If a had a nickel for every time I heard this question I’d be able to buy a (big) vacation place in Tuscany. And Tokyo.
And as many times as I’ve heard this question asked, I’ve never heard a reasonable answer. Not once. I can still remember one particular occasion where a group of mostly late middle aged industry men and one twenty-year-old were mulling it over and no one asked the young person a single question. Not one, which to my mind is a perfect example of why this issue is stuck in the mud.
Or is it?
To my mind, the best way to get new people into our hobby is to do something different, think outside the sweet spot, way outside the man cave. Frankly adding a few “affordable” rooms at a huge hifi show has about as much of a chance at luring in newcomers as baiting a hook with a dollar bill and dropping it into your bathtub in the hopes of catching a 40-pond trout—wrong bait, wrong place.
Which gets me to Devon Turnbull, one very good example of doing things very differently from the norm. You may know Devon from his OJAS hifi company, his recent collaboration with Denon on a limited edition variation of the classic DL-103R MC Cartridge, or maybe you saw his installation at the Lisson Gallery in NYC or his current installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or maybe you’ve seen his semi-permanent OJAS Listening Room at USM NY, or maybe you’ve bumped into his speakers at artist Arthur Jafa’s studio, some discotheque in Bangkok, at Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun official pre-release listening party in LA, or maybe in 4EVA’s official KAYTRAMINÉ video that featured Pharrell Williams, or at a Supreme clothing store in Brooklyn, Shanghai, Seoul, or Berlin, or…you get the idea.
Devon, and OJAS, have put hifi in front of more non-hifi people—with an emphasis on hifi as part of a music, art, fashion, and culture-based experience—than the total number of attendees at every hifi show in the world for the past 5 or so years. That KAYTRAMINÉ video alone has over 4.6M views. [footnote 1]
During our visit to Gold Note in Tuscany last month, company founder and CEO Maurizio Aterini was talking about this exact subject and sharing that celebrity endorsements, especially celebrity musicians, are a great way to reach more people and I couldn’t agree more. The thing is these endorsements need to be placed in non-hifi outlets so the industry, which is hardly an industry in terms of having a unified voice and objective, needs an outreach program. Other than Devon.
Of course there is no simple answer to what is a complex issue. One thing I know for sure—a bunch of old hifi dudes, I count myself as one, sitting around asking each other the same question for a few decades thinking we’ll eventually hit on some fresh new answer is the best way to never change a damn thing.
1. It also seems to me that YouTube is one place where the hifi audience is expanding, albeit fairly heavily tipped toward lower priced gear. You gotta start somewhere.