When high-end isn’t high enough

Until a few years ago, the high-end world was a little sleepy, but stable. You knew with some certainty that if you could afford ‘good’ audio, you could just reach ‘better’, and aspire to ‘best’. There were a few exceptions of course, but you knew that the difference between a couple of grand and perhaps ten thousand was a goal that someone could reach in a life spent in audio. It might take some years, but the pinnacle products weren’t out of the reach of a wider audiophile ‘us’.

That’s all changed now. Suddenly, ‘good’ costs a few thousand, ‘better’ costs tens of thousands, and ‘best’… well, if you have to ask, you can’t afford!

‘Best’ has become associated with prices that most people might spend on a house.

This has caused some considerable consternation among the long-standing audio fraternity, who have seen their attainable audio Everest become an unattainable goal for all bar a handful of yacht-wielding oligarchs.

From an audio perspective, however, our little world is turning out exceptional products at all prices. Look at the current crop of tiny, USB-powered DACs for example; despite costing not much more than a good night out, they offer a level of performance that was potentially unavailable at any price 20 years ago, and available only to the top of the audio tree a decade ago. And it’s possible to find the same high-performance, lower cost products in all categories of audio.

I think extra layers of luxury market have been applied to our high-end world, and we’ve reacted to them in a less-than-positive light. This is surprisingly commonplace, and certainly doesn’t just apply to audio. A watch might cost as much as moderately large family house. A high-end sports car was never cheap, but neither was it the cost of a LaFerrari or a Lamborghini Veneno. And like the highest of high-end audio, these products sell in small numbers, but they do sell.

These can be considered something more than high-end; they are sans pareil products. They are designed without parallel, and with no concession to either budget or domestic surroundings (the owners of the three Veneno sold must live in places where traffic calming speedbumps simply don’t exist). It’s great that these products exist, because they inspire people. The millions who will never own a Veneno will dream of what it’s like to own one. Engineers will look at the project and wonder how they can apply that technology to their own products, and there’s a trickle-down effect.

OK, so things without wheels don’t inspire quite the same nose-to-the-glass effect seen when a new supercar is launched, and even this has begun to pall among some people, who think the whole exotic automotive thing is yet another Baby Boomer fad. But I’m hopeful more will draw something other than just anger at the sans pareil side of audio.

I’m not that much of a car nut, although I have my moments. I’m more of a shutterbug. And there are two companies I’m thinking of here that exemplify all that’s good – and all that’s bad – about the high-end. Phase One is a small company making very high-resolution digital camera backs (as well as cameras and lenses) for high-end professionals who demand the best. The company also learned from that and released software that works equally well with more real-world digital cameras that real people buy. On the other hand, Hasselblad with its (once richly deserved) reputation for medium format cameras and lenses so good, they used them on the moon, now also ‘makes’ pimped up variations of Sony cameras with names like Lunar and Stellar. They base these nice-looking boxes on good cameras to begin with, but there needs to be more than simply ‘luxurifying’ going on to make a high-end product justify its price. We get close to this in the many variations on a theme of Oppo; some honest heavily modified products, some are merely badge-engineered, and some are placed on a continuum between the two poles. I feel it’s time to deny the badge-engineers the oxygen of exposure. And we need to applaud those who go the extra and make sans pareil products that really are beyond equal. We applaud engineering excellence in the turntable world, why can’t we do that throughout?

Constellation Audio buoys me in this. Here is a company with the Dream Team approach, making ‘cost no object’ products that perfectly fit in with that sans pareil idea. It builds big, with grand ideas in its Reference Series. Then it does the same for a lot less in its Performance Series. Now it’s doing exactly the same with its Inspiration Series. The technology and a considerable chunk of the performance of the ‘costs as much as a Mercedes S-Class’ range filters perfectly into the ‘costs as much as a Mercedes A-Class’ products.

It’s not alone in this; a lot of Abbingdon Music Research DNA filters down into the iFi products, and Light Harmonic filters down into the Geek Out. But these change categories as they down-shift, where Constellation takes those sans pareil products and makes them available at less eye-watering levels. 

The ultra-high-end isn’t going to go away. No amount of wishful thinking will change this. But, if you aren’t having this read to you by your butler from the deck of your ocean-going yacht, the ultra-high-end shouldn’t be a concern. It’s another country, they do things differently there. But just occasionally, it’s a hell of a place to get ideas, and not all of them are above our station.