There has lately been a resurgence in love for the hi-fi. Sales of vinyl records have increased steadily every year since 2006, many American cities now host listening bars, and old-school audio gear is more in demand than it’s been in decades. “I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I’ve probably seen, just for the normal vintage receiver and speakers, the price has probably gone up three to four times,” says Steve Messinger, owner of Fly Hifi, a shop in the Sacramento, California, area that specializes in buying, selling, and servicing vintage audio equipment.
A few different factors, I think, have contributed to this. One is a newly reactionary desire for physical equipment, stuff you can push and pull and bop and twist, in a world where everything else is controlled by smearing a finger on a glass screen. The other is that technology has made it much easier to listen to music and other audio: we have access to more of it than ever before, and despite what some might say, it’s available in very high quality. And yet just as we’re marveling at this access, the shameful trends of the 1990s and 2000s removed our means to show it off, to make it a centerpiece. Luckily, this stuff was made well enough that much of it is still out there, sitting on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and eBay, just waiting for its chance to shine again.
One of the digital revolution’s lesser-mourned victims was the hi-fi. Since the 1920s, when radio took off in the United States, audio—from credenzas with built-in turntables to 8-track players— was the centerpiece of the living room, functioning as both audio and decor. But when music collections migrated from the living room to the home office, where the computer lived, the immediate availability of so much music, and so much of it for free, raced out in front of the hi-fi’s ability to include it.
As physical music disappeared, first into MP3s and later even more fully into streaming services, the physical hi-fi sort of disappeared, too. Audio today comes through battery-powered Bluetooth speakers, aggressively nondescript streaming blobs, or extruded black soundbar tubes mounted above or below or behind TVs. According to subreddits and forums dedicated to discussing speakers, which lately have been anguished over the latest destructive Sonos firmware update, this hardware exists to almost reluctantly do its job. Its ethos is to be heard and not seen. What a bummer!
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way, and many in the home hi-fi space have seen dramatic increases in popularity. People are rediscovering the stereo, but it’s different than it was before.
A nice stereo looks sick
The design element is singularly underappreciated in the hi-fi space. These products, whether they’re a $30,000 Nagra digital audio converter or a $150 receiver from 1974, are gorgeous, and designed to be admired. There are machined steel faceplates, luscious wood-enclosed speakers, sinuously elegant turntables, knobs and buttons and switches and toggles, each with their own (sometimes mysterious) purpose. A nice stereo looks sick, is what I’m trying to say, and to place that at the forefront of home decor is something that’s coming back from a few lost decades.
A man considers the vast selection of good-looking vintage stereos.
As with so many other product categories, a price race to the bottom led to shittier products and lifespans measured in months rather than decades. Obviously a $20 Bluetooth speaker whose Amazon product name doesn’t even have a brand name in it is going to be a worse product in every conceivable way than a 1970s hi-fi system. And that race to the bottom has made it much harder to find a quality product that’s both well-made and nice to look at, unless you happen to be very rich. (This happened with just about everything: sofas, fast fashion clothing, appliances, you can pretty much name it.)
The decline and now resurgence of home audio as decor and furniture in its own right is much more interesting. This has paved the way for new, or at least reimagined, businesses like Common Wave, a combination record store, social listening space, audio showroom, and high-end audio installation service in Downtown Los Angeles. “The whole idea behind Common Wave was to bridge the gap between what seems like an outdated business model when it came to hi-fi, which is like, big box, let’s move these products, give you the specials,” says Wesley Katzir, who runs Common Wave. “Instead, I like to think of hi-fi as a design exercise, so we’re crafting custom sounds for our clients.”
If you’re buying new, you can get an awfully nice-sounding stereo for around a thousand dollars. But, from a design perspective, there’s much more fun to be had.
Get weird, and go vintage
“In a nutshell, it’s that old cliche: they don’t make them like they used to,” says Messinger, talking about equipment from the 1960s, 1970s, and (to
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