Crowdfunding audio gear

[dbal]

Well if a person had $30K for speakers, I really don't think they would be worrying about contributing to a crowdfunding project. Just saying, but I do get your point.

 

I beg to differ.

[PorkChop]

The crowdfunding method has exposed the fact that a lot of people are willing to throw good money at 'elite' audio products -- sound unheard. Will that continue to be the case if/when the products delivered do not meet the micro-investors' expectations? LH and Pono have people with successful track records behind the scene...I am more concerned about this crowdfunding phenomenon getting exploited by the unscrupulous. Just promise the absolute pinnacle of sound and have a slick marketing campaign. Let's examine the state of crowdfunding audio products after a class-action suit or two.

[dbal]

My point is not that crowd funding is a bad thing. I like it and participate in a few projects. I don't think that crowd funding being successful means having a dealer has to fail or be corrupt. The premise of the article seems to be, now that we have crowd funding we don't need reviewers or dealers.

[Paul R]

My point is not that crowd funding is a bad thing. I like it and participate in a few projects. I don't think that crowd funding being successful means having a dealer has to fail or be corrupt. The premise of the article seems to be, now that we have crowd funding we don't need reviewers or dealers.

 

That does seem to be a trend though. Reviews and Support seem to be more and more online. For example, CA is a prime location for support on many many topics for a lot of people - the vast majority of whom do not have a reliable or knowledgable dealer within a reasonable distance. Topics here range from speakers to DACs to computers to synergy to everything else you can imagine in the audio world.

 

Buying over the internet is turning out to be a much easier experience for many people than working with a dealer too. Dealers mostly have limited resources, and often don't have stock on hand. That means waiting several days for delivery, paying tax, and making at least two trips. Internet orders are often in-stock, are sent immediately, and arrive in a day or three later, straight to your door. That's a lot of convenience. Add in a lot of vendors are endorsing 30 day trials so you can hear how the equipment will behave at home, and it becomes a no-brainer to use an internet source. Some vendors, like Amazon, Music Direct, and others will extend that 30 day right of return to almost all the audio equipment they sell.

 

Don't get me wrong, I like our two top local dealers immensely, and here in Austin, there are other sources available as well, though admittedly, less well informed and less likely to work with potential customers. One vendor refuses to do business unless the customer commits to minimum orders of $500 or more. (*sigh*) I can see their point, but I don't wish to support it.

[Savage]

If you look at the LH GeekOut, Pono or the Orbit TT all of these got a healthy dose backing from non-audiophiles which seems to be part of the secret ingredient. I think for the backers like this it wasn't a choice of picking something unheard from Kickstarter vs something from a traditional dealer, they most likely would not have not bought anything. If you take anything but the shortest-term outlook, these non-audiophile people are now more likely buy other audiophile products or walk into a dealer.

 

I did find the Stereophile 180º pretty funny, given a moment to think about it, if it doesn't 100% benefit us/advertisers/distributors then we don't like it so much. So much for promoting the hobby and the grand state it's in. In case you needed reminding how we got here.

[mav52]

Originally Posted by mav52 View Post

Well if a person had $30K for speakers, I really don't think they would be worrying about contributing to a crowd funding project. Just saying, but I do get your point.

 

 

I beg to differ.

 

Sure a person with the cash for $30k speakers could be a contributor to a crowd funding initiative, but I just don't see anyone doing a crowd funding project on equipment costing over $1k

[DigiPete]

The Sound Equipment Business

has been on a slippery slope for decades:

 

a) Reviewers are tainted if not down right corrupt as a rule rather than exception.

 

b) Brick and Mortar shops provides less and less value at higher and higher prices.

 

c) Manufacturers are stuck in the mud technology wise & catering for Boomers rather than the young

 

d) Younger consumers are fooled by different rants and branding than the old farts

 

e) Sound quality of films has long surpassed that of CD's

 

 

I think most of the old large Sound Equipment Businesses deserves to die.

They have taken out money for decades yet failed to provide us the benefits from volume and new technologies.

I see this in all business areas, but few as bad as Cars, Houses and Audio

 

 

Sennheiser, Grado, Centrance, audioquest, MrSpeakers, Magnepan, Oppo, schiit et al

gives me some hope for the future of Amateur Audio.

 

Professional Audio never had me worried at all!

[esldude]

My point is not that crowd funding is a bad thing. I like it and participate in a few projects. I don't think that crowd funding being successful means having a dealer has to fail or be corrupt. The premise of the article seems to be, now that we have crowd funding we don't need reviewers or dealers.

 

I find the lack of dealers no problem. So no, we don't need dealers. It is possible to do all this without them.

 

With ready easy communication on forums like this reviewers are much less needed. You do have a chicken and egg problem with new products or new companies in that without existing owners you can't get much info. We could get by without reviewers though I think some are a value to me as a potential customer.

[wappinghigh]

The Sound Equipment Business

has been on a slippery slope for decades:

 

a) Reviewers are tainted if not down right corrupt as a rule rather than exception.

 

b) Brick and Mortar shops provides less and less value at higher and higher prices.

 

c) Manufacturers are stuck in the mud technology wise & catering for Boomers rather than the young

 

d) Younger consumers are fooled by different rants and branding than the old farts

 

e) Sound quality of films has long surpassed that of CD's

 

 

I think most of the old large Sound Equipment Businesses deserves to die.

They have taken out money for decades yet failed to provide us the benefits from volume and new technologies.

I see this in all business areas, but few as bad as Cars, Houses and Audio

 

 

Sennheiser, Grado, Centrance, audioquest, MrSpeakers, Magnepan, Oppo, schiit et al

gives me some hope for the future of Amateur Audio.

 

Professional Audio never had me worried at all!

 

Darn right!

 

Well said!!!

