You can blame Harry Pearson for this. Around 1980 he changed The Absolute Sound from a quirky journal wherein the reviewers listed their zodiac signs while reviewing expensive but hardly stratospherically priced audio gear and manifesting a strong preference for tubed gear over solid state. Given the state of solid state in 1980, it was IMHO a defensible position. But around the time Pearson reviewed the first iteration of the Infinity IRS (which cost an unprecedented for the day $20,000), things took a turn toward pushing Veblen priced gear. He suddenly began reviewing dozens of products like the Conrad Johnson Premier One, a $6000 300WPC tube amp, Audio Research Sp 11 for over $7000, and a host of Levinson and Krell gear none of which was priced below $5000. Eventually, a Swiss company called Goldmund produced a $25k turntable with matching radial tracking tonearm. And Infinity and Wilson pushed the price of their designs over $100k. All of it praised to the sky by Pearson and his crew of reviewers as groundbreaking stuff. By no small coincidence, TAS started simultaneously taking advertising from these self same companies. Given this was the 1980's, an era of resurgent conspicuous consumption fueled by Wall Street types with money to burn, TAS did very, very well.
It was also around this time that audio stores like Lyric HiFi in Manhatten emerged to cater to the need for high priced audio gear among the emergent new status symbol seeking audiophile class.
The aftermath has been the creation of a High End Audio establishment which pimps the idea that there exists a direct and linear relationship between the amount spent on a component and the audio quality it delivers. I don't know how many times I've walked into an audio store and said I was looking to buy, say, a power amplifier only to be asked by the sales lizard "how much was I willing to spend" which assured me he would try to sell me the maximum item fitting withing my "budget" while assuring me that anything less expensive merely "sounds pretty good for the money." Talk about damning with faint praise!
Only now, with the advent of publications like ASR, Archimago, Audio Critic, EAC, and Audioholics are these exhorbitantly priced products being subjected to rigorous analysis and it's become clear that they in no way produce magical, transcendent audio experiences. In point of fact, these analysis are revealing poor design, shoddy materials, and substandard performance with prices that bear no rational correlation with their production and development costs.
So, yeah, when it comes to audio it's both the best and worst of times. Your $10k budget can buy you a USB cable, a box'o'dirt grounding box, or a Wilson Tune Tot speaker system that grades out at 2.7 on the Harman Scale-- or it can buy you a state of the art speaker from Revel, Kef, Genelec, Neuman, Dutch & Dutch, or Kii. Your choice, so be aware and informed.
www.theabsolutesound.com
