is hi fi dead?
Posted by: Rick Weldon on 14 April 2004
i am pleased to say that this does not seem to be the case!the proof? we have just had our first $1 million (us dollar ) month!
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by NB
Congratulation!
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by ben r
hello what lines do you sell ?
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
naim , linn , meridian , etc just a few manufacturers , products chosen for long term sound quality, value, reliability, service,we find if we stock manufacturers who meet the above it cuts down the field somewhat!
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by kid spatula
of course hifi is dead.
it went out with those big black plastic disks that grandad used to play.
it went out with those big black plastic disks that grandad used to play.
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
yes ,i suppose other good "old fashend inventions like the wheel and shaggin are dead to !
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
you leave my grandmar out of it!
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by David Dever
Says it all, really...it's about time that the specialist hi-fi manufacturers resume advertising OUTSIDE the normal hi-fi rags.
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by undertone
quote:
Originally posted by Rick Weldon:
i am pleased to say that this does not seem to be the case!the proof? we have just had our first $1 million (us dollar ) month!
Where is your store?
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
Sheffield in the republic of south Yorkshire
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by jayd
Hi-fi's alive again? Hi-fi has more lives than Elvis. Maybe it's a clone...
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by kid spatula
i was joking.
if you look at my profile you will see that i still only play shellac 78's on my 1920's hmv gramophone?
do keep up PR, capital letters are such a tired cliché.
if you look at my profile you will see that i still only play shellac 78's on my 1920's hmv gramophone?
do keep up PR, capital letters are such a tired cliché.
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by kid spatula
alberich -
i fully believe that by 2034, two global factions will have emerged - the "CAPITALISTS" and the "no capitals please" whose world views are so different that they have to wage a word war across internet bulletin boards. or did i dream that? any way, the point is... what was the point? maybe you can tell me?
ps - my name was nicked (sad but true).
i fully believe that by 2034, two global factions will have emerged - the "CAPITALISTS" and the "no capitals please" whose world views are so different that they have to wage a word war across internet bulletin boards. or did i dream that? any way, the point is... what was the point? maybe you can tell me?
ps - my name was nicked (sad but true).
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by garyi
What we consider to be 'real' hifi as a very small insular group does not tally with most of the buying public. Most of the buying public think 300 quid tops for a music centre, and like it or lump it they may very well have as much music as you, and none of it on vinyl.
CDs will no doubt deminish as more and more music goes online, people will begin to use the harddrive based music source more and more (I certainly am) and there is no getting away from this fact.
Hifi as we know it Is changing, sitting in our rooms writing on forums about how great vinyl is, is going to stand for very little to hifi business as the world changes to downloads for music.
CDs will no doubt deminish as more and more music goes online, people will begin to use the harddrive based music source more and more (I certainly am) and there is no getting away from this fact.
Hifi as we know it Is changing, sitting in our rooms writing on forums about how great vinyl is, is going to stand for very little to hifi business as the world changes to downloads for music.
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by prowla
quote:
"CAPITALISTS" and the "no capitals please"
The other day I was doing some writing exercises with my 4-year old - he had to fill in the missing last letter of some words on a page. He ended one word with a capital "N". I told him that that was wrong because it was a big "N", and he should have written a little "n". He promptly replaced it with a much smaller CAPITAL "N"!
Paul
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by kid spatula
alberich
if we don't use music improperly, how can we ever pin down jazz?
if we don't use music improperly, how can we ever pin down jazz?
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by Jude
Not dead, but the niche is definately not growing with the younger generations. I'm 24 and most of my friends care more about portabibility and ease instead of hi-fi and hi-rez. What is the point of DVA-A and SACD when the growing population is more interested in iPods and mp3s?
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by J.N.
quote:
we have just had our first $1 million (us dollar ) month!
In good old blighty - so why the $ total Rick?
The marketing pundits tell us that the two channel stereo market is shrinking at 15% per year.
Our beloved old-fashioned 'stereo' will never die - there will just be less specialist manufacturers and dealers, supporting it.
I've stated before, that my local Naim dealership is situated in an ex village school in the middle of nowhere and does good business with not one jot of interest in AV equipment.
It's even picking up some customers from other dealerships that are trying to be all things to all men and failing!
Posted on: 14 April 2004 by JamH
Personally, I don't think hi-fi is doing well at the moment.
Part of the problem is formats ... CD's were 'better' than vinyl in that they were harder to break, did not need cleaning, had remote control etc. so people bought them. [I know people can argue about most of this but I have records with scratches but all my CD's are perfect, and I am pretty careful handling records].
I do not know what you need to hear the difference between SACD/DVD-A and ordinary CD but I suspect you need quite expensive hi-fi. So I can't see people with 'three-in-ones' [or the modern day equivalent] buying them. So the equipment and disks will stay expensive. The disks don't give any real advantage to CD if you can't hear better sound [except maybe surround sound].
The use of MP3 and other types of compression is also worrying. I would not be interested in downloading muisc [for a fee] off the web if it's compressed. CD was already a compromise and this is worse.
The excitement is video and suppound sound. Obviously there are still people who want music [and I am one of them] but the numbers willing to spend lots are diminishing [IMHO] and economies of scale [really the opposite for small firms which produce small numbers of their products] are making hi-fi less available at reasonable prices.
I remember when stereo radio first arrived [it was actually after TV because I remember my father listenning to an early demonstration of stereo with one channel on the TV and one on the radio]; I also remember colour TV arriving.
The excitement now is [as I said before] video, compressed portable audio and surround sound.
