Nostalgia is a funny thing.
Funny in that our memories of childhood are often edited, either intentionally or not, over time. Picture a piece of driftwood with all the rough edges worn away, a fragment of what once was a larger living and much more complicated thing.
I’ve lost count of how many articles I’ve read about hifi where the writer idealizes their past hifi life, representing it as a veritable garden of earthly delights;
“Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.”
A world where even a kid could buy a nice hifi and most adults could afford the “best” hifi had to offer. When it came to hifi, the playing field was level. Damn near flat.
As this story goes, the world of hifi has changed—even though there’s an endless number of choices for every hifi budget, there’s a lot of stuff many adults can’t afford. This fact is viewed as a problem in need of a solution, a wound in need of healing.
The thing is, when we burst the bubble of this oversimplified nostalgia, we find that the world at large is not the same place we grew up in. Seeing as this isn’t some sort of dissertation, I’ll share a personal anecdote.
My grandfather left school before the 8th grade to work full time in order to help support his family with his weekly pay spent mostly on bread. Mick, as he was called by other adults, went on to work as a union carpenter, the sole bread winner in the family. We spent most summers at my grandparent’s home at the beach, originally a second home he built from the ground up along with his cousins who all worked in the trades on a patch of vacant land.
Getting back to hifi...Not so fast!—My grandfather worked a union job and was able to buy, or build, a second home, a vacation home, at the beach. One relative, who worked as an accountant, was ‘crazy’ enough to ‘waste his money’ on an ocean front vacation home in the same small seaside town. Today you can’t touch an ocean front home for less than a few million and even the remaining ‘summer cottages’ cost well over $600k. Even adjusting for inflation, prices have more than quadrupled.
The not so funny thing is the world has changed and hifi has changed along with it. The way I see it, complaining about the high price of some hifi is nothing more, or less, than nostalgia for a world different from the one we find ourselves living in.
And I get it, boy do I get it, but hifi has never existed as some kind of egalitarian raft in a sea of shark infested capitalistic waters. Hifi, and its cost, were a sign of the times. Times when one parent working a full time job allowed for savings, home ownership, a car or two, and even a vacation home if you were thrifty. Hell, suburban developments like the one I grew up in were designed to foster this view of a level playing field where every home looked more or less the same. But over time even this manufactured sameness gave way to clear indications of difference with some home owners turning carports into garages, adding ‘rec rooms’, and air conditioners sticking out of windows.
Now for some accounting. There were nearly 24 million millionaires in the US alone in 2024, a year that saw a thousand new millionaires added every day. If we widen the net to include everywhere else, we find there were 58 million millionaires worldwide in 2024. What’s more, there are 5.5 million people in the US alone with more than $1 million in liquid investable assets (according to the US Wealth Report 2024 by Henley & Partners and USB). If we take these numbers and this reality into account, the number of people who can spend a couple hundred grand on a hifi, many with cold hard cash, number in the millions.
When I was a kid, we had to drive somewhere to buy a hifi (or most anything else) and there were five hifi stores within a few miles of our suburban home. As I sit here typing these thoughts, I can pause for a moment and buy a great hifi online for a few hundred or a few thousand bucks that will arrive tomorrow from among nearly too many choices to count. And if I don’t like it, I can return it.
What’s more, most people including kids walk around with a music player in their hand with access to millions—and millions—of albums at their fingertips. As I’ve said before, we are living in a golden age when it comes to the enjoyment of music.
So where’s the rub? Why article after article about the good old hifi days?
Back in the day, when most adults could buy the “best” hifi had to offer, you didn’t have to contend with the fact that other people owned stuff that was even “better”. Stuff that you could never—in your entire lifetime—afford. This reality, for some people, intrudes on their ability to enjoy what they have so they demonize availability.
Me? I’m just fine with enjoying what I have.