Audiophilia Is A Messy Hobby- How Build It And They Will Come Doesn’t Work In AV Retail

The audiophilia business done right might not be that luxury oriented despite the hobby’s alternate name of high-end audio. Oh, not to say the prices aren’t high for audiophile gear. The finishes as well as some of the technologies for the gear can be exotic, but is this really a luxury goods business or something else?

Years of experimentation with “build it and they will come” audio-video showrooms suggest that the hobby/business of audiophilia has never translated well in the lexicon of overall luxury goods. In terms of quality, what is the difference between say a Hermes “Kelly Bag”, a bespoke Brioni suit or say a pair of 800 Series Bowers + Wilkins speakers in an exotic finish? They are all expensive, time-tested products that all have a bit of design appeal outside of their core audiences. The way (and the venue) that they are sold are very different. Hermes, sadly even on Rodeo Drive (and they should know better) still has that “Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman” level of snobbery. Their gorgeous leather goods, textiles and beyond are sold with an ever-present limited edition exclusivity that one might expect to get from say Ferrari when it is time to invite collectors to buy an F70. Buy it or we will sell it to the next guy. That rarely happens at a good audiophile retail location.

Brioni has the craftsmanship and unique tailoring to make even overweight, orange-tinged former world leaders look halfway decent in ways that the best golf clothes can’t. They would never exude the same level of “buy it or somebody else will” like Hermes, but like the French leather goods brand, Brioni delivers a beyond slick customer experience. If you are a good client, they are apt to pour you a $100 few-fingers-full of good scotch while you are getting uniquely fitted for your next suit or picking out all of its accessories, be it shirts, ties, belts etc… That might happen at an audiophile store if the owner is an enthusiast but stores built with the sleek lines, spectacularly gorgeous lighting and wow factor are historically proven to be rejected by the enthusiast audio crowd.

How does the sale of audiophile products compare to these other luxury goods-products? Audio enthusiasts aren’t looking for the same experience delivered to date even though retailers around the world have replicated it over and over. For decades, there have been global efforts to build showrooms that can deliver the luxury as well as the technological story of audio. And nearly every one of them I can think of has failed at some level or another. I moved to Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago and worked at the legendary Christopher Hansen Ltd. in Beverly Hills towards the end of its run as a retail location. Indonesian royalty funded building a massive audiophile and home theater emporium in the old Rolls Royce showroom on Olympic Boulevard around 1990, this was to replace the messy, clutters and all-time uber-successful showroom up the road on Robertson Boulevard which saw more big ticket audio products sold than perhaps any other venue in audiophile history. When the new, award-winning, stunningly beautiful location opened, the audiophiles stopped coming. In droves. Yes, there was a post-cold-war military-inspired economic recession, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the new store was too fancy. Cables were hidden in ducts. Showrooms were fantastically back-lit with Hollywood drama with the presentation quality you’d expect on Rodeo Drive, Fifth Avenue or Les Champs Elysée. It put off audiophiles irrecoverably.

Others have tried the build it and they will come retail model for audio. The store that I grew up learning about true high-end audio was called SoundEx. Like Hansen’s, they sold close to everything audio. Every brand, even ones that directly competed like Krell and Mark Levinson or Transparent and MIT cables. They did their sales from a dumpy house in a somewhat retail location near the Pennsylvania Turnpike outside of Philadelphia. In their heyday, they had a community of buyers from all over the area that would congregate over piles of rare Mobile Fidelity CDs, recently printed copies of The Absolute Sound and talk about the hobby on any given Saturday morning. They had the most high end gear tucked somewhere in the location and stuff that mainstream people could afford in this packed-to-the-gills retail dump and it was great. People from Manhattan would rent a car and come to the suburbs of Philadelphia to get the same discounts that they could have gotten in the Big Apple but the unspoken secret was that they were also looking to save on New York sales tax. That made SoundEx a juggernaut back then. The only problem is that SoundEx’s owners didn’t understand that value proposition. Long after the lesson of Chris Hansen and packing a warning from me, they built a 26 room, two-story showroom that had everything. Everything but video in the era of $10,000 plus plasmas that sold like hotcakes. Their community eroded despite having everything audio under one roof and displayed wonderfully. The New York people bought more in New York or from dealers with lower overhead (think: more margin to give away). SoundEx went out of business in pretty short order after that.

How Do We Attract  New Blood to the Audio Hobby?

In the more modern era, The McIntosh showroom in So Ho is a very cool place if you’ve never been there. It is a somewhat hidden New York City gem that is worthy of making an appointment to experience. They’ve got the best in audio and state-of-the-art home theater and 4K video on display in the most chill, supercool location. Yet somehow the showroom seems to be sustainable more than creative office space and specifically as Lower Manhattan event space. Other globally known retailers in the heart of the audiophile world simply can’t turn enough top-line revenue to have ground-level retail stores. They are moving higher and higher up into second floor (or higher) spaces that have smaller rents but have little to no walk-in traffic.

In effect, the audiophile hobby presents itself like a luxury goods product, but it plays out something else. Perhaps audiophiles are hunting down a passion project or they view the hobby more like a unique religion. Each audiophile is on an (often non-scientific) journey to find what sounds best to them or what other people think sound best for them. Used gear has been and plays an increasingly important role to the hobby. Presenting the best of the latest technology in a glamorous setting is historically proven not to be as important.

So, where do we go from here? Successful audiophile locations in more affordable “retail” locations seemingly are the future of AV retail. Perhaps they aren’t retail locations at all? You need room to highlight what the best of audio and video can do and that’s crazy expensive in the world’s most well-known locations. Looking at Sunny Components east of Downtown Los Angeles, I see a warehouse-like location that sells some of the best products in a very approachable way that isn’t too offensive to the remaining core audience of audiophiles. Smaller, multi-purpose stores like boutique bookstores, craft beer gardens and other more off-beat locations are uniquely good for promoting new, younger audiences into entry level gear. If you sold beer for a few bucks a pint, wouldn’t you like to make the occasional $1,000 audiophile system sale? The industry would benefit from another nationwide retail option such as the one that Circuit City offered, yet you will notice nobody stepped into that now decade-old void.

The lack of new blood in the hobby is going to demand that there is more and more creativity in terms of how the future of the audiophile business plays out. The COVID-inspired lack of audiophile shows isn’t helping matters much. The lack of regional and national chains of AV isn’t good either. The great hope is that the Millennial generation, who loves music perhaps more than any before it, will embrace higher end “performance audio” as they late-bloom into home ownership and delve deeper into technology.