After the pandemic you and your buddy at the greens can go to my house even at nights. 11 miles away. I blast my 300b amp in or bonus room no problem even 2 am. We'll get a late-early keg party!
I come at high-end audio from the headphone side where the high-end isn't as expensive as the speaker side of the hobby. I got more serious about pursing audio quality about 15 years ago. Head-fi has a forum section called Summit-Fi where the high-end gear gets discussed. 15 years ago you could easily get the red carpet acceptance into the Summit-Fi forum with a $2500+ amp, $1000 headphone and $1000+ DAC or source. That level of system would get your entry to the Summit-Fi world even though there were people there with the Sennheiser Orpheus, Stax SR-007 systems with custom amps, and other very expensive systems that could cost as much as a car. Today the high-end headphone world has gotten more expensive. $4k headphones are now common. $3k+ amps are common, and DACs over $10k are common. There are people playing with the Woo-Audio WA234-MONO amp ($16k), with Abyss headphones ($5k), and dCS DACs ($20k+). But still I consider my modest headphone system of a $3k amp, $1k headphone, and $1.2k DAC as an entry level system into the Summit-Fi world. It easily got into the Summit-Fi world 10 years ago, it is still just as good now as it was then and still deserving. It still sounds every bit as good now as it did 10 years ago. But Summit-Fi entry level has moved on considering that $1000 headphones are now entry level. I think of Summit-Fi as a mix of high price and high performance level tier. It's a combination of price level and performance level tier. If it is just expensive without achieving the performance level it isn't going to get there. If it is that magical giant killer level of performance (a true unicorn) while not being expensive enough it also won't get you in the club. But I've yet to find that giant killer.
There is very little agreement on what the best stuff is in home audio because there are more options than in headphones (I'll grant you that has been changing over the years because once a company sees that you can actually sell $6,000 headphones and headphone amps the dollar signs light up). The reality is there are people with a bucket of experiences like Art Dudley and Michale Fremer and I always noted that both gys had pretty much polar opposite ends of the spectrum systems. One guy loves his flea watt and Shindow and wide baffle Snell inspired speakers and the other must have 1000 watts multiway big ass speakers. And both have lots of followers who have heard both ends of the spectrums siding in one camp or the other (or Electrostats or Horns etc). This is why this hobby tends to be somewhat more argumentative because the people who get the goosebumps from one and not the other don't really get why anyone would buy the "other" - CAN'T YOU HEAR? ARE YOU DEEF? How the hell could you like that rubbish technology. And then we get to the - look at this measurements - see this graph, such and such has more distortion - did you read the white paper from X - even my wife likes this better, I know that George Lucas uses this speaker and not that speaker, My girlfriend plays the violin and she says this is more like a violin than that one. Most of us do this to some degree. I do it too. It actually does us all a disservice because we wind up, probably, spending more or getting locked into stubborn belief systems over companies or technologies. Too many biases to list but they have an impact. Put all the crap out of your head and just sit in the chairs and listen to the music you love, and if you still love it on the system you are playing it on then the system is doing a good job. I like the Outfield an 80s band for the most part and I always use Play Deep as a demo disc - not because it's a particularly good recording but I like the album and I want to enjoy it if I buy a given system - if I can't enjoy it then the system no matter how expensive has failed to allow me to enjoy music from my childhood. You have to like your music - not just the audiophile-approved Patricia Barber recordings. Like a car - I don't care if the car gets 5 stars and car of the year or car of the century - if you sit in the seat and the bloody thing is uncomfortable it's not the right car for you. A better one is keeping to headphones - I may like the sound of the on-ear Grado headphones more than the sound of those comfy Beyerdynamics but if I have to take the Grado cans off after 10 minutes because they hurt - then you buy the Beyerdynamics.
High end to me is about using better quality ingredients (in F&B) or parts in the case of audio equipment, to create a higher level of enjoyment and satisfaction than could be gotten from what is currently considered as meeting basic expectations. So what is high end changes with time and location. And of course low end is beneath basic expectations, using substandard ingredients or parts for cost reasons. This is just my opinion.
im surprised to read that people assume that high end audio means more money. as if the only way to get a high end car is to get ****ed by BMW
High-end to me is when components or a system is beyond the basic. Looking it up on Wiki .... "denoting the most expensive of a range of products".
