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Audiophile Survey [message #97495] Sat, 09 March 2024 20:39 Go to next message
smartt is currently offline  smartt
Messages: 172
Registered: March 2020
Master
To get accurate results more surveys are needed.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2023/05/audiophile-survey-early-2023-who-we-are.html#more
Re: Audiophile Survey [message #97561 is a reply to message #97495] Tue, 26 March 2024 19:12 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Madison is currently offline  Madison
Messages: 332
Registered: June 2017
Grand Master
Is that your blog, smartt? It's incredibly interesting and informative. I'm not surprised that the survey found that audiophiles are skewed towards an older demographic. Audiophiles crave the best musical experience, and that chase is expensive. No way could I have bought a collection of vinyl records, nice speakers, and other pricey gear in my 20s. Not many could.
Re: Audiophile Survey [message #97562 is a reply to message #97561] Tue, 26 March 2024 20:43 Go to previous messageGo to next message
gofar99 is currently offline  gofar99
Messages: 1945
Registered: May 2010
Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
I agree that more data is needed. A larger sample would make it easier to correlate the type of music with age group.

Good Listening
Bruce
Re: Audiophile Survey [message #97564 is a reply to message #97562] Wed, 27 March 2024 11:20 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Rusty is currently offline  Rusty
Messages: 1177
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
Illuminati (3rd Degree)
The only thing of note for me was the small percentage of analog users pursuing quality music listening. I wasn't surprised. But that never mattered for me. I've just been revolving to the music since I've been listening. Digital's fine, but for me, not sublime.
Re: Audiophile Survey [message #97566 is a reply to message #97562] Wed, 27 March 2024 11:57 Go to previous message
Wayne Parham is currently offline  Wayne Parham
Messages: 18776
Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)

I'm sure there is probably some useful information in finding the "audiophile" demographic in the 2020s but I'm not sure what it is.

I know this: I have been interested in high quality sound since I was around 16 years old, in the late 1970s. I think probably my DIY leanings came from the fact that having that desire at a young age meant I needed to find ways to get high-quality sound on a budget. But the fact that it was even possible for me to obtain high-quality sound equipment at that age is my point.

If someone did a survey of audiophiles in, say 1975 to 1980, I think it would show many audiophiles were young. There may have been more young audiophiles back then than there were older audiophiles.

There was a time - prior to the 1950s or so - that hifi sound was exotic and esoteric. It was only for a dedicated breed, a lot like being a ham radio operator. You had to have financial resources and technical expertise to even get the gear. So even being an audiophile in generations back then was rare.

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s brought more offerings, so there was more to work with at a little bit lower cost. That made "audiophile quality" systems more attainable. But even then, the quality of high-fidelity equipment was significantly better than low-cost radios, tape decks and record-players. So there was a wide range of quality levels, with a large gap between hifi and low-cost systems. That tended to give a reason to want to obtain better systems: There were more obvious benefits in the better systems and they were more available to more people.

Mid-fi in the years prior to the 1970s or so was pretty much a table radio or portable record player with practically no-fi. So if you were a young adult prior to the 1970s, you had to either get a pretty good hi-fi system, or you were settling on sound that really pretty much sucked. There really wasn't a "mid-fi" system in the 1960s and before - you either had a fairly expensive and relatively exotic hifi system, or you had sound bandwidth that wasn't much greater than a telephone.

Not so by Y2K. One could purchase an inexpensive system that wasn't audiophile quality but it was definitely better than a table radio. You weren't limited to telephone-bandwidth sound, even with an inexpensive sound system. So I think that makes younger generations less likely to spend thousands on high-end hifi equipment.

So I am wondering if the age-bias has more to do with that kind of thing - the offerings available to older generations when they were young adults - than the mere fact of age itself. I mean, one might think that boomers are more likely to be audiophiles than younger generations. Could be their natural affluence, or maybe it more because good quality sound became more reachable by the 1970s than, say, the 1940s. And then by Y2K, digital media and other technologies made mid-fi much better sounding than mid-fi in earlier decades, so maybe that's part of it too.
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