Current Trends In Home Audio

I've been hanging around a few "hi-end" stores in my area for about 20 years. All of them are in to "whole House" audio. The trend has been "ease of use" and "I don't want to see it - I just want to here it" for about the last 8 to 10 years. Most of the systems are designed around Denon, yamaha and sony entry level stuff with in-wall or in-celing speakers. The stores keep a few hi-end pieces on display, but their bread and butter is custom install. Even the big hi-end stores like Soundex in Philly make the majority of their money on custom install. Makes it really apparent how small a minority we are.

A few years ago, I programmed the home automation system in an $18,000,00 , 22000 square foot, 7 car garage home. They spent over $1,000,000 on the audio system - over $200,000 on the crestron stuff alone. The system took over three years to complete from the planning stage until we sat down with the owners and staff to show them how to use the system. Guess what type of equipment and speakers they use? Yes, that's right, Denon equipment and all inwall/inceiling speakers.

Last year when i was shopping around for house, it absolutly blew my mind how hard builders and designers worked to create houses that were as hard as possible to work HT or a 2 channel rig in. (laugh)

There was one line of homes, between 250,000-400,000 i was checking out, and the livingrooms were built against HT all the way. With the popularity of surround sound, you would think they would start incorperating this stuff into thier houses as perks.
In this specific line of houses, each house had the option of coming with a complete 5.1 surround sound system with in-ceiling KEF speakers and velodyne subwoofers. Now these houses had yer typical "TV nook" built in the wall with optional equipment racks above and below. The greatest part of these HT systems is that in the middle of the wall where the TV would sit, was a massive fireplace, and the actual TV nook itself was shoved in the corner, slightly to the left and below the Left channel. The center channel was directly above the fireplace.

Im not sure how much crack the designers were smoking, but last i checked the center channel is supposed to be over the TELEVISION, NOT 6 feet to the right. Every Stinking model of home they had was set up that way.

The house i finally settled on (my ex fiancee's mothers house) is about 20 years old and far far better for accousitcs or any type of AV setup. Especially since i have been gutting and renovating the entire interior for the past 6 months.

In colorado they have the "Parade of homes" where they build incredibly nice houses and furnish them, and people can come in and check them out, and even buy em. One of these houses actually had a high end audio room built in with non-parallel walls and all the accoustical treatments, along with a nice little 50,000 stereo system (wilson&levinson). Obviously one of the people involved in that house was an audiophile and knew what he was doing.

Interesting thread.

I'm curious.

How many of the houses had musical instuments? Pianos? Guitars?

My wife and I have been shopping around for a new home. About the only way you'r going to get a room for audio/HT is have them add a room above the garage. That's what we did in our current home.

We looked at a model that advertised whole house audio recently. The place had one of those cheap ass intercoms with an am/fm radio. I guess Bose is high end to these people. And, who listens to FM anymore with Clear Channel owning the whole industry?

Integration of a nice 2 channel stereo will be one of my top priorities in my next home/condo search...I totally agree with Slappy about the new construction homes that have the tv "nook" off to the side of the fireplace in a corner...lame lame lame.

There are so many factors that go into this question of "where are all the high end rigs"

Eyeballman brought up one point...in certain parts of the country, real estate prices prohibit many people from affording many other luxuries...after all...more people financed their homes with ARM's last year than ever in history only to be able to afford the house that they wanted.

In mid Missouri where I live, real estate is cheap so the luxuries are abound. I detail cars for Dr's and pretty much all of them have one or more 2 channel rigs (the high $$$ stuff too) and many of them have high end home theaters to boot, so I see alot of systems.

In Los Angeles, where my father lives, we frequent the open houses in his neighborhood when I am there and there seems to be a mixture of high end and mass market...it seems as if it just a matter of priorities. One house down the block houses the worlds largest private collections of classical guitars...the family had always been musicians and yup...there was a high end rig there...on the other hand, some homes had a bose wave radio/cd player in every room...but you wouldn't want to ask how much the antique living room rug is worth...lol...cause then you'd get a case of sticker shock. I don't think the people are "hiding" their gear...most people want to show it off...even to prospective buyers if only to have their house seem that much more luxurious and worth the asking price.

just my nickles worth

Ellery