Remember Intel can produce one chip for US$1billion and two for $US1billion + 50cents. If they sell two they each cost 1/2US$1billion but if they sell a million .... I suspect its somewhat the same with naim. CD players got cheap by the same route but I wonder about SACD and DVD-A.
James
Part of the problem is formats ... CD's were 'better' than vinyl in that they were harder to break, did not need cleaning, had remote control etc. so people bought them. [I know people can argue about most of this but I have records with scratches but all my CD's are perfect, and I am pretty careful handling records].
I do not know what you need to hear the difference between SACD/DVD-A and ordinary CD but I suspect you need quite expensive hi-fi. So I can't see people with 'three-in-ones' [or the modern day equivalent] buying them. So the equipment and disks will stay expensive. The disks don't give any real advantage to CD if you can't hear better sound [except maybe surround sound].
The use of MP3 and other types of compression is also worrying. I would not be interested in downloading muisc [for a fee] off the web if it's compressed. CD was already a compromise and this is worse.
The excitement is video and suppound sound. Obviously there are still people who want music [and I am one of them] but the numbers willing to spend lots are diminishing [IMHO] and economies of scale [really the opposite for small firms which produce small numbers of their products] are making hi-fi less available at reasonable prices.
I remember when stereo radio first arrived [it was actually after TV because I remember my father listenning to an early demonstration of stereo with one channel on the TV and one on the radio]; I also remember colour TV arriving.
The excitement now is [as I said before] video, compressed portable audio and surround sound.
Remember Intel can produce one chip for US$1billion and two for $US1billion + 50cents. If they sell two they each cost 1/2US$1billion but if they sell a million .... I suspect its somewhat the same with naim. CD players got cheap by the same route but I wonder about SACD and DVD-A.
James
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
hi, JN $1,000,000 looks better than £600,000 !
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by Allan Probin
Assuming the shop is open for 20 days a month that works out at about £30,000 of sales per day. Is that just HiFi ?
Allan
Allan
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by Rick Weldon
we had a couple of "large" jobs we have been working on for a while that both finished this month yes the installs were mainly hi fi.both installs have taken months of planning and hard work so the figures are a little misleading ! the point i was trying to get over is that sales and interest in good quality hifi is far from dead . back in the real world of more affordable gear we are getting more and more new customers who are into high quality music in the home they see this as a longer lasting source of enjoyment than a poor quality" fad" av system
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by o.j.
Hy there!two reasons:Not easy to find quality
music today. Zeppelin or jethro tull were known
by everybody,but the music that is well known
today by everybody is imo qualitywise not in this league,and therfore nobody wants to sit
infront of an hifisystem and listen to it.(only few people of today know quality music,compared to the past)
Second reason:Computers and the time you sit infront of that,and therefore have no time to
listen to music ,and computers educate people to look for Quantity(of what ever).Hifi is Quality.
O.J.
music today. Zeppelin or jethro tull were known
by everybody,but the music that is well known
today by everybody is imo qualitywise not in this league,and therfore nobody wants to sit
infront of an hifisystem and listen to it.(only few people of today know quality music,compared to the past)
Second reason:Computers and the time you sit infront of that,and therefore have no time to
listen to music ,and computers educate people to look for Quantity(of what ever).Hifi is Quality.
O.J.
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by Laurie Saunders
quote:
What is the point of DVA-A and SACD when the growing population is more interested in iPods and mp3s?
I agree...I`ve made this point myself on numerous occaisions
quote:
The excitement is video and suppound sound.
if so then I must be missing something.....a graph of my TV/video viewing plotted against time over the last 10 years, has negative gradient, getting steeper
Laurie S
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by undertone
A million dollars turnover in one month for an independant retailer of quality audio hardware in 2004 is a remarkable achievement, congratulations. In a world now dominated by Home-Theatre-In-A-Box, this shows that there are still people out there who appreciate the finer things in life.
A lot of people think that this industry (audio being part of the greater "consumer electronics" business) is enormous, what with mega-corporations like Sony & Philips being in every corner of the world. I recently read some statistics of worldwide annual turnover size of various consumer products sectors. Believe it or not, the disposable nappy (diapers to some) industry dwarfs the CE business by a considerable margin. When you consider what goes into a disposable nappy, and where it goes when it's full, you come to realize the hierarchy of business and audio's place in it. Makes a million in turnover in audio seem like a great accomplishment indeed.
A lot of people think that this industry (audio being part of the greater "consumer electronics" business) is enormous, what with mega-corporations like Sony & Philips being in every corner of the world. I recently read some statistics of worldwide annual turnover size of various consumer products sectors. Believe it or not, the disposable nappy (diapers to some) industry dwarfs the CE business by a considerable margin. When you consider what goes into a disposable nappy, and where it goes when it's full, you come to realize the hierarchy of business and audio's place in it. Makes a million in turnover in audio seem like a great accomplishment indeed.
Posted on: 15 April 2004 by Jeroen P
As it happens, I am in the middle of loading 100's of my CDs onto an iPod. Does this mean that I am only interested in MP3 etc? Of course not. I fully enjoy my Naim set up that I quite recently treated myself to. However, it is a case of horses for courses. When I travel (which happens very frequently) it is not very convenient to box my home equipment and take it to South Africa with me. If nothing else, they use different plugs there. An iPod allows me to enjoy my favourite music both in the air and when spending many a night in some boring hotel.
There is clearly a market for both. I would not be satisfied with the quality from an iPod when enjoying musec at home but it is a fair compromise between that or nothing.
Jeroen
There is clearly a market for both. I would not be satisfied with the quality from an iPod when enjoying musec at home but it is a fair compromise between that or nothing.
Jeroen