Is social media good or bad for HiFi in general and us as audiophiles?
So, is social media helping HiFi get better? Is it helping us to better our own systems? Or are we losing valuable time that we could use for music listening? Because that's what it is all about, listening to music, right?
I'm going to be frank; i started using social media back when I was in college, only because two of my closest friends went out, one to Japan and the other one to the States. And at the time, there was no other option so; it was either phone or Facebook? I entered the realm of Facebook so I could go keep in touch with them. I never really liked the idea of hanging out with people who I do not know personally. This was my prejudice.
Over the years i used internet to better my knowledge but really never turned to socials for that purpose. Then when we started our own HiFi furniture company, one of one of the best ways to promote our audio racks and speaker stands was to let yourself be known trough social media. At that time I have rediscovered social media especially Facebook and YouTube as a tool to not only market Myro audio racks & speaker stands but to upgrade my own system, since i considered myself an audiophile from 2005 (that is when the value of my system started being more valuable than my car).
There are pros and cons to everything, this is the case here also:
Pros
+ Socials have helped everything open up in HiFi industries. During years they were there were many barriers to get in. So if you were a great engineer and made great amplifiers and not that expensive there was only about two ways of letting people know that they actually exist. The first one was to go about and pay magazines to show everybody that you exist. The other ones were to go to the shows hifi shows that fairly regularly occur all around the world. And both of those types of distributions or marketing are relatively expensive for starter, so a great engineer and an innovator that has a great product has basically one chance to make it happened and that is to make a proposal to some big company that will basically market it. The history has shown that this just didn't happen. Big corporate companies are not in it for the love, or the progress of HiFi, they're in it only for the money. And even though they started out of love and excitement the corporate have their own values that have nothing to do with their own start. So what happened in late 70s, early 80's is that many of really high quality stuff was merged and acquired by this big corporate companies and basically a lot of the really high end high quality equipment stopped producing just because the low quality, cheaper material, cheaper everything showed up to be much more profitable. As the time progressed, the price of the piece of audio equipment is constituted more and more on marketing expenses and less and less on the real product value. The socials and web in general have been a "great equalizer" for the industry and that is a major positive. Now small producers of hi end equipment can now stand up and be counted and recognized. Now people can speak directly to us and we can make them custom solid wood hifi rack or custom speaker stand with no additional expenses.
+ The other great advantage to the company getting into the Hi Fi business is that no other type of connection would give you this kind of frank, honest, sometimes brutal and instant response of the market. This is hugely beneficial, if your Ego can handle it. Even though out there might be some people who have their own issues, and can act kind of mean. Even this kind of meanness is very good and valuable for the company. This kind of people are more open and are not afraid to say what other people might be thinking anyway, at least in an on-line format. And this is a huge advantage! There's no other marketing channel that will give that honest response, and you're looking for response because that's the only way you are going to get better. People applauding you for your achievements is nice and can be satisfying, but can usher you and in the long run even harm you. I think the first one is a lot more significant and will help individual or the company more than the second one. This kind of honest, face value, sometimes brutal response is going to come out more often in social then, in real time, people to people men to men, personal discourse. This is a huge, huge benefit of the social media. Sometimes even though they're trying to do a bad thing and ruin your reputation at the end they end up doing a good thing by keeping you on your edge. From time to time we would malicious comment on one of our audio racks or speaker stands from people that really have no insights in to what we are doing and we would always try to understand their objections because there is a chance that we did not communicate everything about our hifi rack or speaker stand well enough.
The socials have their bad sides also
- Socials can become a bottomless pit; there is too much information, to many opinions, too much time to can be wasted on this kind of social discourse. The only real solution i have at my disposal is to limit the time that will be devoted to this. By doing so, it will make me more efficient on the web. I just do not have the time to take this and that side road. We love HiFi, and everything about it, but we are in a job of making Hi End audio racks and stands and this needs to be the focus of our attention.
- Beware of the advices you receive on social or on-line discourse. I this "anonymous" world people are usually playing roles and are eager to spread wisdom they do not possess. This can be costly for them and their followers also.
The only thing we can do here is to carefully chose who will we follow and whose advices we can respect. Also it is important that even if we think somebody is worthy of our time that we still measure his words, all humans can make mistake and no following should be absolute. We try to answer to questions regarding audio racks, anti-vibration treatment, speaker stand height...and will not go into topics that we are not that comfortable with.
To conclude, we believe socials and web in general have many advantages if used wisely and with measure. They are a great equalizer and can unite people at the time when everything is fragmenting. We just have to tame the trolls and focus on the good, there is so many good things out there.
Thank you for bearing with us,
Myro HiFi furniture