Is There A Glass Ceiling Operating In Audio?

Maybe not any more…

By Roy Gregory

As the world emerges, blinking into the harsh light of a nearly post-Covid reality, we hear constant references to the ‘New Normal’. There’s no doubt that many things won’t be returning to the way they were before – and one of those things is going to be the audio industry. You can expect to see significant changes in both the way we buy audio equipment and the audio equipment that we buy. But to understand why that’s going to happen – and for any of us to have any impact on what actually does happen – it’s necessary to understand the status quo ante and the conditions that created it. That means looking back at not just where we were but how we got there. This is all to do with the products we are offered, the prices we pay, the brands that get attention and the ones that get ignored. Why does this matter? If high-end audio is a performance-based pursuit, as opposed to being about the acquisition of ‘stuff’, anything that stands in the way of progress should be considered bad. A system that defends existing producers in a shrinking market is hardly conducive to advancing the state-of-the-art – but that’s exactly what we’ve been putting up with for years.

Look back ten years and, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I believe that it’s fair to say standards of audio performance have stagnated. Products have got bigger and so have their price tags, but where are the compelling, breakthrough performers, the great leaps forward in musical performance. They’re there – but you have to search for them, buried amongst the mountains of same-old, same old from the same old faces. That’s the nub of the problem in a nutshell. The last two years – the Covid period – has seen a series of genuinely innovative and ground-breaking products emerge, some of them to market prominence. Think Wadax and CH Precision as serious examples, amongst others. Yet neither is a new brand and in neither case has the technology and engineering they rely on for their demonstrably superior performance only existed for or emerged during those two years. Quite the contrary. In both cases, the performance, the innovative approaches and technology have been there from the start – it’s just that they never received the attention or prominence they deserved. That’s worth thinking about…

The term ‘glass ceiling’ is probably familiar and it is generally used to refer to a structure or system that suppresses one group (eg. Women) in order to preserve the interests of another. It’s got other names too and, if “the old boys network” doesn’t carry exactly the same meaning, it definitely results in the same elevation of interest over talent and capability. You don’t need to dig too far into the recent history of the audio industry to see such suppressive tendencies at work. But before you all start thinking I’m some sort of conspiracy theorist with notions of an elaborate and far-reaching plot, nothing could be further from the truth. The glass ceiling that has operated in the audio industry is the inevitable result of rampant self-interest and extreme market pressures. But when those pressures increase dramatically, any structure that can’t (or won’t) bend is going to shatter – and that’s just what’s happened with Covid.