High-tech audience catches on to hi-fi

What if a high-tech audience didn't care about high-end sound?

The Internet and digital technology have upended the music industry over the past decade or so, but high-end audio has arguably suffered an even greater blow. The industry's very raison d'être — the nitpicky pursuit of superb sound reproduction, no matter the cost or complexity — is irrelevant to many music listeners today.

People download MP3s from iTunes or websites and play them on their smartphones or laptops. They share songs with friends by e-mailing YouTube links. Sure, the music sounds flat, tinny, supercompressed; it's an audiophile's hell. But convenience and mobility rule the day.

Ken Kessler, a veteran audio journalist, summed up the industry's problems last year at an audiophile conference in Denver. Speaking to a roomful of mostly middle-aged men, he said: "In the '60s and '70s, if you opened up Esquire or Playboy and they showed a bachelor pad, there was a killer sound system in it. Now, there's an iPod dock."

Apple devices aren't losing ground with bachelors or anyone else, and soon music may exist mainly in the nebulous "cloud." Still, there is a sense that after years of near extinction, a new generation of home audiophiles is emerging to follow in the footsteps of those bachelors from decades of yore.

The Needle Doctor in St. Louis Park is seeing increased interest in its inventory of audiophile equipment, and the new customers come from a wide range of ages and backgrounds.

"People are getting educated and learning that MP3 players while in theory are good, they're not an improvement across the board," manager Ken Bowers said.

From the renewed popularity of vinyl (a trend not lost on retailers like Urban Outfitters, which now sells not just records but turntables alongside its clothing) to the sales explosion of high-end headphones like the $400 Beats by Dre, many younger music fans are seeking a listening experience that goes beyond an MP3 and a cheap pair of earbuds.

Of course, for some, the primary motivation is fashion; it's become cool to collect vinyl or wear slick headphones. But for others, there is a desire for what Charley Damski, a 24-year-old budding audiophile, called a "pure connection to the source."

Damski, who lives in Los Angeles and works at a TV animation studio, said he spent his high school years buying and burning CDs and making mixes from songs he downloaded from iTunes and file-sharing sites.

Then he heard one of his older brother's albums, "A Night at the Opera" by Queen, in 5.1 surround sound. "I remember listening to it in my room and hearing all the voices," Damski said. "I thought, 'Oh, there's another layer to this I wasn't aware of.' "

Hearing music with such outstanding sound quality was a revelatory experience, he said: "You don't know you need it until it exists."

Music as currency

If sonic quality has diminished for many in recent years, the quantity of music that people consume may be at a high. Freed of home storage constraints, digital libraries have swelled absurdly.

Dan Svizeny, a 24-year-old manager at a Philadelphia online advertising agency, recalled how his high school classmates bragged about the number of tunes stored on their iPods. "They would say, 'Oh, man, I have 60,000 songs,' " he said. "It was a currency."

For a while, Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. "The sound quality didn't matter at all," he said. "Just the music."

But Svizeny's attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father's collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. "I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it's lost value to me," Svizeny said. "I'd rather hold a physical thing."

With vinyl, he added, "You're experiencing music in a different way."

Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to "abandoning" iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the "Easter egg hunt" of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys' bearded phase.

In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. "I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn't on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube," he said. "It sounded so bad."

Listening through their eyes

For years, the typical high-end audio customer has been a white-haired classical music aficionado or an aging rock fan for whom listening to Steely Dan's "Aja" in 1977 on a pair of Altec Lansings was a spiritual experience.

But recently, veteran audio companies have started adapting their products to the changing tastes of younger listeners. McIntosh, for years the holy grail for preamps and other components, has been adding USB ports to its entire product line in a long overdue acknowledgment of the popularity of music streaming. Thiel Audio, the revered speaker maker, has hired an industrial designer for the first time to make sure its products pass what its chief operating officer, Bob Brown, called the "aesthetics test."

"My wife laughs at how our house was filled with speakers the size of refrigerators," Brown said. "This generation is not going to buy ugly, boxy stuff. They listen through their eyes first, before their ears."

Brown envisions that Thiel speakers will be curvier, with thinner profiles, in keeping with the industry trend and in line with modern interiors. It's a look he hopes will appeal to his new, more-discerning target audio customer: the young career woman.

"The bachelor-pad stuff is old," Brown said. "I wish it wasn't, but I have to be honest: If you sell to my son and my wife and the young career woman, you get me. I don't make the buying decisions anymore. It's over."

Grain Audio, a new company formed by four industry veterans, is covering its bookshelf speakers and earphones in wood, an aesthetic it hopes will appeal to both sexes. Mitch Wenger, its president, said music fans shouldn't have to conceal speakers behind walls or cabinets at home, as they have for years.

"It should be furniture quality," Wenger said. "It's, like, my Eames chair and my Grain bookshelves. That's the thinking."

Since the Apple store has for many people replaced the stereo showroom, audio companies are also striving to find creative ways of reaching younger music fans. Two years ago, Roy Hall, the founder of Music Hall Audio, approached Urban Outfitters about carrying his turntables. At first, the retail chain sold a $250 entry-level model, but sales have been so robust, Hall said, that some stores now carry his higher-end mmf-2.2 turntable, which sells for $450.

"The kids are not idiots," Hall said. "A nice little hi-fi system with a good turntable sounds amazing — way beyond an iPod."

And while many audio companies have struggled or gone under in the wake of the iPod's popularity, the iPod has also created millions of potential audiophiles. "You have a whole generation getting music over the Internet, from streaming, tablets, iPhones," Brown said. "It's introduced many more people to music."

Still, to someone like Brown, the speaker executive, it's encouraging that sound quality is once again part of the equation.

"I never lost faith that the new generation would come along," he said. Then he added, in what could be the audiophile credo for any age or era, "If you really love music, you're [forever] searching for how to hear it better."