Stuff that is high priced, and should sound better. Sometimes it does, and often it does not. Just like any hobby, law of diminishing returns factors in usually below the so called "High end"
Look at the gear behind him in the video. None of it is high-end. It doesn't cost enough. He starts the video talking about high-end being a luxury product and being about price. And he's sitting in front a Lexus level gear instead of Maybach level gear. He wants to tell us that high-end is about price and luxury and he sits in front of that gear? What a joke. At least play the part if you're going to tell us that BS.
I do agree with a part of what he is saying about type 1 and 2 buyers as my dealer in Canada noted the same thing - the type 1 buyer who wants a system that will give them a kind of spiritual level listening experience vs the "this will blow you away" and "impress your buddies" for the hi-fi pyrotechnics - Albeit, I don't agree with some of his examples. He judges a lot of stuff he heard at audio shows vs the gear at home with all his treatments and elimination of clap echo. Focal sucks at a show (in rooms that almost always SUCK) so it's for type 2 buyers but he has some speakers he likes at home in a treated room with hours and hours, days and days, if not weeks and weeks of setting up to get it bang on perfect. The guy at the show sometimes has as little as an hour to set the stuff up - were given the wrong rooms(too big too small etc) - they have stuff running the speakers that are emergency stand-in components as their amp arrived broken or didn't arrive at all. Still, my dealer noted that 90% of the people who walk in buy those type 2 systems based on review/looks/name brand prestige. Most dealers carry what has the biggest margins and require no work or effort to sell. He noted that most people already know what they want before listening - they listen for a short time - confirm that it is "good" and hand over their card. Nothing really wrong with that. Most stuff today is in fact "good" in that it is better than what he called commodity audio or appliance audio.
High End was originally coined as how music - usually classical - was accurately reproduced on home playback systems. Equipment was considered High End only insofar as it approached the reproduction of live music in a jazz venue, symphony hall, or even stellar recorded performances by artists captured in the studio that approached the live musical experience. What it means now has little correlation to what it originally did. Like many definitions, such as the meanings of words such as "iconic" and "legendary," ideas of what it is have changed its original definition, especially in the last 25 years.
Like many I started buying budget oriental hifi from high street stores here in England, but having read popular hifi magazines I knew there was another world of hifi just beyond my means. Names like Rega, Thorens, Dual and Rogers were around, but still too ‘niche’ and costly for me. Some years later when I began to earn more ‘disposable income’ I started to look seriously at that ‘other world’ of hifi previously considered a luxury and thought why not me? My record collection now deserves this! I did a number of hifi shows and visited quite a few dealers for auditions. Real hifi to me in the late 80s included names like Linn, Roksan, Naim Audio, Exposure, Meridian, Monitor Audio, Heybrook, Alphason, SME to name a few, but although costly this was not ‘high end’ My own dealer had a few more exotic brands, which were getting towards the high end with a bit of a cross over with some products. If you worked your way up to a fully active Naim amplification system with multiple 250s or 135 monobloc amps you were effectively into hi end prices and your source components had to be equally top tier to work well at that level. In the 90s Roksan launched their TMS turntable as well as their first CD player and reference amplifiers, which were not unlike Audio Research in sound. The DS1 power supply unit to these products nearly made it into my own system, but I ducked out with the cheaper DS4 and that’s the closest I got to ‘hi end’. I had been to a few shows such as Heathrow Penta Hotel here near London where I met a few high end gurus and listened to their wares. Names such as Goldmund, Krell, Martin Logan, Wadia and Audio Research were respected in this world and at prices I just didn’t discuss, I would need to have sold my house just to join the club! My own long term dealer set up as a more ‘high end’ agency in the late 90s, but like most independents only stocking products they believed in. Having passed from Roksan they now deal with Vertere, which is now hi end in my book, but they also keep a ‘midfi’ room with more affordable quality brands for us mere mortals, which is nice. I get to hear the good stuff and there is always the chance of a piece of ‘hifi exotica’ coming up for a good price second hand. There’s no harm in listening to ‘hi end audio’ and it can give you an idea of a sound to aim towards, even if you might never quite get there. Isn’t that the definition of hi end for many of us?