eiaudio’s 5th Anniversary

I am writing these lines in the week of eiaudio’s fifth anniversary and find that our world, technology, and future outlook have changed dramatically since then. Back in April 2020, citizens around the globe were experiencing government-imposed lock-downs that had been put in place to slow down the spread of the Covid-19 flu-pandemic. In order to stay in business during these restrictions, companies ended up moving vast portions of their communications and operations to cloud-based servers and online platforms, which culminated in the largest synchronous data upload in world history. With my family’s language school business closed down for several weeks and both our kids at home due to the restrictions, I wrote my first article on my smartphone. I wanted to tell the story of HiFi from the very beginning, and so I called the article: “The Power Source”.

My aim was to share what I had learned about HiFi setups and gear with like-minded enthusiasts. I wanted to document my discoveries for my own future reference in a place I could rely on, to encourage my readers to make new discoveries and trust their own ears, and also to set up an alternative platform to my family’s language school operations, which could apparently be shut down very quickly, as the German government had made clear to us. Built on a basis of truthful personal reflection, the blog was destined to become a beacon of audiophile integrity, limited only by the scope of my experience and understanding. Having such a strong basis in personal appreciation proved to be beneficial to the website’s reception, and eiaudio.de soon attracted well over 10,000 individuals each month who stuck around to read many more articles.

Today, my eiaudio blog is even more influential than shown in the numbers above. It helps people around the globe form their opinions on subjects such as HiFi setups, room acoustics, vintage gear, and listening skills. However, in many cases, the people benefiting from my articles do not really need to visit my page anymore. Instead, they ask an AI-bot like Chat GPT to collect the information for them. With most of human data and experience available online, it was only a matter of time, before someone came up with an algorithm that could drink from this extensive pool of human labour without its user having to visit the sources that feed into the pool each time. And there is more: AI bots cannot only extract information from the web but now also organise data in order to create spoken and written texts, images, and also music. The bottom line is that output once unique to us humans is henceforth subject to automation by bots, and those sharing their insights online, like myself, are feeding them for free.

As it looks now, our social stability and order, sense of purpose and justice, personal commitment and resilience, will all be tested at the same time, while AI is leading us towards completely uncharted territory at breakneck speed. Some industries will be affected by these changes sooner than others. The music industry, for instance, has already been forced to make the transformation from the High Fidelity-sound of the 1960s to 1990s (first based on vinyl and later on CD sales) via the iPod (with predominantly MP3 as its basis) to the High-Res streaming services of our time. In the face of local music abundance, due to instant worldwide availability, the formerly large budgets of music labels have shrunk dramatically and with them the incomes of the artists providing the music. With earnings from music sales at an all-time low, the price of concert tickets has skyrocketed. Those artists who do not manage to attract regular crowds mostly go empty handed.

In most modern households, High Fidelity has been reduced to the sound quality of smart speakers, and few people take the time to set up a proper HiFi system or to develop their listening skills anymore. Slowly, we are learning that information without structure and context is disinformation. Just like high-frequency noise clutters the iron core of a transformer and prevents it from working properly, the helpless attempt of today’s global brands of reaching all consumers directly via social platforms makes people withdraw from communication on many levels, unsure of what to believe anymore. There are simply too many companies and too many products for the consumer to process when these make a pitch all at once. The pendulum of globalisation has swung from the scarcity of goods and local production all the way to the abundance of goods with failing consumer demand and a general drifting towards the pointlessness of everything.

After all, what is the point of me writing reviews that are predominantly going to be read by bots and that are therefore no longer linked to my name? And what is the point of factories making products faster and faster in which the workforce has long since been replaced by robots and companies stalking communities online, trying in vain to sell products to people who have lost their jobs and no longer have the means to purchase anything? — One could argue that five years after Covid-19, the full scale of human greed and stupidity is more blatantly obvious than ever before. Although we are family and clan-based social beings and therefore utterly dependent on each other for survival, our current economic model mostly rewards those who most quickly come up with products and services that threaten and break apart the pillars of our social fabric and environment.

While eiaudio is about deep contemplation and making time for appreciation, the current trend of placing everything at our disposal at once, seemingly without the need for personal understanding and growth, is luring us down a dark alley, ill-prepared for what awaits us. I would have liked to see a deep connection to evolve between the readers of my blog (commenting section) and myself. This can still happen, of course. But with bot visits heavily on the rise, the risk of us never getting to know each other and drifting further apart as HiFi enthusiasts, families, and nations seems very real.

Best wishes,

Karsten