"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Doki" wrote in message


I noticed today in John Lewis that they had no hifi or
hifialike gear for sale at all.

How do you define "hifi"?

The word hifi is a shortening of "high fidelity" and high fidelity refers
to reproducing sound with accuracy.

IIRC there was some standard about being able to produce a frequency range
of 50Hz-20kHz. Here I mean any kind of stereo system with a pair of decent
sized speakers, or a pair of small speakers and a proper sub (ie, actually
producing non-direction frequencies).

Loads of digital radios,

Surely some of them are at least somewhat accurate in their reproduction.

mp3 players

Which can be used with highly accurate earphones and headphones to obtain
good, accurate sound.

and sets of little speakers that ipods fit onto,

Some of which are actually fairly accurate, or at least no less accurate
than some middle- or low-priced traditional home stereo sets.

but no mini systems

Some of those really sucked.

Granted. Anything mass market product category is going to contain some
dregs - somehow a lot of Vauxhall Corsas were sold, and people keep buying
LCD tellies...

or seperates at all.

Arguably separates have been in their decline ever since integrated
amplifiers and then receivers became more popular.

Has the mass market for hifi stuff completely died?

The market for high fidelity audio has changed. It is now dominated by
portable and personal use equipment.

Perhaps, but the home kit that remains seems to be trying to look flashy and
be small, and that seems to be about the sole requirement. Sound quality
barely appears to come into the equation.

The
emphasis seems to have turned entirely to subwoofers that
produce midbass at a very small range of frequencies
(bandpass box perhaps?) along with a load of little
speakers that sound absolutely horrible.

There are many examples of that technology that sound great. You have to
spend a little money for them and be careful what you buy. IOW, nothing
has really changed except the format.

There may well be. But, the mass market stuff sounds horrendous. There's a
Sony system which I've heard
(http://www.johnlewis.com/230444465/Product.aspx if you're wondering) and it
is terrible. The little speakers do appear to be tweeters, as they produce
no mid range at all, and any speech or mid range stuff is very obviously
coming from the sub when you listen to the system.

Some kit has
only tweeters for stereo seperation with a "sub"
producing the mid range.

Well, the speakers may be the size of tweeters, but it is possible that
some of them cover a lot more than just the treble.

It may well be possible, but not at any sort of sane mass market price.

It seems very strange to me given that development has
been driven by better quality in the past - ie moving
from LPs to CDs.

Many portable music players provide something that is effectively CD
quality, when they are playing files that are not lossy-compressed.

Indeed, but that's not how they're typically used.