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So why not offer an HD tuner in a receiver to the consumer as one of those features to get it to catch on? It's true you get a lot of gadgets for the money on electronics these days, keep in mind around the time you say the bottom dropped out, the U.S. had a new way to buy, big box stores started driving "mom & pop" out of business. I'm not so sure mobile electronics is so big either. Especially compared to the late 80's, early 90's, when car audio contests were big, and not just for being loud. I think if car audio was still booming, you wouldn't see brands like Rockford in BB.
I also wish HD video content would grow at the rate HD radio broadcasts did. I have a way to watch the HD content but still waiting on a viable way to listen to HD radio. You draw comparisons to other products on the market but I see HD radio as being exactly backwards from other products introduced to the market.
We sure did get some good mileage out of this thread. You never know when one will take off or just fade away.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
So why not offer an HD tuner in a receiver to the consumer as one of those features to get it to catch on? It's true you get a lot of gadgets for the money on electronics these days, keep in mind around the time you say the bottom dropped out, the U.S. had a new way to buy, big box stores started driving "mom & pop" out of business. I'm not so sure mobile electronics is so big either. Especially compared to the late 80's, early 90's, when car audio contests were big, and not just for being loud. I think if car audio was still booming, you wouldn't see brands like Rockford in BB.
I wouldn't say car audio is booming right now, but it's certainly not in a state of major contraction like home audio is.
The move to big box is indeed a major reason why you see the price points on audio products going through the floor. Wal-Mart has a policy of cutting out suppliers that cannot continually reduce costs from year to year for comparable products. And indeed consumer electronics has seen a market share shift from specialty stores to mass merchandisers. With these market conditions, the old price points simply could not be sustained, especially when factoring in inflation.
Of course, the flipside is that you can buy a much higher quality product today compared to what it would have cost you several years ago. Like I said, my parents' Marantz receiver would have cost $2,000 in today's dollars. That Marantz 2275 was a midlevel two-channel receiver, just think of what kind of two-channel front end you can buy today with $2,000 -- I can tell you it's much higher quality than that Marantz.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
I also wish HD video content would grow at the rate HD radio broadcasts did. I have a way to watch the HD content but still waiting on a viable way to listen to HD radio. You draw comparisons to other products on the market but I see HD radio as being exactly backwards from other products introduced to the market.
What makes you think that HD video content hasn't grown? I believe that the majority of all TV stations around the country now broadcast in DTV, and the government mandate shutting down all analog OTA TV broadcasts is still on target for 2009. If you buy a HDTV and hoist an aerial antenna, in all likelihood you'll pick up a DTV signal for the majority of the stations in your market.
Of course, a DTV signal does not mean that all (or even most) of the content will be at HD resolution, and that's simply because most programming was not originally produced in HD. (When watching ESPN HD for example, notice that the live broadcast might be in HD, but most of the commercials and highlights are not) But, I don't think this is any different than HD Radio having to share the same compressed dynamic range and lossy music files. In both cases, just because the signal format allows for higher quality content does not mean that the broadcaster will necessarily make full use of that capability.
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Wooch, let's see what bears out. So far HD radio has not really broken into the car market, whereas XM and Sirius have. To recommend that they should spend all their marketing dollars there seems risky.
I still think that HD has potential in the home market, even if only as a niche product. Given that it has better sound quality, to me, it seems like it would make that a natural fit. I am merely suggesting that they consider this since the car market hasn't been very fruitful for them. The hardware for component-sized tuners has not been subsidized, hence the dearth of affordable home products.
Finally, I am fairly certain that the phone-as-entertainment-medium is the iPod for the near future. If that's the case, then HD should be there too. The fact that small and efficient chips were not designed until recently is only an indication that not enough research money was made available in developing these. I think that this would be a better avenue for that marketing dollar, instead of using it on what I consider a stagnating market (the car market).
Remember that despite all those sales figures / stats / charts, however detailed they may be, these only show us what was, not what will be. We can perhaps extrapolate future trends with some degree of accuracy, but again, that is dependent on the industry doing the same thing it was doing, in a similar way. These figures do little to correct for sudden changes, watersheds, bubbles bursting, market crashes, another stupid comment by our pres., or heaven forbid, another war.
With new technologies, the internet and cellular networks, the time we old timers consider short - days, weeks months - may be an eternity to the trend setters out there. Things change fast. Remember the computer memory price bottoming out about a decade ago? That was because someone had smuggled a suitcase full of chips into the US and sold them on the gray market. If that's all it takes, I wouldn't hedge all by bets on the market doing the same thing it always has.
Bottom line:
1. The phone market is hot, and HD needs to be there.
2. The home market is where a better sounding product will get the most traction.
3. And there are enough HD products for cars, so they need to let that sit.
Anyhow, that's my opinion.
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