| Meanwhile, it's possible for someone to spend less money than ever before to get really good sound. Sell the Beats earmuffs and pick up Superlux HD668B headphones for under $50. Drop the Apple earbuds in the garbage and get TRN V80 in-ear-monitors for under $50. Add a pack of random eartips to figure out which ones are most comfortable for you. Your MBP's built-in speakers have no bass below 160Hz or so, and bluetooth party speakers have all the sonic charm of a box of Kleenex. Spend $300 on a pair of JBL 305P powered speakers and plug anything into them -- they're a distinct upgrade from basically everything costing less and an awful lot of speakers costing twice as much. Buy your music on CDs and spend the ten minutes per disc copying them. Do you know you can fit 1300 full CDs in a one terabyte disk without any compression at all? Or buy FLAC or any other non-lossy compression version. Buy directly from artists whenever possible: give them the best margins. Use wires. Use headphone jacks. Use cheap ground loop isolators when you get hum from power lines -- they used to be really expensive, now they cost $10. We live in a time of high-quality low-cost devices that play music much better than anything your parents could have bought without spending a month's grocery money. |
Is that really the case? I've got some late 70s / early 80s Fisher speakers that sound almost as good as the best bookshelf speakers you can buy today. I rather enjoy the sound more than the JBL 305P studio monitors. While the Fishers are less precise, they're more enjoyable to listen to. (The trick is to put them on a desk at an angle the same way you would for studio monitors, and turn them upside down so the treble stays at ear level.)
I can't imagine Fisher costing an arm and a leg back then, and back then Fisher speakers were sold at normal electronic stores, while today high end audio has to be bought at specialty stores like Guitar Center or online. Today if you go to a Best Buy, they'll have some thousand dollar home theater speaker setup that could sound better. The average consumer thinks that is what top of the line is and sounds like, when in fact they're being sold a lie.
High end speakers were once accessible and advertised to the masses, unlike today. Today you have to be a specialist, an "audiophile", or some other niche title.
In an ever increasing mobile world, mobile speakers have taken over. While some of the in ear headphones are amazing, and I hope this trend continues, it will be a while -- if ever -- when we get portable speakers that sound decent. One of the problems is the direction of the sound, and the other is the Bluetooth compression itself leaving manufacturers to make their speakers fuzzy to counter the compression.