ere’s a thing that’s not
happened to me for a
while. I’ve just updated
a product – a wireless
speaker as it happens – and the
software update has bricked it. By
which I don’t mean the software
has soiled itself; I mean the update
has destroyed (‘bricked’ as today’s
young people say) the speaker.
This is not one of those
‘premium’ wireless speakers like
an Apple HomePod or the new
Amazon Echo Studio, however.
Oh no no. This is an ‘actually really
expensive, high end’ wireless
speaker. It’s worth thousands. Or at
least it was until I just killed it. It’s
okay, I expect it can be revived.
And so not for the first time,
I find myself asking this: what is
wrong with hi-fi businesses? Do
these folk want to go bust?
Don’t get me wrong. Slightly
modifying the old-school racist
trope, a lot of my best friends are in
the hi-fi business. They all seem like
good chaps. And they are mainly
chaps. But so many brands in this
fabulous sphere have now spent 10
years trying to pretend wireless
streaming isn’t something that even
exists, and then another five years
ballsing up implementing it.
First they tried to pretend
nobody would listen to MP3,
because it was ‘lossy’, which is
a terrible word but let’s not get
bogged down in that. MP3 is
compressed and dispenses with a
certain amount of musical detail in
order to make it possible to fit
more tunes on a hard drive. They
assumed true music lovers would
stick with CD – which is weird,
because the hi-fi industry spent a
fair few years decrying CD as a load
of old crap that would never
supplant vinyl.Meanwhile,
everyone in the
world bought an
iPod (or similar) and
started listening
exclusively to MP3 (or AAC
for Apple fundamentalists).
A lot of us even ripped CDs to
convert them into MP3. And after a
matter of merely four to five years,
a few brave audio brands started
catering to this by grudgingly
making high-quality speaker docks.
The problem with this was that
everyone by this point had an
iPhone (or similar) and they did not
want to have to dock it, because
they wanted to always have their
lovely phone to hand so they could
admire its handsomeness and send
DMs to their friends or whatever.
So at this point, everyone in the
‘serious’ audio world said nobodyprompted a grudging
confession that, yes, wireless
audio could be ‘hi-fi’.
Unfortunately, a lot of brands
who thought they could make
money from wireless didn’t realise
something quite fundamental: that
their expertise in making amazing-
sounding audio products now
required similar expertise in app
making, app maintenance and
commitment to tech updates.
Unfortunately, the big tech
giants change their hardware and
software requirements a lot. A lot
of hi-fi brands didn’t understand
that. Before you knew it, there were
streaming products costing into the
hundreds – thousands – that barely
worked, because Apple or Google
had tweaked this or that in the part
of their operating systems.
What they probably also didn’t
understand is that tech brands
worth trillions can easily acquire
the skill sets of hi-fi brands worth
millions, when it comes to dabbling
in wireless audio. Now we have
Echo Studio and HomePod:
premium audio products, with
immediate brand recognition,
trusted by most people. Neither
sounds anywhere as near as good
as the several-thousand-pound
wireless speaker my software
update just killed... but what
good does that do it now?Te c h b r a n d s wor t h
trillions can easily
acquire the skills of hi-fi
brands worth millions
H
would ever put up with listening to
music via Bluetooth because it
sounds rubbish and, yes, they had
heard of Sonos but that kind of
streaming over Wi-Fi was very hard
to implement, and anyway, it was
rubbish and nobody wanted that.
Meanwhile, everyone in the
world got on with buying wireless
speakers, wireless headphones,
wireless you-name-it. The obvious
success that several brands had
with premium, wireless speakers34 T3 DECEMBER 2019Horizon
OpinionDuncan Bell is
bricking it
Getting unwired for sound needs a technical
touch that some companies just can’t muster