As I sit here typing, we are a few days away from my wife and kids moving back into the house after a pretty major kitchen cabinet upgrade in our home. A few years ago, I had purchased some good equipment, including a six-burner Wolf cooktop, a new oven, a new microwave, and a flush-mounted fan for over the cooktop, as well as new Caesar Stone in white (with a gray vein to it) in the center island. Respectfully, the kitchen, with its 29-year-old, spec-house-grade cabinets, looked like ass warmed over. I kid you not, the brown, worn cabinets were just brutal-looking. The doors slammed loudly. The drawers didn’t always close that well and, overall, the kitchen didn’t look finished or high-end at all, despite a good $25,000 invested in the partial redo. Sadly, we didn’t really invite our friends over for dinner parties as we did in the pre-pandemic era, but that’s all about to change. The last bid I got to paint over 78 cabinets and drawers (that’s a lot) was $12,800, and I understandably balked. I ended up mentioning my kitchen cabinet frustration to my beloved cleaning lady, Maria Lopez, and she launched into action by enthusiastically recommending her friend from church, Walter. Let’s just say that, for $6,000, Water crushed it with the kitchen cabinet repainting project. In four days, we took everything apart, got it painted, re-installed with new hardware, new pulls, and a bluish-gray paint that unexpectedly makes the cabinets look great, as well as makes the black-and-white stone look fantastic, too. We couldn’t be happier with the project.
With everybody out of the house by design, we’ve taken on some other projects, too. We’ve removed much of the audiophile and non-audiophile baby-proofing that was needed over the past two years. That is a massive improvement. Another change is that my wife has never gotten the chance to do any interior design in any of our last three homes. I always did that, as I was the one who worked with the architect and I was the one with the “to the trade” 35 percent off discounts, but that is changing. I am about to go away for two weeks to see clients all over the country this fall. During that time, my wife has been given a pretty meaningful budget and full autonomy to decorate the house as she sees fit. I plan to come home from my trip and screech in joy like a Midwest housewife who just saw the reveal of her home on an HGTV home improvement show. In a very strange way, I am kinda looking forward to said reveal, although I will try to not act like I just won free Tom Petty tickets from the local classic rock FM radio station while calling in from my lunch break. I will try to keep my cool if I can, but no guarantees.
One element of our home that needed to die a miserable death was our main living room sofa.The sofa that we brought from our last home absolutely didn’t fit as it was a “left turn” sofa, and we needed a normal, three-seater sofa instead. At the time that we realized this, it was early and super-scary COVID. So, what we did was to order a Room and Board Metro 108-inch-wide sofa, which was a brand and style that we had in our old home in Brentwood (the next canyon over from where Kamala Harris lives when she’s not in D.C.). We knew it was fairly priced and we thought that we liked it. It was in stock and arrived for delivery in about a week, which was great. What wasn’t great was that the sofa was absolutely terrible to sit on. It was too deep. It was too low. The pillows didn’t fluff up very well, so it only looked good on Fridays, when Maria and her team had cleaned. My wife and I didn’t sit together, because the structure below the sofa made that physically uncomfortable. It is safe to say that we hated the sofa, and this felt like a good time to get rid of it.
So, with everybody else in a VRBO for a while longer, I put an ad with some photos on CraigsList.com. Note: this is the sofa that I listen to audio on, thus this sofa needs to be comfortable, and it simply wasn’t. Within a day, I got an email from a young man asking if the sofa was still available. It was, and he came over in a rented U-Haul pickup truck with his able-bodied buddy. He saw the sofa, which just last week was steam-cleaned, peeled off the required $500 cash and started loading it into the truck. I added in a very luxurious, round brown leather ottoman, which was a leftover from the aforementioned poorly-fitting sofa from the last house. This young man didn’t hesitate to send me $200 more via PayPal, and that item also went in the U-Haul truck. It was a pleasure doing business with him.
As the buyer and his young Gen Z buddy were loading up the rented pickup truck, they asked me about my Bowers & Wilkins 802 D4 speakers, which are quite dominant in the living room. I opened up the doors on my equipment rack, and their tech-savvy jaws hit the floor. They couldn’t believe what two Middle Atlantic equipment racks looked like filled with a full object-based surround sound theater, a full Crestron Home automation system, and nine zones of Sonos for distributed audio, as well as my audiophile gear. The rack is pretty impressive, if I say so myself.
