Are headphones, sound bars, and the like not an enormous market segment? Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?
This reads like "I feel totally alone in diverging from the norm that microwave TV dinners are as good as any other food, I much prefer home cooked meals". Like... that's not a controversial opinion, that's normal. OP taking an elitist stance about doing something that everybody else does and having an opinion that everybody else agrees with.
30 years ago members of the general public spent money on home stereos with good speakers. Photos, videos, and movies from the 80s of male teenagers' rooms all had at least decent stereos if not pretty good stereos.
And now they don't. Your comment conflates two things: what people agree is true vs what people do. Everyone knows that decent stereos or audio setups sound better than phone speakers. That isn't up for debate. But they stopped buying decent amplifiers and speakers because music precipitously dropped as a cultural cornerstone with the mainstreaming of the Internet. If you ask someone with headphones on today what they're listening to, it's just as likely to be music as it is to be podcasts, news, youtube videos about video games, or youtube videos about a random topic that you would never think people would care that much about.
> Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?
This is actually a pretty good example. Obviously they would notice. But it turns out that they don't actually care very much: the masses are perfectly happy to watch shows and movies on tiny screens with terrible audio.
This is just false. People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it. TVs are still found in every home even though they are rarely hooked up to anything other than internet streaming any more.
The reason sound systems aren't as popular as they were in the 80s is that most modern TVs come with decent stereo sound, and bluetooth headphones are excellent. People are buying decent amplifiers and speakers, built in to other things because manufacturers know that they will get more sales if they make the built-in audio quality of their devices better.
What did I write that is false? You didn't actually contradict any of it. You wrote about what people prefer and I wrote about what people do.
> People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it.
Their actions indicate their preferences. If they're doing it a certain way then they, by definition, prefer to do it that way. No one is forcing them to do otherwise. Audio equipment is not expensive.
I think a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are confusing a simple majority of the whole population, with a large minority which obviously does care enough about audio but is nevertheless a minority.
25% of US adults, say, spending on audio gear may be a huge market segment, but it's still a minority!
I don't think that's true either, because most people I know (even ones who don't have tons of disposable income) have invested in some form of speaker system or headphones. I don't know anybody who just listens to music from their phone speakers.
I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.
> I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.
The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.
> The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.
The point is that there's a $100b+ industry towards selling audio devices.
You can debate to what extent people care about audio quality, and what tradeoffs they're willing to make for better quality, but you can't deny that the majority of people appreciate that phone speakers are not the optimal audio setup.
In my experience, most people will choose to listen to music directly from a phone or laptop even when there is a good floor speaker system in the same room they could connect to and play through in seconds, because they just don't care.
If you're talking about someone hosting a party where they're playing music off their phone/laptop, that's something I've never personally seen before lol
I'm talking about my family members and girlfriend playing music or movies in a room where I have a great stereo system, and not connecting to it, even though they are already paired and just need to click the icon.
I think you hit the nail on the head- people think a big stereo is for volume levels, not quality. They will obviously switch to it when they want things louder, but often not before.
Not sure what your definition of normie is, but that's been my experience across a fairly wide spectrum of US society.
When I went to public high school in rural America, pretty much everyone I knew owned some sort of headphone/speaker system, and they would be used at every party / larger gathering where audio was important.
It depends on the context though. Obviously if someone is just sharing something casual like a Youtube video on their phone, they're going to use the built-in speakers.
Hmm, I know a lot of people who just use the earbuds that came with their phone. I guess those aren’t included nowadays, but for a while there it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that most people had never bought a pair of headphones.
But like always “most” depends on the population. Most people would have no opinions or nonsense opinions on programming languages I guess, because most people have never written a line of code. It doesn’t tell us much about the popular programming languages, the general population is just the wrong one to sample for that kind of info.
>I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent
Considering the top100, yah, no one cares about audio quality. Airpods are a symbol of status, not a relevant audio accessory, and from a hifi perspective, they are shit. Im not saying they dont sound good, what Im saying is that equalization does miracles when the sound isn't there. The compression format is lossy.
I don't ask people for their IQ score before I spend time with them, but this has held true across the entire cross-section of society that I've personally experienced. When I was working as a dishwasher, everyone would bring small Bluetooth speakers to their area if they wanted to listen to music.
Do you think that people with a certain background / IQ score are not enlightened enough to recognize tinniness or poor sound quality?
You're misinterpreting my comment. I was not implying any correlation between IQs and audiophile-ness. I was pulling out a random example of a counter-intuitive property that "most people" have, though it's clear from your response that I picked a bad example.
I can't claim to speak for everybody, but I think that as high-end (relative to previous standards) audio tech has become very mainstream over the last decade or two, most people recognize that the default phone/laptop speaker setup isn't ideal.
Its actually not true, but is that relevant? Can't a simpleton of IQ 60 be the bearer of golden ears?
You seem to equate variable "measurable puzzle-solving skills" with common sense and capacity to act on a specific domain; please don't do it, because it makes the rest of us feel sorry for you.
