Where Are All the Young Audiophiles?

Spend more than five minutes at most HiFi shows or in your local HiFi dealer’s demo room and you’ll start to notice a pattern—not in the kit on show, but in the clientele. Grey hair- guilty (with what’s left). Bald patches – guilty. Sensible shoes – sometimes guilty, but not very often, though Dave at GIK mocks my wearing of Skechers. We’ll leave elasticated waistbands where they belong. It’s a bit like a Status Quo reunion tour… but with less hair and more comfortable footwear.

So, the question that’s been asked before and rightly keeps cropping up is: Where are all the young audiophiles? More importantly, how do we bring them into the fold?

We joke about the slippery slope of ever-upgrading kit, but the reality is that for younger people, that slope is often inaccessible to begin with. The traditional HiFi journey – start with separates, chase your ideal sound, rebuild your living room around your speakers – assumes money, space, and often time. Three things students and twenty-somethings are notoriously short on. I was fortunate enough to get a full grant when I went to university and so spunked my first term’s grant on an LP12, but I never could afford to buy the arm.

One of the biggest hurdles is financial. Many young music lovers are passionate, but they’ve grown up in a world where a smartphone and a Spotify subscription are “good enough.” And let’s face it, when a properly set-up HiFi system can cost the same as a small car (or even a house), we’ve got to ask: are we unintentionally excluding these younger folk from our hobby?

We saw in the Student HiFi Buying Guide 2024 that it doesn’t have to be that way. That guide was one of our most popular features the year – why? Because it acknowledged the reality of young people’s budgets while still treating their interest in audio seriously. That’s the approach more of the industry needs to adopt. Less “back in my day we used CD transports with XYZ outputs,” and more “here’s a fab little system you can build for the cost of a night on the lash.” And this can be done – I put together a very respectable system sometime ago on a strict budget of less than 500 quid – ok, that’s a big night out on the lash, but you get my drift.

HiFi also has a bit of a branding problem. There’s sometimes a religious devotion to numbers and acronyms, which can be alienating – I know for a fact that when I was a teenager getting into HiFi and reading the various magazines that I would read articles, but my eyes would glaze over and I’d skip the technical data. It’s not that younger people don’t care about quality – they do – it’s just that the obsession with graphs and jargon can come off as intimidating or elitist.

The modern audio enthusiast might be more interested in how their gear integrates with their phone, how it looks on a desk, or how it plays their hip-hop playlist on YouTube. That’s not ignorance – t’s a different set of priorities. We need to meet them there, not drag them back into the listening rooms of 1983. I argued this point when I was part of a panel at Munich High End a couple of years back. The future is screen-based to a large part… in my opinion! 

So, what can the industry do?

Accessible Starter Kits
Not just cheap gear, but cool gear—designed with aesthetics, streaming, and convenience in mind. There are a good few brands doing this with Wiim, Kii, and Volumio springing to mind.

Education Without Preaching
More content like Tweak It Tuesday (must revive this), these Sunday articles, and the Student Guide, which demystify HiFi without dumbing it down. Invite curiosity, don’t crush it with condescension. We are trying here at HiFi PiG! We really are!

Events That Feel Welcoming
Shows like Audio Show Deluxe, Cranage (NWAS), High End Munich, Warsaw, and Bristol have already begun shifting the tone—add in student discounts, live DJ sets, portable audio zones, and interactive displays to make them less intimidating and more inviting. A head-fi zone just doesn’t cut it! 

Bridge the Analogue-Digital Divide
Vinyl is having its moment with younger people. Pair that nostalgia with modern usability—Bluetooth turntables ( I can ‘see’ readers recoiling in horror), or even HiFi ‘starter boxes’ bundled with a few records and a guide to setup. You get the idea!

HiFi isn’t dying—it’s just changing. And change isn’t a threat; it’s a signal. Younger people do care about sound. But we have to speak their language, not force them to speak ours. If we want them to care about tonearms and toe-in, we need to show them why it matters to them, not just to us.

Otherwise, we risk becoming the sonic equivalent of trainspotters—passionate, precise… and totally invisible to the next generation.

I’ll get my anorak.

I’m well aware this is barely scratching the surface of the debate, but do watch this space…

Stuart Smith

How do you think we should attract younger people to audiophilia? Join the conversation over at our Facebook page.

Read more Sunday Thoughts and Views of Stu.