[Editorial] Wasn't high-end in excellent health?

I've been writing this for years, and I feel more and more like a voice crying in the wilderness. This world, that of HiFi and high-end, has been showing worrying signs of crisis for some time now. All those involved in the field, journalists first and foremost, who instead of providing information and publishing real opinions, act as a megaphone for the companies, are quick to say that it's not like that, that turnover has never been so high, that sales are going very well and that, to use the words of some boastful retailer, “dozens and dozens of McIntosh amps are sold every month”, while proudly displaying pallets of gigantic packages that have just arrived at the shop. If you listen to these people - yes, you too, dear fellow journalists “on duty” - everything is going wonderfully well: the shops (which ones? The few remaining ones?) are full of customers, the HiFi shows are swarming with visitors and the field is more alive than ever. And the same “journalists”, when they review some inexpensive product, mainly from China, are quick to say that it is...“interesting” (note, they never say it sounds good!) and that in any case it is not a “giant killer”. God forbid that the doubt should creep in that certain HiFi prices are absolutely unjustifiable. Indeed, a real joke.

In this fabulous house of cards, however, every now and then a crack appears: glorious brands sold off for a few pennies (see the sale of the glorious Sound United brands that I wrote about last month and the Krell closing) and companies that are on the brink of bankruptcy. It is news these days that MBL - in the collective imagination the most high-end brand of all, perhaps the first to start with a certain type of HiFi for sheiks - is looking for investors to save it from bankruptcy. The Berlin-based company in fact filed for insolvency on May 27, 2025 and is now actively looking for “saviours”. The court has appointed restructuring expert Frank Brachwitz of PLUTA Rechtsanwalts GmbH as provisional insolvency administrator. Is MBL another brand that will become Chinese property or maybe some large financial group will step in?

MBL Gmbh is an LLC with 50 employees, known in the industry for its unconventional approach to sound reproduction, with its very particular omnidirectional speakers. If I understand well, the top of the range model is around €400,000 (four hundred thousand). A few years ago MBL, probably foreseeing the collapse, had created two lines below the Reference one, a more - let's say - economical line, the Cadenza, which sits under the middle line called Noble. The average prices of Cadenza electronics are around 10,000€, more or less half of those of the Noble series. Who knows, maybe this downscaling has not produced the desired results and it is obviously a shame, because an innovative brand like MBL deserves to survive, and with it the 50 employees who are evidently not to blame. It's no different from what happened to Porsche, which, in order to keep the 911 alive, was forced to produce SUVs, and that's not doing very well either. Indeed, Porsche was recently forced to close several stores in China, for example.

Can we draw conclusions? No, certainly you can't extrapolate a trend from an example, but here the examples are becoming more and more numerous and, perhaps, the quantity of new rich is no longer enough to support a market that, let's face it, has definitely had its day. From below comes the unstoppable attack of ChiFi (which is ramping the learning curve very quickly) and in the mid class range the interest in HiFi seems to have definitively dropped. It seems we are going full force with the Titanic orchestra playing on and on!

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June 2025 Editorial

Is the house of cards crumbling?