Doodz

There's a big whopping problem in the audiophile world, and I'm hardly the first to point it out.

The problem isn't only that it's an older clientele, but also that it's a bunch of old white guys.

That bible of high-end audio, The Absolute Sound, just bestowed its "Innovator of the Year" awards, and the series of awards went to – a bunch of white guys, with one lone Japanese chap the sole holdout.

What it tells me is that audiophilia remains the provenance of well-heeled doodz. White guys. Older white guys.

As an older white guy myself, I realize I'm calling the kettle black here.

But if those audiophile mags and their customers really do want to expand the thing so as to include a larger and, shall we say, more representative clientele, then would it have killed them to go out there and find some kind of female innovator? Or a black guy?

But maybe there aren't any.

Or maybe The Absolute Sound doesn't really care. It's so entrenched in dazzlingly expensive stuff that it can't see that increasingly it's preaching to a tiny subset of the choir – i.e., the part made up out of upper-middle-class white guys.

I'm actually rather offended by this state of affairs. In no other consumer area is the disparity so glaring. Think about it: cars, high-end TVs, computers, etc. There's actually a fair amount of representation across the spectrum. Well, maybe not quite so much for cars. But there are young guys who are totally into cars.

But not audiophilia. For one thing, young guys can't afford it. But for another, they're more interested in the present and not the past, which is the other big problem with audiophilia – its obsession with obsolete technology.

If they really mean it, then those big mags like AS or Stereophile could very well take a year or two off from stratospherically-priced gear and really get into stuff that is more reachable by a larger clientele, and maybe just to drop the bullshit about tubes and tape and vinyl. Just go for good digital for a while, by which I don't mean $100K+ dCS equipment, but just nice one-box digital setups that can do a great deal with little. Not compromised or sleazy or anything like that.

But would it kill them to do some issues about single-box, just-add-powered-speakers affairs? I'm thinking here of something like a Bluesound Node ($600) and a pair of KEF powered speakers ($1600). So there you have $2200 in a system that's designed for streaming from the ground up and is pretty much guaranteed to sound fantastic. Doesn't use much electric current or space.

I would have killed for that good of sound back in high school. And, OK, maybe $2200 is a little too expensive. So how about a Wiim Pro streamer ($150) and a pair of Audio Engine 5+ powered speakers ($500). $650 and miles again better than anything I could have had as a teenager or young adult. And you can control the whole shebang from an iPhone.

So hey, Doodz. Get your feet off your soapboxes and your head out of your asses and really make something happen. For now, every time an audiophile kicks the bucket, there isn't a new one to replace him. (Always him, still.)