Dear Audio Community, Get Your Head Out of Your…

In the meantime, Spring is starting to make itself felt in most places and it feels like a time of renewal in many respects. As such, I feel like I need to get a few things off my chest. Perform a kind of therapeutic cleansing. A detox if you will, of some of the audio-related things I’ve heard and observed which may or may not have gotten under my craw over this past period of pause.

After a slew of show cancellations throughout all of last year, we have started to see a few shows actually go on this year. By the time you read this, the Florida Audio Expo, CanJAM NYC, Salon Audio Montreal, and AXPONA will all have happened and by most signs will have been successfully attended, with Munich Hi-End happening just around the corner. And honestly, it’s about time. Having personally attended Florida and CanJAM, it was generally just good to see and catch up with industry friends again after being gone so long. Yes, you can do it over Zoom like so many of us did, but it’s not the same. Greater still, I was also very happy to experience a large variety of great audio equipment again, which in case anyone was wondering, is the point of these things.

Throughout the pandemic, I heard more than a few industry people (manufacturers, reviewers, marketing reps, etc.) eulogize about the end of the audio show. It has become unnecessary, both as a method of doing business and for drumming up consumer product interest. Comments like, “Shows are a dinosaur, a huge waste of time and effort, a money pit for us.” I kept thinking to myself that this was almost dangerously self-defeating when I heard it from a manufacturer, and honestly just plain foolish when it came from anyone else. Putting the obvious health dangers of the pandemic to the side for a moment, most audio and video manufacturers I’ve spoken with discovered the whole COVID-19 situation to be an unexpected sales windfall. All of us that found ourselves with little to do and nowhere to go for the past two years sank a bunch of disposable income into our homes, which included things like new or updated audio and video systems. A/V companies now being flush with orders to fill, with many back-logged due to supply chain issues, can easily bag on the idea of doing a show. From their perspective, who needs to bang on your own drum when lots of customers are already coming to you, cash in hand?

Yet sooner or later that will come to an end and there will be other things that will return to fight for those disposable dollars. What happens then? I remember having a discussion with a particular high-end speaker manufacturer on the subject. This company makes very well-respected active loudspeakers. They were of the opinion that modern audio shows were pointless, set up at a show is never ideal, and in the end, did not result in any significant increase in sales for them. I argued that may be so but what about for publicity? They aren’t the largest manufacturer in the world or a household name in speakers so where and how would people be able to experience their products outside of a select few audio dealers? The company rep maintained that shows were still irrelevant. I replied, frankly I personally would not have been able to experience your products at all if I hadn’t been to the Munich show or RMAF. At both those shows, I spent a fair amount of time listening to the company’s speakers and came away very impressed and I knew for myself that yes, these speakers were worth all the hype that had built up around them. Slightly taken aback he replied, well did you buy a pair? No, I said, I can’t afford them, yet. But someday I might. More importantly, though, it established a quality benchmark in my mind, both for the brand and the particular speakers in question. One that I would compare other top-notch speakers to. That is what an audio show is all about! Where else can a bunch of like-minded folks gather in good cheer and listen to a broad variety of equipment?

And before anyone says that it’s just the same old grey-haired white guys that come to these shows, where that may have been true in the past, I observed a bit of a younger and more diverse crowd at these first couple of shows I attended this year. A byproduct of being extra prudent due to COVID perhaps? Maybe. But for shows, and the A/V biz in general, I’d personally be less concerned about rising COVID cases from some new strain and more worried about high energy prices and recent political turmoil causing issues going forward.

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