Hi-Fi Choice mag to vanish?

[Puffin]

I'd bet that Alex UK's "avatar" will grow up not only to love music, but value how well it is reproduced by a quality hi-fi system - and that'll be thanks to what he's doing now to educate her accordingly

How many more of us here with kids (who will form the next generation) are doing their bit to the same extent?
Marco.

I have two grown up children, one male, one female. The female listens to music on her iphone, the male nicked a lot of kit off me but is not into hifi, only freeloading!!!

They have both seen and heard all the hifi kit I have had over the years and it has not made one blind bit of difference. Alex's daughter is likely to follow the latest trend and want a nice pink "eyeclone" or whatever, regardless of sound quality. it's a different generation.

[Marco]

Perhaps, Rob, but perhaps not. All we can do though is *try*

Quite often, the interests that kids have can be shaped by those of their parents, although my dad wasn't into hi-fi in the slightest, nor indeed music to any great extent. In that respect, I probably took after my uncle.

I did, however, grow up to share my dad's passion for air-rifle (and clay pigeon) shooting, and for a while took that to quite a serious level, in terms of entering competitions, etc...

How many of us here obtained our interest in hi-fi and music from our parents or members of our family? I know that things have changed, but it's not impossible that we could also influence our kids too, in that respect, to *some* degree, and thus do our bit to try and keep our hobby alive.

Marco.

[keiths]

How many of us here obtained our interest in hi-fi and music from our parents?

Not me. All my parents had when I was young was a 'Bush' record player with a (BSR?) autochanger with amp and speaker built in (marginally upmarket 'Dancette') and a bunch of 'K-Tel' LPs. My hi-fi and music interest came via my cousin - so 'peer influence' rather than parental.

[chelsea]

Peer influence.

[Alex_UK]

Well, Avatar already has most of a vinyl system waiting in the wings, but whether she will actually want it is a different matter! Hifi and music is no different to anything else - all you can do is expose them too it, and leave them to make up their own minds. I agree with Stuart, though - very hard to fight against peer pressure, but then no reason why kids can't enjoy "proper" hifi and an iPod - I do.

[Pete The Cat]

Hi-Fi Answers
Hi-Fi Sound
Popular Hi-Fi
What Hi-Fi
And the relatively newly acquired Gramophone.

And that is just Haymarket publishing - how many of them are still published - just the last two.

Hi-Fi Answers has closed ?!@#? I've read up to October '87 now, please say it ain't so...

Pete

[colinB]

I didnt get into hifi until i was 30. The aspiration isnt the same as it was.
Plus a lot of young people i knew with a sound system were students blowing their grant check down Richer Sounds. Not much chance of that now.

[Marco]

Well, Avatar already has most of a vinyl system waiting in the wings, but whether she will actually want it is a different matter! Hifi and music is no different to anything else - all you can do is expose them too it, and leave them to make up their own minds.

Precisely!

So how many of us here with kids old enough, I wonder, are exposing them to our hobby, in the way Alex has indicated?

And how many haven't even bothered trying because "it's a different generation", or because of some other excuse (and I'm not referring to you here, Rob)?

Defeatism or apathy never were the catalysts for achievement!

Marco.

[nat8808]

Two things

1 Google is your friend
2 Ask for users on all the forums

Jerry will take the risk, and then tell you all about it

Neither help unfortunately, even today, when needing to quickly research gear on Ebay - briefest of mentions in hifi news from feb '89 are all I go on sometimes.

Try Googling old gear, even stuff that not that rare - nothing comes up, no opinions, unless it's over hyped and over-priced. Anything non-mainstream gets a bit drowned out.

Ask on forums - can wait weeks before a reply on rare stuff and you don't want to alert people to the auction either...

Without my collection of every Hifi News from 70's - 2000 I wouldn't be able to work out a lot of the stuff I see on ebay.. Would like to expand that to Hifi Choice and Hifi Review etc but Emporium Hifi has stuffed that by flooding Ebay with all their magazines at £4 minimum and so no-one now sells their collections as one lot anymore.

And forums delete years old posts, online magazines will go off line taking all the reviews with them etc etc etc

You need hard copies for any kind of longer term information - all there in the old magazines.

[Lodgesound]

When I was 2 years old the guy who lived next door to us had a reel to reel machine - I used to sit on the floor in his lounge and watch the reels go round and listen to whatever - my mother had to come round and almost drag me away for dinner....

When I was 6 some neighbours gave me an old Sony reel to reel machine -used to love it - distmantled it, serviced it and learnt how it worked. I was 7 when I was given an old PYE Black Box and connected the output of the reel to reel to it's amplifier's input to get a better sound.

My dad brought a separates system when I was 8 - fairly modest but it did sound good. I told my mother that I wanted to work in a job operating tape recorders when I was older - she said not to be ridiculous and that no such job existed.

Ten years later I landed a job at the BBC as a Recording Operator running 2" and 1" videotape recorders. I heard my first decent HiFi when I was 15 - I was 23 when I aquired my first pair of BBC LS 5/8 speakers. By 33 I was considered superflous as I was too old (I made the mistake of going into London post production houses - the biggest waste of my working life to date - I wasted nearly 12 years there). Made redundant on my 40th Birthday as my skills were no longer of any use.

My influence was my dad listening to music which spread to me - I now own several broadcast tape machines and a fairly decent monitoring setup and recently dumped or gave away much of my spare equipment. I still love recorded music but fear that it just does'nt play the same part in people's lives that it once used to. I have many personal theories as to why this is so but I think that the introduction of DVD's and how cheap they became played a large part in turning films into a throw-away medium which has done incredible damage to the recorded music industry and thus the HiFi industry. In my time in broadcasting I saw technology change in ways I could not have possibly imagined it would to the point where it now requires absolutely no skilled technical operators at all.

I sincerely hope that you are right Marco and do believe that a once quite large industry will shrink to "White Dwarf" levels - very small, very dense and very specialised for those who still love music as the members of this forum do.

For my part I can no longer make ends meet working within a formerly reasonably well paid industry and although I still do a job within it am about to study and hopefully qualify in Gas and Heating engineering.

Please feel free to delete or move this if you feel it's too off-topic Marco - I was inspired by the whole "passing on to our kids" thing (I never had any myself).

These magazines are very sadly feeling the effects of a very much more serious decline. I believe that the current model for downloading / selling music is fundamentally flawed - you only have to look at the boom in vintage audio equipment and records to see that. People STILL want to own and collect the physical asset - you cannot get excited over a piece of software but you can over a marvellous piece of engineering or some lovely cover art.

Somehow files and the whole download thing seem to be sucking the life out of the industry and out of the buying public.

I would love to see it change.