As I was scanning the comments under Jason Victor Serinus's insightful piece, "What If They Gave a CES and Nobody Came?", Bill Leebens's words caught my eye (footnote 1). "[ . . . ] several subsequent attempts to form industry associations have come and gone. I was involved in them all, and even I can't remember all their names!" wrote the industry veteran of 40 years (and counting).
Being the (relatively) new audiophile on the block with high hopes to entice the masses, the concept of forming a trade body to promote high-end audio was immediately appealing to me. Dying to know more, I decided to stalk Bill and get to the bottom of this—for you.
Jana Dagdagan: Why do you think none of the numerous attempts have succeeded?
Bill Leebens: A couple of primary reasons for that: this is an industry of extreme individualists who tend to follow their own path and are not used to cooperating. They're generally not people who are good at organizational structures or at following instructions. As I've flippantly said on a number of occasions, it's tough enough to get people to agree on a place for lunch, much less on any major efforts in guiding the industry, much less funding such an effort. As always, efforts like this come down to two things: 1) people providing time and leadership; and 2) people providing funding. Both are difficult to come by.
JD: Do you think this industry needs an industry association?
BL: I'm stubborn enough to think that it is needed and could happen. It would require somebody who is just totally relentless and not disturbed by a succession of failures to promote such a thing. (And I tend to be pretty pig-headed myself.) What would we hope to accomplish? What would the intended goals be? How would we go about achieving them? How would we fund such an effort? Nobody can operate in a vacuum and nobody can operate without funding. A lot of companies in this industry are not what you could call "cash rich" to begin with, so the idea of them shelling out $10,000 a year to support an organization seems a little on the naive side.
I've been involved in a lot of the efforts with the Consumer Electronics Association, which is now the Consumer Technology Association. Back in the day when there was a High Performance Audio Advisory Board there were a lot of industry people like Ray Kimber, Kathy Gornik, then from Thiel, Richard Schram from Parasound, Wes Phillips from Stereophile, me, and a lot of people whom I sadly can't recall at the moment. That was an effort that was killed by CEA (I think) largely because they didn't think it was large enough to matter. Going by CEA/CTA stats, consumer electronics in the United States is about a $275 billion/year business, and even the most optimistic estimates put high-end audio as $1 billion or less in the US.
So for those folks, it's really small cheese, and I think that's reflected on the way high-end audio's been treated at CEA. Especially over the last decade, where we're kind of relegated to these attic rooms that are increasingly being encroached upon by businesses that have absolutely nothing to do with audio. We're losing ground every year, the costs are extortionate, and there's less reason to do CEA every year.
JD: How would an industry association be beneficial?
BL: The biggest issue for high-end audio is, generally speaking, a lack of recognition. Over the last couple decades, that has largely been due to the fact that there is no trade association or industry organization. There is no—to use a parallel—there is no Milk Producers Association coming up with memorable slogans like "Got Milk?" A lot of the businesses do tend to be cash strapped and at the same time there is a very strong fear of one business benefiting from the exposure more than another. And clearly the businesses are not interchangeable or fungible, to use a lawyer's term. It's not like milk producers. It's not like everybody does the same thing and that they're well served by bonding together.
In high-end audio you've got very small, sort of craft-oriented business that may be 1–3 guys—and it's nearly always guys—and you've got multinationals that produce what audiophiles generally dismiss as mid-fi gear that's sold through Best Buy or Kmart or whatever. And there's, quite frankly, not a lot of common ground between all these companies. You can view them as home entertainment, you can view them as consumer electronics; but in terms of getting them together to agree upon goals, to agree upon ways of providing exposure for the industry, it's hugely difficult.
While I think that the industry could indeed benefit from an industry organization, you would first off have to very clearly define who would be served by such an organization. In high-end audio, we're dealing with companies that do $50k a year, and we've got companies that are dealing with billions of dollars a year. Clearly they don't have a lot in common. Defining who would be served, how they would be served, how the organization would be funded would be very difficult. I think it's worth working on, and I would really enjoy working on such a thing. But again, somebody would have to fund it and we'd have to figure out how to do that.
When I was working at CEA back in the day, I had always assumed that the organization was largely funded by company dues for the organization. But as it turned out, 95% of their revenues were provided by CES. Clearly they have a vested interest in preserving that show, and keeping the attendance and number of exhibitors as high as possible. But whether that serves the high-end audio industry, I tend to doubt it. We're running some absurd number, like 170,000 attendees at CES any given year. I've set out with a number of other exhibitors (the high-end audio exhibits at the top of the Venetian) to try and determine how many visitors we were getting over the last few years, and it's not more than a couple thousand people. In terms of exhibition costs that are $20,000 minimum (and frequently up to 6 figures) it's just not a very good return for the money.