[Liam]

iFi audio are doing their bit to promote the business of audio by asking customers or potential customers directly what THEY want in a product and designing around that. All discussed openly and also actively engaging and promoting on Facebook.

 

Their whole approach is helping to stimulate the market generally and encouraging the younger person to raise sound quality expectations, at reasonable prices using a crowd design, not a crowd funding model.

 

The return on the iFi range no doubt helps in their R&D for the highend sister company AMR Audio and everybody gains. Way to go in my opinion.

 

[Jabs1542]

As long as they don't get overloaded by comments from idiots, look at what happened to Microsoft Office 2010. Sometimes this concept tells the manufacturer to dumb things down in order to comply to the masses.

[monteverdi]

There are two parts to this:

direct sales: more profit for the producers by elimination of distributors and dealers. Cheaper prices (hopefully) for the consumer. Why to support dealers: to be able to evaluate products before on buys them. My recent experience is that dealers do not have any product I am interested in (especially true for servers etc.) but tried to convince me the lines they carry are what I should be interested in. The ability to audition gear before one buys it should be part of a direct sales model but rarely is. Relying on reviews and marketing is not a substitute for own experience.

Crowd funding is direct sales of a product which does not exist yet. Why on wants to invest in a promise? Getting something cheaper than when the product is on the market. Investing in a company is different as one gets a share of that company. What the value of that share will be in the future is speculation but one can trade that share. So paying for a product which is not (yet) existing is relying on company promises and I see not many of that promises are kept (at least delivery date wise) (Geek, Pono). The quality of that product is unknown and it all motivated by perception and biases one has about one company (drinking by the label).

[Kimo]

Based on my experience, I nominate the following for the most useless and painful 4 minutes of conversation available on the planet.

 

1. A real estate agent

2. An audio dealer

3. A car service department counter person

4. Anyone who works for Microsoft, who offers an explanation on how to fix something from Microsoft

 

Though admittedly, they still pale in comparison to the audio equipment importer, the most useless form one can take, if a customer actually needs something.

 

While, it would be nice to actually hear a pair of speakers, before ordering them, the only one that I mentioned that might still provide that service is the real estate agent.

[mrvco]

The brick and mortar audio business seems to have stratified into two primary camps, the big box stores and the local or regional retailers who inevitably focus their efforts on Home Theater and custom installations. Rarely does either serve the two-channel music listener in a satisfying manner, especially not in the case of computer-based audio.

 

Hifi audio is well suited to boutique and small-batch manufacturing where you can charge a premium for a quality product designed to cater to a relatively small market of dedicated enthusiasts. If crowd-funding is what it takes to get someone with a marketable idea off the ground and delivering product, then I'm all for it. However there are and will continue to be crowd-funding horror stories and it remains to be seen if the public's taste for crowd funding will diminish as these stories make the rounds in the media.

 

My biggest concern is that brick and mortar stores were how I got interested in Hifi audio and without those, how does the industry get new folks interested in the hobby? Is there enough of a natural progression among enough people from earbuds, iPods and BT speakers to seek out something better that can keep the hifi industry afloat?

[Superdad]

My biggest concern is that brick and mortar stores were how I got interested in Hifi audio and without those, how does the industry get new folks interested in the hobby? Is there enough of a natural progression among enough people from earbuds, iPods and BT speakers to seek out something better that can keep the hifi industry afloat?

 

That's a good question. Allow me to recount a little of my own youth before I comment on the question.

 

Being age 52, I too started out (in Santa Monica, CA) haunting the hi-end rooms of every retail audio store on the West Side--starting at about 13 years old (it took a while until the sales guys would trust me alone in those rooms--and some never did). And I bought stuf when I could, including some very nice used pieces. In fact, making a pest of myself at the closest one to my house--Pilot Stereo Center--is how, at 14, I met and ended up working for Robert Hovland, the service manager there after he left JBL and Marantz--and that began my really long odyssey into building audio. But I digress…

 

Of course I hung out at all the record stores in town, some of which also housed head shops or an upstairs pinball arcade, and bought a lot of import vinyl (all of which I have to this day). At the time, my step-dad was the West Coast Editor of jazz magazine Downbeat (I met a lot of fusion greats when he did interviews) and he received at least a dozen or more promo LPs of all genres every week. After he sorted them, I would trade back to the record shops what he was not keeping.

Sorry, I digressed again…

 

In the early 1980s, computer software stores started popping up, and I would visit some of those, subsequently landing a job in the computer industry.

 

You can start to see a pattern here. There are no longer real hi-fi stores, real record stores, or even much in the way of computer software stores. Certainly none within 100 miles of the rural area where we now live, raising our 3 children.

Yet somehow--via friends, and the internet of course--each of our kids has developed some interests. Are they into record collecting? No, but our 18 year old daughter has moderately sophisticated tastes and a decent collection of digital albums (and prefers to listen to a whole album, not to just individual songs). Our 16-year old son, aside from liking to rock-out, loves every piece of classical music he hears (he plays saxophone in his high school band so that may be an influence), and he is a very dedicated movie buff (and budding critic; he is likely to go into either prop-making and/or writing screen-plays)--despite the fact that we rarely make it to a real movie theatre. And our 13-year old son is bent on becoming a computer programmer, and shows some real aptitude for it.

 

So I have no answers to your question. But I can say that our kids are pretty happy with their headphones--which are always on their heads or around their necks--hooked up to either their computers or their iPods. And I guess that one observation may be enough to explain why the single largest growth segment in 2-channel audio--for at least the past 8 years--is the "personal audio" headphone/headphone amp market. I believe it is now many times larger than the entire specialist hi-fi market.

Personally, I am not much of a headphone listener, but it is not at all a stretch to assume that the path to getting young people excited about higher quality audio is all about the 'cans'.