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The future of home audio: Amazon Echo

Flint

Flint

Prodigal Son
Superstar
Goodness me! Believe it or not, smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home account for about 30% of all home audio speakers sold in the USA.

http://www.audioxpress.com/article/...arket-vpas-poised-to-create-new-wild-frontier

“In the US, smart speakers now account for nearly one out of every three shipments in the home audio hardware category,” says Rasika D’Souza, Senior Market Analyst at Futuresource Consulting. “That’s a feat that was inconceivable to many just a year or so ago, and it has the potential to unsettle the entire CE industry.

“Globally, in Q1 2017 alone, 3.4 million smart speakers were sold, with a retail value of more than $440 million. That’s year-on-year growth of 710%. When we factor in the wider opportunities for VPAs, things start to look very interesting indeed.​

This is amazing, to me. What does this say about the future of home audio? Any sound, even a single mono speaker, is good enough for listening to music at home?
 
Flint said:
What does this say about the future of home audio? Any sound, even a single mono speaker, is good enough for listening to music at home?
Click to expand...
For a majority of people, the answer to the second question is probably yes. They get to hear all that they want, or really need, to hear.

The mono Tivoli in my kitchen easily provides the majority of my daily "sound" (news and music) listening, followed by my computer speakers (and sub), car audio, outdoor "rock" speakers (depending on time of year), etc. Likely last on the list is my main HT system.

As to the first question: the future is a pretty lengthy bit of time so it probably says squat. There will be cycles, ups and downs, and roundabouts - in ever-increasing frequency - is all I'm willing to predict.

Jeff
 
I'm not surprised at all; when I read articles (https://www.cnet.com/news/do-you-listen-to-music-in-stereo/) which have to explain to today's listeners what stereo is, then its pretty obvious that the world has moved on from being interested in our hobby. Take a look at photos from any audio club meeting; they're almost exclusively baby boomers or older. That is obviously not a sustainable model! Other industries are having the same problem with aging customer bases, like motorcycles.

There are just so many other shiny objects for people today to get interested in. Personally, I find most of them boring in the extreme, but whatever.
 
It says what we've know to be true for ever, even if we want to deny it. That when it comes to audio, convenience will trump everything. If it's easier to access the average consumer will sacrifice quality.

Alexa, play The Eurythmics is easier than queuing it up on your smartphone and connecting your phone via cable or Bluetooth. It's easier than finding a disc.
 
Towen7 said:
It says what we've know to be true for ever, even if we want to deny it. That when it comes to audio, convenience will trump everything. If it's easier to access the average consumer will sacrifice quality.

Alexa, play The Eurythmics is easier than queuing it up on your smartphone and connecting your phone via cable or Bluetooth. It's easier than finding a disc.
Click to expand...

Given that every kid I know under 30 either owns a turntable or desperately wants one, the idea of convenience being king has some limits to the argument. While about 10% of all album sales are LPs, it is growing faster than the album sales market (which is shrinking overall).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188822/lp-album-sales-in-the-united-states-since-2009/
 
Flint said:
Given that every kid I know under 30 either owns a turntable or desperately wants one, the idea of convenience being king has some limits to the argument. While about 10% of all album sales are LPs, it is growing faster than the album sales market (which is shrinking overall).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188822/lp-album-sales-in-the-united-states-since-2009/
Click to expand...

I'd bet my paycheck that more people listen to music on Amazon Dot's than they do turntables. I wouldn't pay attention to album sales because that's simply not how music is consumed anymore. My three kids (age 22-26) don't own a single album or CD. They have and will never pay to own a digital or physical copy. 100% of their music is streamed or (I hate to admit, pirated).
 
Both good points. I believe our hobby has always been a niche marketplace and is currently pursued by a higher percentage of people than in the past. The report I posted reflects the entire CE space, non-hobbyists as well as nut-jobs like us. That said, I also think we, those of us pursuing this hobby which basically is an attempt to reach a figurative "Nirvana" through great sound and great recordings, in both music and video content, are making more purchases of items like Amazon's echo and small Bluetooth portable speakers than our desired high end gear. And, in agreement with Tom, we probably consume more music on our smart speakers, phones, and Bluetooth speakers than we do in our high-end shrines to the pursuit of audio "Nirvana."

This shift impacts the companies who make our high-end gear, so that when we finally decide to replace or add some killer new component to our beloved hobby system, we may be faced with fewer choices, less than ideal choices, and potentially no appropriate options at all for what we desire. I experienced this with trying to find a HT Pre/Pro several years ago. Why do I have to pay more for a pre/pro with the same audio and video processing capabilities as a surround sound receiver which also has seven 120 watt amplifiers in it? What I wanted was that very good receiver without the noisy amplifiers, but the manufacturer decided that sort of product was only appropriate for the rarified high end customer who can afford to pay double what a similar receiver would cost. That was a decade ago. Now we face the reality that fewer companies are making the audio/video components we want and those that do make them are either questionable or have gone high end and we have to settle on a far less ideal option or just go without.

If the future of getting music at home is a $100 smart speaker, what happens to the market for self-powered bookshelf speakers and other important components which are not smart speakers?

