With it being nearly a month since my last rant (politcs in music), it's time I put one down for this month. Todays rant is all about high end audio. With an increasing amount of people having large amounts of disposable income, they are willing to spend money on the finer things in life, the Porsche's, the penthouse suite, hundreds of dollars on wine, the 60" TV. They cover all of there senses with the finest they can get, they truly apreciate quality and are willing to spend money on it. But quite often they over look the audio side of it. As they enjoy their expensive furniture, booze, ect, they turn on their $1000 home theatre in a box, that they beleive is a decent, if not good sounding system. Now its not their fault that they beleive that what you can get at the future shops, and circuit city is high end audio, it's just that they are uneducated in the world of audio.

When they enter into these home theatre stores, all they see are the cheap "cookie Cutter" electronics such as the Yamaha's the Sony's and the Bose. On paper they look great but after a short audition it quickly reveals what they are cheap. With high frequencies fighting it out with booming one note bass, and the mids are vague and un recognisable.

High end audio comes at a dear price, because, like a great bottle of wine, it takes a lot of time research and developement to produce products of such great caliber. They are perfectly crafted and transcend the everyday audio to the orgasmic experience like no other.

Now high end audio is still doing pretty well thanks to the numerous amount of support from people like us on this forum. But the high end brands from Rotel, to Mark Levinson, to Halcro, are unmistakably great products but they lack the retail representation that other brands like Harmon Kardon, Polk, Bose, and Paradigm(don't get me wrong Paradigm are pretty darn good im just trying to make a point).

now the industry is taking steps to move into the right direction having some of these box stores starting to carry decent products like the the new Magnolia section in Best Buy. But they still lack the knowledge that these mom and pop shops will have about their products. Odds are that even though these stores now carry decent electronics its still a long ways off (if ever) that these stores will start to have small high end boutiques within their stores that would carry such brands as Focal, Sonus Faber, B&W, Hovland, Electrompaniet and many other amazing brands.

Is there a way to educate the general public about the advantages and the shear amazement of the high end audio world. It may be a dream to bring the publics attention to the Elacs, Martin Logans, and classe's, but hey thats what dreams are for.