The number of people that you see are not only lesser in number than your average regional show, they're far lesser in quality. They're people working at mainstream exhibits over in the convention center and just coming over on their lunch hour for a lark. So at this point, I'd say that CES doesn't serve the high-end audio industry at all and is largely a waste of money.
In the past, I've been involved in running shows—I've assisted the late Richard Beers on a number of Las Vegas and Newport shows, and ran a show in NYC in 2012 at the Waldorf Astoria. What I've found is that often, rather than working together, dealers are so highly combative that they tend to be their own worst enemies. Rather than presenting the industry at its best, they tend to bring out all the nutty warfare that's like a dysfunctional family that really is not conducive to inducing people into being interested in the audio field. It's a tough call, and it's something where, one way or another, feelings are going to be bruised, and again it's going to require somebody who's fairly relentless and thick-skinned to guide such an effort.
JD: Do you think the high-end audio industry will die unless an association is formed soon?
BL: Well, the funny thing is, pretty much the whole time I've been involved since the early 1970s, which in a lot ways was the "boom era", in terms of the number of people having (at least) modest stereo systems. We've been periodically predicting the death of the industry and it hasn't happened yet. I think what it does periodically is reinvent itself and redirect itself. What we're seeing right now is a lot of interest with younger people in personal audio, headphones, portable audio—that sort of thing. And while, for the old farts, that may not be their primary intent or their primary goal, it is what it is.
And in terms of people being involved in listening to music and learning how to become closer to their music, I think it's all good. It's just we have to get over our preconceptions of exactly what the industry is, for one thing. And again, there is a little bit of a generational rift. At 60, in a lot of ways I'm one of the younger guys of the old guard. Getting these other guys to even recognize the headphone business, younger people with tats and weird hairdos, whatever, it's a challenge. And it's a challenge that I think enlivens the whole dialogue and industry. But whether or not everybody's open to it? Not so much.
I don't think it's going to die. I think it's going to morph periodically. Simply from the basis of a fairly stagnant worldwide economy, and people getting used to smaller and smaller living quarters, I think the idea of having this giant, altar-sized stereo system is probably not going to be as strong in years to come. And that's understandable. And that doesn't mean that trying to listen to music in a quality way in your home or on-the-go is going to die. You just kinda have to get rid of your preconceptions.
JD: For someone like me who has never been in an industry association, what would it mean literally? Listening sessions? Newsletters? What exactly?
BL: I think newsletters are worthless in that regard. I think this is experiential. Not listening to music reproduced well and trying to get people to bite into high-end audio makes about as much sense as sending newsletters to people about wine without allowing them to taste wine. I really think it's an immersive, experiential deal, and unless they can hear it, feel it, it makes no sense whatsoever. When I was in college in the '70s, a number of the larger manufacturers like Pioneer and Panasonic had 45' trailers that went from college campus to college campus. They'd have demo systems in these trailers and they wouldn't actually sell anything, but you would at least get the experience—a taste of what they were trying to sell. Obviously that's something that requires deep pockets, but I think it's not just vital but really necessary in the big picture, to expose the maximum number of people to this.
Right now if you talk to your average 20 year-old or whatever about having a system that might cost $15k, $50k, or $100k, they might look at you incredulously. Basically, their entire lifespan, they've been listening to MP3s through earbuds and have no conception of what quality music reproduction through quality gear is like. That saddens me.
I really do view this as a communal experience. Certainly when I was growing up, everybody had the bitchin' stereo system in their dorm room, and y'all got together and did whatever while listening to music, and I think that that's something that's lost in a headphone kind of mindset. I think that the benefit, the fun of this, is to be seen in a communal, social environment. That's something we really need to work on.
Again—who's going to fund these efforts? Who's going to get these things out there, whether this is going to be restricted to college campuses or the general public? Not sure. But I can say that the companies making billions of dollars now, like Beats, Sonos, Bose—they're really not doing a great job of evangelizing, shall we say.
Footnote 1: Bill Leebens is marketing director for PS Audio and editor of the company's on-line magazine Copper.
Footnote 1: Bill Leebens is marketing director for PS Audio and editor of the company's on-line magazine Copper.
