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Chapter 14 - Valuation in the Market for High-End Audio: Hunting ‘Monsters’ in Analogue Discs

from Part III - Valuation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2024

Susi Geiger
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Katy Mason
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Neil Pollock
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Philip Roscoe
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Annmarie Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Limerick
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Pascale Trompette
Affiliation:
Université de Grenoble
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Summary

High-end audio systems aim to reproduce the original sound of music performed in physical spaces. They are an intersection of aesthetic art and emotions, a culture of listening to music in ones’ preferred genres and a system of components or machines that are designed by technologists of acoustics, electrical engineering and material science. There is an abundance of scientific research on sound and acoustics from engineering and physics that discusses the engineering of good sound on the basis of quantitative, parametric measures for the human cognition of listeners (Pinch and Bijserveld 2012; Powell 2010). There is a dearth of research on how hi-fi aficionados determine what really counts as ‘hi-fi’, however. This chapter empirically investigates the high-end audio equipment market. It applies perspectives from the pragmatist literature of valuation to probe the valuation practices of actors and agents using data from field interviews and observations, and archive and online documents.

Type
Chapter
Information
Market Studies
Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action
, pp. 222 - 236
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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