Is there room for Venus in hi-fi heaven?

Is there room for Venus in hi-fi heaven?

                        

Why are most women not interested in hi-fi?  Or, more pertinently, why are they not interested in the technicalities involved in buying and setting up the equipment? I do not see much involvement from women in the hi-fi world. Is the male dominated hi-fi industry missing a trick here? Half the population seems to be ignored.

The other day I was at my local street market and spent a lot of time thumbing through the second-hand records on a stand. The friendly and talkative proprietor was playing his records through a smart-looking bright red record player; the music did not sound too bad considering that the device only cost £99.

 An older lady was thumbing through the records too and then asked the salesman if the player could go louder - maybe it was for her grandson. “Yes” he said. “You can connect it up to your main hi-fi with a line connexion and then it will sound like a CD” - a slight exaggeration, I thought. She might as well have been talking to an audiophile Martian. She probably did not believe him and walked away without buying anything.

A younger woman arrived at the stand and asked the record man if the player had a line output. “Yes”, he said enthusiastically. He then tried to engage her in conversation about hi-fi amplifiers but she drifted away apparently embarrassed to have asked such a simple question. Maybe, she was only attracted by the bright colours.

The record man talked to me instead. He knew all about old record players and turntables with idler drives and such like. I bought a Jefferson Starship LP and took it home. My wife thought it sounded great and said, “Let’s play records more often”; but I had to flip the disc over to the second side.

My wife loves jazz, the Pink Floyd and the Beatles. When I was courting her, she had bought a really good separates system with a Pioneer deck which she had set up for herself. She is no technophobe and can fix up a WI-FI system and change a computer’s sound card with ease. But, she only does any of this when I am on a business trip; when I return I have to do all things technical concerning the hi-fi and the PC. I get the feeling that she is bored by the button pressing and would just rather leave it all to me. She, like most of her gender, is more interested in the human aspects of playing music rather than just being attracted to the equipment for its own sake.

We have an easy relationship when it comes to hi-fi as my wife knows that I have got the good sense not to spend an unaffordable fortune on kit. The wife of a former colleague did not have such luck. Her “other half”  invited us  to their apartment one evening to listen to thousands of pounds worth of “high-end” turntables, CD transports, amplifiers and their ancillaries.

We were treated to an evening of audio nirvana during which he was tweaking the equipment with filters and stroboscopic adjustments. He asked us to decide which sounded better - CD or LP? His wife could hardly tell the difference nor could mine and neither could I; such was the quality of the sound from both sources. He was convinced that LPs sounded so much better and would not accept our views.  I could not resist jibing, devilishly, that the turntable gave the best quality sound reproduction of a static discharge that I had ever heard.

My colleague’s wife averred that it would be better for their family budget if he plumped for just one format, CD, rather than duplicate the cost of different sources. And, anyway, the awful looking equipment was cluttering up their living room. I later found out that he had got himself into hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt to finance his enthusiasm. His wife’s ideas of how to listen to good music were much more realistic and took home economics and sociability into account.

Possibly, this extreme example points out the differences between most women and men and their approach to hi-fi. I find that women take a much more practical attitude, as they are much more interested in what the music sounds like rather than the technicalities of high resolution filters or advanced anti-skate devices.

I can see why women seem to have been excluded from the hi-fi market; it is because they are not interested in listening to or reading about techno-babble or tweaking equipment.  The sales of hi-fi separates are continuing to fall because young people in general are not interested either - the market is now in a crisis. The purchase of high fidelity equipment could soon be limited to rich, or highly indebted, male enthusiasts.

When it comes to hi-fi women are no fools; they want high quality music at a fair price. They want to hear music that makes them feel good by playing attractive and user friendly equipment. Perhaps, it is time for the manufacturers to appeal to both sexes before the market place is completely flooded by cheap headphones, MP3 players and docking stations.

Women could be the driving force that pushes a healthier and more profitable industry into a new era of practicality which appeals to the social nature of listening to good music through good equipment.  There is still time to avert a crisis by giving hi-fi heaven the sex appeal to attract Venus.