| >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. |
Maybe they were $100 speakers in 1980? That would be about the same as a pair of powered JBLs now, except that you still need to get an amp for the Fishers.