The New Audio Geeks

It really does bother me that few people these days are concerned about actual sound quality. At my local Best Buy, there is an entire isle dedicated to headphones with about a dozen on display and connected to a central music box. This music box makes even the best headphones sound absolutely terrible--and all of the headphones are 'trendy' styles such as Beats or Sol which have over-exaggerated highs and lows that make the listener think they're awesome.

If you ever wander in to a BB store with these boxes, go ahead and plug a set of headphones into your cell phone and play a song--you'll be amazed at the difference. They literally do not care how the headphones sound to the buyer, just how they look and how much they cost.

In the back of the store, by the musical instruments and "DJ" stuff there is another headphones display. This display has gear from companies that actually make a good product for music. Sennheiser, Pioneer, the good stuff. This section is completely abandoned and nobody cares about this stuff, which is why the section has been shrinking to make more room for Monster HDMI cables and the like.

Best Buy also has a car stereo section, which is unsurprisingly less than fantastic as well. They carry speakers that are designed with loudness in mind far before sound quality--but they'll tell you they sound great, and most consumers will listen to the expert on stereos in the blue shirt and khakis. Head units are toted as having apps and dvd players and all the gadgets, but no mention of sound quality is ever made with the units. Sure they can read the box and tell you it has a 24-bit burr-brown DAC, but they couldn't tell you what it means.

Disclaimer: I am considering Best Buy to be sort of an 'average' for consumer electronics due to its dominance on the market and with that I am only using my local store as an example. YMMV

I have a few random thoughts on this.

"convenience and mobility rule the day" This happens to everything eventually. When I see someone take salad out of a plastic bag and pour dressing on it out of a little package, I have a similar reaction.

Some people just don't care or legitimately don't know what bad sounds like. My kids were mucking with my preamp and got the tone controls all messed up. It sounded terrible, but my wife was listening to music all morning and never noticed.

I think the real downside of this trend is that it's becoming difficult to actually listen to the gear I want to buy. I live in a city of over 1 million in a part of the world where the economy is strong. There are three places left in the city that carry decent equipment. The last set of speakers I bought I ended up getting second hand so I could actually listen to them for a few minutes before deciding to buy them.

Non-audiophile people I have talked to about high end stuff are often intimidated and won't go into those higher-end audio stores.