With the truck packed, I did something important. I did something that I am going to encourage every FutureAudiophile.com reader to do. I sat these two men down and played them a little bit of music: three tracks to be exact. I asked them what they wanted to listen to, and they asked for Led Zeppelin. I am down with that, even if Jimmy, Robert, John and John Paul aren’t always the best-sounding audiophile recordings. I did start off with my go-to demo track right now, which is Beyonce’s cover of “Blackbird” from her country album Cowboy Carter. It took them about 10 seconds before they were effusive about the sound. They muttered key phrases like, “I didn’t know music could sound like this at home.” That’s right, you didn’t, but I wasn’t going to let your ass go home without an experience.
We talked about experiences versus assets, which is a huge difference between my Generation X and Millennials. The buyer was Gen Z, and he works for SpaceX down by LAX. The other guy is a Millennial, and he has a software startup company that makes business software. They seemed to understand that owning things is an advantage over just consuming them. I told them that I could have bought the Pass Labs XP-22 two-chassis stereo preamp outright for what I spent for a business-class ticket to the Munich show (connecting through Frankfurt). They seemed to get it.
Their next level of questioning showed why these young men are headed somewhere good in life. They asked if they could afford a system like this. How much did this cost? My audio gear is perhaps $45,000 total at this point, maybe $50,000, but I reassured them that by no means do you have to spend $50,000 to be happy. $1,500 is a great start. I told them about Chi-Fi and some of the other brands like Monoprice and Schiit, which allow us to build meaningful audiophile systems for very reasonable prices.
I played them the Marcin cover of “Kashmir,” which was a Led Zeppelin warm-up, and they loved it. The familiar melody made the 1:30 (don’t let your demos go longer than that, ever) audition sound great and be very relatable. I finished with “The Song Remains the Same,” the breakneck opening track from Houses of the Holy, perhaps my favorite Led Zeppelin record. I spooled the music down a bit after the opening settled down and the first verse started. They had a look of both joy and astonishment on their faces. I had done something good here.
I did nothing more than tempt these young men with the potential of good audio. I didn’t spend more than 10 minutes playing them music. And they were hooked. They have the love of music. They have money coming in from a SpaceX “coder” salary. The problem was that they had no clue that music playback could sound like this. After 10 minutes, they wanted it.
Before they left, I took them into my office, where they tried on a few of my over-the-ear wireless audiophile headphones, including Mark Levinson No. 5909s (my reference), and the $1,600 T+A Solitaire headphones, which are gorgeous. They tried on Bowers & Wilkins PX8s, as well as some open-back HIFIMAN Deva headphones. I informed them that, for less than the price of a used Room and Board sofa, they can start their audiophile journey with a pair of $399 headphones. They were quite receptive.
Final Thoughts on Reaching Out to Today’s Youth Regarding Audio and Music …
All you need to do in order to take the lead here and run with it is to be extroverted enough to invite someone younger who loves music to experience your audio system. Simply put, 95 out of 100 possible young audiophiles don’t have a clue about what is possible. Unlike me with my best friend’s dad, my Dad and my stepfather back in the 1980s, they simply have never been exposed to the joys of good music playback.
I cannot emphasize enough the point to not do a long audiophile demo. Three songs, 10 minutes maximum, unless they are begging for more.
Would you consider being an audiophile evangelical? Who could you invite over to hear your system? Who could you take to visit a local stereo store? A nephew? A friend of one of your kids? There has to be somebody.
The establishment print magazines are owned by Baby Boomers. Their content is written by Baby Boomers, and they have little to no capacity to change, even while staring down the barrel of a demographic problem that is enough to end the hobby and business of audiophilia. Don’t expect them to stop gushing about $100,000 tube preamps and promoting gear to same old audience that they always have. They just aren’t going to evolve. We are, and by “we,” I mean that there are plenty of Boomers who will take me up on the challenge to share the fun of our hobby with others.
You and you alone can make a difference in the future of this hobby. We all can. If we all did just one demo for one young person (women love music and hear really well, too, despite the 99/1 demographic split in the hobby today), then there is renewed hope.
The severe demographic problem with our hobby isn’t the product and/or experience not being effective. The issue is one of younger, music-loving folks being exposed to audio so that they know the health, lifestyle and artistic benefits of the hobby. That’s a challenge that we can all easily live up to and, when we do, we create a whole new market of buyers. That’s an exciting thought.
How would you best be able to do some outreach? Would your FedEx or UPS driver want to hear your system? Do you have kids from the local high school or college who might want to learn a little more about audio? Who can you do outreach for? I’ve done this one demo and I am looking for new people to introduce the joy of our hobby, too. Some of the assistant golf pros at my club come to mind. Who will you do outreach with? Who have you already done this with? Will you agree to help grow the hobby to a new demographic?
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