And as for Turntable - I can remember just a few years ago I could go to nearly every online audio electronics store and the options for turntables was either none or just a couple. Today there are hundreds of good models and brands out there and even mainstream stores like Best Buy, Walmart, and Amazon are selling pretty decent players.
 
Flint said:
Now we face the reality that fewer companies are making the audio/video components we want and those that do make them are either questionable or have gone high end and we have to settle on a far less ideal option or just go without.
Click to expand...

When I look out my window at work, I see assembly lines upon assembly lines of very high quality audio amps (and preamps), many with reasonable price points, just waiting to be snatched up by customers. There are some good bargains to be had with other brands too, but granted, there are fewer choices. Elac speakers is one example of reasonably priced speakers which are extremely good. Pro-ject makes good turntables at all price points.

Although I was very young at the time, I do vividly remember the late 1950s and early 1960s when Hi-Fi was the hobby of choice, and every manufacturer invested heavily in selling quality gear. A neighbor down the street was a very intense Hi-Fi bug and that is where I got my first taste of the hobby. He had an Ampex 970 tape deck, McIntosh MC60 amps (two for stereo and vacuum tube of course), McIntosh preamp, and what impressed me most, two gigantic (to small-at-the-time me) Altec Lansing A-7 speakers. Hi-Fi was huge during that time, and every bachelor who ever hoped to get laid had an impressive rig to impress the chicks who stumbled upon his bachelor pad. It will never be like that again, and I would venture to guess that no hobby will ever be as popular and/or widespread as Hi-Fi was during its prime. Its just a different world.
 
This has always been a weird space and it just gets stranger as the technology evolves. I spend a lot of time on media server forums and there are two distinctly different groups of people into that hobby. The first group wants the best possible quality and endlessly debates the merits of .iso images vs remuxes (I'm on the remux side). The second group brags about having thousands of movies and then you realize they have them all crammed into something like 8TB of storage. I guess my point is that it has always been a battle between quality and convenience and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future.
 
Flint said:
Given that every kid I know under 30 either owns a turntable or desperately wants one, the idea of convenience being king has some limits to the argument.
Click to expand...

You mean all 3 own turntables? Interesting ;)
 
My evil plan is to ruin my kids by surrounding them with great audio, but I don't know how successful I will be. I've caught my daughter sitting in a room with a Bluetooth speaker system listening to music on her phone speaker more than once. My wife does that too. It drives me nuts.
 
I wouldn't count high end audio out just yet. With Amazon releasing the Show, which does have two speakers, it's a step forward in the right direction for better sound. Although the speakers are close together, and I'm not even sure they are playing in stereo, but it still sounds decent enough for casual listening.

I could easily see Amazon integrating Alexa with a receiver, so that it would be easy to use when watching tv, listening to music, etc. And hopefully, maybe one day Amazon will offer their music streaming in a lossless format. I'd pay a little more for their music service if it was lossless.
 
Huey said:
I wouldn't count high end audio out just yet. With Amazon releasing the Show, which does have two speakers, it's a step forward in the right direction for better sound. Although the speakers are close together, and I'm not even sure they are playing in stereo, but it still sounds decent enough for casual listening.

I could easily see Amazon integrating Alexa with a receiver, so that it would be easy to use when watching tv, listening to music, etc. And hopefully, maybe one day Amazon will offer their music streaming in a lossless format. I'd pay a little more for their music service if it was lossless.
Click to expand...

I agree. While I certainly do believe that convenience is king, if presented with two equally convenient options many with the means to afford them will choose the better sounding option. Integrate Alexa into a higher quality speaker and they will sell.
 
I want both quality and convenience and we're getting closer. I want to be able to tell Alexa to play a certain song, album, or playlist from my media collection, have her fire up my system and start playing it. (Currently I can have Alexa "Tell Anymote to Listen to Echo" and it runs a macro which sets my AVR to the correct input for the Echo then tell Alexa to play Pandora etc.) There are 3rd party devices out there including Harmony which can do this but I'm thinking it won't be long before AVRs have Alexa capabilities built-in. (I saw the other day that many new Sony TVs have the capabilities built-in.) Once we get to that point, convenience and quality aren't necessarily competing.

For the masses this may still not be enough, though. It could allow them to listen to Pandora on a decent set-up, if they could set it up. But therein lies the rub...

John
 
The Harmony Hub is a pretty powerful device and the Alexa integration is getting better all the time.
 
Alexa, the echoe Dot has a TRS headphone out jack that I use to send to the home receiver to run in the music room. Same is true for the video content being digital and disposable. Watch the Movie once or twice and they are done with it. Some have the mindset that Old video or music is just dated and not today. So why do Bach, or other old school music and videos.
 
malsackj said:
Some have the mindset that Old video or music is just dated and not today. So why do Bach, or other old school music and videos.
Click to expand...
Movie studios and other purveyors of media don't seem to care; they just want to produce product and justify their existence, and people are still willing to provide financial backing in the hope of making a buck. Enforcing the idea that anything which wasn't created last week is passe is in their interest of course.

I have to laugh at the vinyl and turntable resurgence in that some of the very same people who were dissing the technology as old and useless are now screaming about how great it is (Sound and Vision, I'm looking at you, dudes). :thumbsdown:
 
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