Finding your groove: getting into vinyl with Audio-Technica
I’d like to think that I could’ve been friends with the late Hideo Matsushita, founder of Japanese Hi-Fi powerhouse Audio-Technica. If I could, I’d travel back in time to 1960’s Tokyo, where a young Matsushita curated “vinyl listening sessions” at the Bridgestone Museum of Arts, exposing visitors to the sounds and possibilities of high end audio and the warmth of vinyl records. I imagine sitting with him in a mod coffee shop, listening to the stories of what he witnessed in those sessions, the conversations he had with visitors, and what ultimately motivated him to head back to his small apartment above a ramen restaurant and start an audio company of his own. In the histories I’ve read regarding AT’s humble beginnings, Matsushita’s motives seem clear. Produce high end audio at affordable prices, bringing audio excellence into spaces and to customers that simply didn’t have access to it before. His first two products, the AT-1 and AT-3 phono cartridges did exactly that, and...
Dec 6, 2023
Secondly: the only data (I would call it anecdotal at best) I have available is product pricing which is readily available to the public
As I shop for gear on massdrop, amazon and elsewhere for anything from DACs to headphones and everything in between, I've noticed a pattern in pricing: for any item certain range most, if not all, vendors sell a product at nearly the same price (be it ~$199 DACs or ~$350 amps or ~$500 speakers or ~$900 headphones). To me this raises red flags. In a competitive, efficient market vendors should try to compete and undercut each other, not settling on very tight price ranges. The fact presently there are several headphones at $899-and-change and at other other products at prices mentioned above scream of unintentional price fixing: w/o any malice or collusion among them, vendors choose to not undercut each other. i,e.: vendor A releases product P at price X, vendor B releases competing product Q at price X, then vendor C and vendor D follow suit whereas in an efficient market, vendor B would price Q at X - 5% (just as en example) in order to get customers looking their way. This lack of competitive efficiency hurts the consumer badly and if I'm right in my feeling/sensing we could be overpaying for the products we buy-- which are already quite pricey :(