Are headphones, sound bars, and the like not an enormous market segment? Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?
This reads like "I feel totally alone in diverging from the norm that microwave TV dinners are as good as any other food, I much prefer home cooked meals". Like... that's not a controversial opinion, that's normal. OP taking an elitist stance about doing something that everybody else does and having an opinion that everybody else agrees with.
30 years ago members of the general public spent money on home stereos with good speakers. Photos, videos, and movies from the 80s of male teenagers' rooms all had at least decent stereos if not pretty good stereos.
And now they don't. Your comment conflates two things: what people agree is true vs what people do. Everyone knows that decent stereos or audio setups sound better than phone speakers. That isn't up for debate. But they stopped buying decent amplifiers and speakers because music precipitously dropped as a cultural cornerstone with the mainstreaming of the Internet. If you ask someone with headphones on today what they're listening to, it's just as likely to be music as it is to be podcasts, news, youtube videos about video games, or youtube videos about a random topic that you would never think people would care that much about.
> Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?
This is actually a pretty good example. Obviously they would notice. But it turns out that they don't actually care very much: the masses are perfectly happy to watch shows and movies on tiny screens with terrible audio.
This is just false. People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it. TVs are still found in every home even though they are rarely hooked up to anything other than internet streaming any more.
The reason sound systems aren't as popular as they were in the 80s is that most modern TVs come with decent stereo sound, and bluetooth headphones are excellent. People are buying decent amplifiers and speakers, built in to other things because manufacturers know that they will get more sales if they make the built-in audio quality of their devices better.
What did I write that is false? You didn't actually contradict any of it. You wrote about what people prefer and I wrote about what people do.
> People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it.
Their actions indicate their preferences. If they're doing it a certain way then they, by definition, prefer to do it that way. No one is forcing them to do otherwise. Audio equipment is not expensive.
I think a lot of people elsewhere in this thread are confusing a simple majority of the whole population, with a large minority which obviously does care enough about audio but is nevertheless a minority.
25% of US adults, say, spending on audio gear may be a huge market segment, but it's still a minority!
This reads like "I feel totally alone in diverging from the norm that microwave TV dinners are as good as any other food, I much prefer home cooked meals". Like... that's not a controversial opinion, that's normal. OP taking an elitist stance about doing something that everybody else does and having an opinion that everybody else agrees with.