I wasn’t going to miss them, again! To my surprise, Jones had a whole new speaker - the floor standing F5 at $580/pair. While I completely bypassed this demo at Munich (I plead jet lag), I did find ELAC at RMAF this year. Worthy audio for the masses? Be still, my little proletariat heart. This move says, to me at least, that the baby Pioneers were not an accident, but part of a grander plan. At Munich this past year, Jones and (new) company released another set affordable loudspeakers, the Debut Series B5, at $229/pair. They’re not the TAD versions, of course, but they’re also less than 1/100th the price. Given their price, these speakers are all that and a bag of chips. In fact, I have an award that I bring forward whenever I find a particularly salubrious intersection between cost and performance. “What if I only spent ($) instead of ($$$$$) on parts? What then?” The upshot, of course, is irrelevant - again, not to make it all about me, but I have a full surround-sound complement of those Pioneer speakers and for their price, they’re really quite good. The fact that they don’t suck is a testament directly to his design, but I remember wondering if it was a calculated move or something of a design exercise. The fact that he slummed around and bothered to design and launch the sub-$150 Pioneers is something of a marvel. Anyway, Jones made some extraordinary speakers for TAD, speakers I’ve been repeatedly startled by, both by their cost ($$$$$) and their quality (amazeballs). I remember the announcement came shortly after I’d decided that the little Pioneer SP-BS22 LR loudspeakers won my Guttenberg Challenge. Jones recently left Pioneer/TAD to join ELAC. I’m the chair-jockey, vying for the center seat. I’ve met Andrew Jones a couple of times, glancingly. But on the off-chance you’re being dense, here’s the punchline: if all you had was $200, based on my Guttenberg explorations, what I would recommend is a pair of AKG K7XX headphones from Massdrop. Or rather/better, endorse to what end? For dedicated two-channel music thrills? Or something (marginally) better than what your iMac is capable of with it’s built-in speakers? I’m exaggerating, but you take my point. But good? To the point of actually endorsing? Not so much. There was one pair of speakers and an amp to match that didn’t necessarily make me want to throttle myself with my own intestines. But the bell that Steve rung around “affordable audio” has reverberated around in my skull - so, I spent a couple hundred bucks on cheap audio components in my own Guttenberg Challenge. I called it “The 21st Century Audiophile”, and we talked about a lot of things. It was a direct result of panel I hosted last year at the New York Audio Show, with Steve Guttenberg, John Darko and Art Dudley. If it were true, if it were possible, it would be rare. I also want to say that an entire audio system can be had for under $100 (or $250, or some other arbitrarily low-level), and further, that the sound coaxed from that system fully rivals the sound coming from systems costing many, many thousands of dollars. I want to say that speakers don’t necessarily get all that much better the more expensive they get. There is something to that, I’ll confess. It’s either a sense of outrage and righteousness at the current sorry state of pricing in high-end audio, or a certain smugness that invites a caveat: “Price certainly does seem to correlate with quality, though!” Such declamations are usually followed with one of two things, however. Of course price doesn’t entail sound quality. “Gear doesn’t have to be expensive to be good.” That’s been repeated so often and for so long, that it’s cliché at this point. And that fact alone says “things” about the industry as a whole. Or even that it hadn’t ever been done before. I think that is the main point that John and Steve were driving at, back in New York.
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