Over the past 30 years in this country, there has been a trend in audio to go for convenience first and high fidelity second. This has resulted in the DOWN SIZING of speaker cabinets to increase the marketability. While this generated a garden of cute little speakers (little being the key word) it has done little for efficiency or fidelity. What suffers the most when you down size a speaker– bass response.

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A gentleman came to me the other day, a pleasant young man who was very intelligent, he needed to install a new computer here in the shop. (We won’t get into what happened to the old one!) He brought in a pair of speakers, one pictured at the left, in hopes that I could repair them for him. I could see he thought they were really good speakers… and I didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise. I hope he doesn’t bump into this page, or if he does, I hope he appreciates the education.After he left it dawned on me that so many people are like him, victims of ignorance, and by no fault of their own… really. So I thought I would just snap a picture of his speaker and use it as a visual aid to help educate the average person of the mass stereo crazed public!

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Living in the smack middle of the USA surrounded by corn in a society where audio is whatever they tell you it is, and high end audio is an incomprehensible psychedelic concept too ridiculous to be taken seriously… an audiophile could feel a little lost. Around here, high end shops sell mid fi - that to the encompassing miss informed local mass, appears to be hi fi.

I guess keeping this in perspective, I would think that possibly say what… 95% of this entire country fall into the same category of perceived audio nirvana phobia, where an appreciation for the emotional / spiritual intercourse with music does not exist.

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