I noticed when skimming through their blog for the RMAF that he said he'd never seen so many young people at one of these things. So I got to wondering about that (and he stated some reasons in another section--see the external link for that part of the blog).I consider myself fairly young, under 40, for the hi-fi group. One thing as a younger person that I've noticed is that a lot of the music played, at least at LSAF, is either some sort of classical, jazz, or "world" music. I own a lot of this myself, but I can tell you that I am in the minority for my age when listening to it. Granted it makes the system show it's stuff, but most of the younger crowd isn't going to be listening to it. Whenever I've brought in Texas blues or some sort of rock, I always feel like the system owners are "put out" by having to put this "junk" on their system. Maybe because the recording isn't up to snuff. Well folks, if the music I bring can't sound at least decent on your system, why would I buy any of it. And I'm not going to limit my buying selections to just perfectly recorded music either. Maybe there's lots more rooms that play this kind of music at RMAF, I don't know as I've never been there.
And of course there are the other issues such as the astronomical prices of some of the equipment. Not so much at LSAF, but even there much of it is out of my expense acct.'s range. But I understand why some of the equipment costs what it does there, and most of it is not out of line for the product you would get. But I don't know many people, not any of my friends or family, that could afford to go drop $4-5K or more on a system. That's a pretty good chunk of money to drop, or even save for myself. I mean if I had the money a pair of Duke's Dreammakers would be sitting in my living room right now
I'm sure there are other things I can't think of right now, but thanks for letting me ramble.