Our digital soapbox

Opinions?  We got 'em!  Welcome to the little inflammatory corner of our site where we rant and rave about what's good and bad about all kinds of stuff.  We might write about the stereo business, digital rights management, or ridiculous proposed legislation like the Induce Act.  Check back often! 

A Consumer Nightmare – in Stereo

When you walk into a stereo store today, what do you see? I’m not talking about the ultra-premium espresso-serving stereo salons, but just a regular “big box” stereo store. You know what? You see pretty much the exact same stuff that was available 20 or 30 years ago.

Ok, so they have CD players now and blue LEDs in the face plates, but really it’s fundamentally the same stuff!

To be fair, the slickest thing I saw during a recent foray was a big name-brand CD player with a hard drive for about $750. It couldn’t talk to your PC and you were somehow expected to manually rip each CD. One by one. Let’s see…I’ve got 600 CDs and I could rip for a mind-numbing hour each night, five days a week, so that would take…TWO AND A HALF MONTHS!?! And after all that, I couldn’t even back up the hard drive! What if it crashes? Oh, and of course the sales dude was entirely clueless.

Well, that’s the supply side, but what did I actually want? First, I wanted quality sound. I don’t care if it’s on CD or ripped, I just want the freedom of instant access, but without the sacrifice of unrecognizably compressing my tunes. It’s got to be expandable, of course, and solve the back up problem. (And quiet, too - my Tivo hard drive is too loud for a living room!) Finally, everything must be “networkable” so I can send different music to different parts of my house.

It’s simple: I don’t want to be bothered by where the music is or what format it’s in – I just want it NOW. Now that’s not asking too much. Hell, I can do a lot of that stuff on my computer already. But my stereo? Noooooo.

OK, so what’s that going to cost me? Thousands of bucks! $4,000 to $25,000 and it’s only available from the stereo shop pretending to be an espresso bar. Once you add in their other expensive gear and wiring that accompanies these systems and you now have…a lot of boxes of expensive gear. To actually integrate it together, you’ll have to shell out about the same amount in serious labor bucks - with plenty of overhead for that sales “consultant”.

That’s just wrong. I’ve got all this music in digital form on CDs and MP3’s anyway, so why suffer the limitations of traditional analog stereo gear? I got so mad, I started a company. StreetFire Sound Labs was created so that you can enjoy your music with all the advantages of modern computing and networking – at accessible prices. Because a trip to a stereo shop shouldn’t feel like a visit to Jurassic Park.