I attended my first hifi show as a member of the press in 2008.
Sure, I’d been to a few shows before as a consumer, a role I still play, but 2008 was the first as a reviewer. Since then, my total number is around 40 in all.
Here’s a relevant rant from my CES 2008 coverage:
“What kind of music do you want to hear?”
A harmless enough question. Granted, exhibitors can only bring so much music to shows (just wait ’till the next show when terabytes’ worth are a-plenty). But the answer to that simple question is different in audiophile land just as a happy ending means one thing in a Disney flick and something else everywhere else, especially in Las Vegas.
When I think about the biggest change at a hifi show today and hifi shows past, the obvious answer is streaming.
Today, “What kind of music do you want to hear?” has been replaced by the availability of nearly everything accessed via tablet or phone as remote. Thanks mainly to Qobuz, and to a lessor extent Tidal, most rooms at hifi shows these days stream and the adventurous exhibitor may take a request (or 2) where the world of music is literally at our fingertips in lossless quality. My 2008 self imagined terabytes’ worth of tunes which is kinda quaint in retrospect.
In terms of “What’s new?” lossless streaming is the winner by a country mile. At least in my book. That’s not to say advances haven’t happened in the realm of hardware and the software to run it, but compared to streaming, we’re talking baby steps compared to flight. Of course I say this as the owner of an integrated amp that’s been in production since 2005 which drives my speakers that first hit the market in 2011 and one of my favorite rooms at HIGH END Munich this year, and every other year they’ve exhibited, was from Silbatone featuring Western Electric horns from the 1935. There’s also some gear from that 2008 CES I’d love to have today (like the EMT JPA-66 Jubilee Series Varia-Curve Phono Stereo Control Center) and there’s a bunch of gear I sold along the way that I wish I still had (like the Sun Audio SV-300BE amp). Oh, and I love and listen to 78s.
But sure. Digital amps offer tons of power in tiny packages, new materials have extended the reach of loudspeakers toward both ends of the frequency spectrum in home audio, and the quality of digital music replay has come a very long way since the advent of the CD and the MP3. For the most part. But again, relatively small steps on the treadmill of hifi progress. Notice I did not mention music file formats because they’re not relevant in this conversation as far as I’m concerned unless we want to talk about the most over-hyped and under-delivered hifi news in the past 15 years or so. Remember DSD? MQA? Atmos? All formats that were very short lived stars of hifi shows past yet I’ve heard hardly a peep about ‘em since.
If all this sounds familiar, I went down this road back in 2023, when I had this to say:
I would rank lossless streaming as The Biggest Advance in HiFi in the past decade (or more) and because of it we are living in the Golden Age of Music Discovery.
And music discovery is the reason I love hifi. I love hifi for its ability to bring us closer to music, to offer the opportunity to better understand music, and to ideally grow, as human beings, because of it. Not to mention fun, joy, excitement, dancing, singing, and feeling part of something greater than I.
So all of this is nothing new, simply (re)stating the obvious. But when I reflect on the big advances in hifi over the course of my 50 or so years being in it, streaming is the clear winner. And that fact is a wonderful, wondrous fact because it’s all about music and that is something worth repeating.