John Darko
10,391 — that’s the number of people who turned up to AXPONA, North America’s largest hi-fi show, in April 2024. A couple thousand more people came out for the Warsaw AV Show in October 2023 but taking the crown for the most well-attended hi-fi show in the world – and by quite some margin – is Munich High-End with 22.198 visitors in May 2024.
In the wake of major hi-fi shows like these, the likes of Stereophile and Part-Time Audiophile dedicate up to four weeks of editorial time to room-by-room coverage. Darko.Audio no longer deals in this kind of reportage – its import has been slowly eroded by Joe Public’s numerous and timely social media posts – but we still give over a fair amount of editorial energy to discussing how hi-fi shows could be more relevant to more people.
It might therefore be reasonable for the casual onlooker to assume that hi-fi shows are pivotal to the audiophile experience.
But are they?
In the wake of our Munich 2024 video, numerous comments suggested this might not be the case, at least for the Darko.Audio YouTube audience.
Time to move from the anecdotal to the quantitative with a YouTube Community poll. I asked, “How many hi-fi shows have you attended in the last 20 years?”. Over 12,000 people responded. For context, that’s more people than attended AXPONA 2024.
Here are the results:
The screamingly obvious finding is that 3 out of 4 people have never been to a hi-fi show and of those that have, over 50% went to a second. However, only 7% of all respondents are what we might loosely call regulars of the hi-fi show scene, attending five or more events in the past two decades.
There are two ways to look at these poll results: 1) a mainstream-tailed YouTube audience has little interest in showing up to a hi-fi show or – more opportunistically – 2) there remains a vast number of people out there with an interest in hi-fi who have yet to be turned onto attending a hi-fi show.
Choose your fighter.
