feel you! ^^ I'm not really that much of an audiophile guy, but i know exactly what you mean!
i would say, it's just about the demands of these days... and with these lowered demands with the newer generations, the music totally has not the same level of quality, like in the 80's for example! i mean, i like the music from these days too, but if you focus just on quality and lyrics, there's a whole gap between them...

but the same manner is visible almost everywhere!
i'm more the "movie guy", so let's take look at this section too...
the television programs for an example - i think, about 15 years ago, there were a lot of good movies to watch on the usual television channels. you definitely had no need to go for paytv...but now, there's trash tv almost everywhere... each show gets more worse than the last one and you are really start trying to get the meaning of life, while watching people eating ***** in a jungle for some fame / bucks! smh...

the conclusion: if you are a person, who likes good movies, you have to get them on bluray, or watch them on netflix / itunes / whatever. otherwise you suffer brain damage in the fastest way...

so, keeping that in mind, i would say, that with each generation, the whole demand thing is getting lower...

i don't think this is just a "men thing", but obviously, the most people interested in tech / sound quality / ... are men, i would agree...

it's not a demand thing ('these lowered demands' mr. condescending). how to demand something when there's no true and serious info on anything, just advertisement and paid for propaganda, and only garbage and faker-y to choose from? the industries answer: 'oh we rather spend money on marketing than invest and produce good quality products'. now i'm gonna listen to frankie's 'two tribes' extended version @ 45rpm... on a side note: the female millenials will save us old, mostly male, fools, if and when we let them.

Well, there's a lot of new resp. modern music out there with top-notch production. I'd even say that most of todays music generally sounds better than the average 80's production. Yes, there have been perfectly mixed records since the 60's but there were a lot of great records with questionable production (a lot of metal from the 80's for example, or no justice for all by metallica...). I'm not a fan of the "wall of sound" or the "loudness war" but that seems to be getting better (fingers crossed!).

As for your other point: Being an audiophile comes with a lot of expenses (expensive amp, expensive speakers, treated room, expensive turntable, and so on). Since "older" people usually have more money, it's only logical that you can find more audiophiles amongst them, isn't it? No clue why they are mostly men, but as a studio owner and musician myself i can tell you that the music tech world is a man's world. But i'm sure that's gonna change over time!

Another sidenote: I have a nice system at home, not overly "audiophile" but close. Furthermore, I have a few studio-grade converters and monitors for mixing. So I am accustomed to "good" sound. My girlfriend, before she met me, used to listen to music throug her laptop speakers or one of those portable "boom-boxes". Now she can barely listen to music on her laptop because she thinks it sounds thin and small in comparison. And a lot of young people today are probably like her. Because they don't know any different.