I hope folks don’t mind me sharing my views on these forums. They can come off alarming I know, but my posts here are based in reality not fiction.
The 80’s and 90’s we spent our time as insiders recruiting young and middle aged listeners into this wonderful hobby. HEA up till the mid-90’s fit. The hobby was still pure in many ways bringing in fresh designers who were sound driven more than money. The CES was the mother of shows and then the other shows were the regional spin offs supporting the CES. The main floor of the CES today, is young an full of innovation, teamed up with a mature foundation. Electronics now are performance based with affordability and practicality in mind. Today’s electronics aren’t here to replace the room, but to use it as part of the equation.
The now generation looks at equipment stacked against a wall quite differently vs the guys trying to impress by saying how much their system cost them. Now, hobbyist using a dollar amount to describe their system means nothing. Look at the posts here using a dollar figure to describe their sound instead of sound itself describing the sound. Those statements hold no appeal for the guy or gal walking around the CES main floor. HEA has isolated itself for 20 some years now, not being the leader any more, and not even being a competitor in smart systems.
Smart audio is about using the environment as the medium, not sitting there looking at components as if they can do something magical. Are you following me yet? Saying "my system cost $250,000.00" is yesteryear. It registers a zero for a 25 year old music lover looking to be inside of a soundstage. Listeners now are looking to the experience not a component chassis. Most of them don’t know what a radioshack RTA even is. Today’s listener is beyond home brew bench testing, or home brew "experts" looking at numbers to explain their distortion levels. Some of the new listeners reading this post right now are going to be getting ahold of me, simply for the reason that I’m talking about now. And, that’s not going to change or suddenly flip back to some old school belief in expensive chassis. Remember the days when there was a radioshack or 2 in every town along with a couple of stereo stores? There’s a reason they are no longer there. There's a reason HEA is no longer on the main floor of the CES.
mg