Your iPod Is Killing Tweeter

by Gregory Sullivan — Wednesday, April 18, 2007, 08:00 AM EDT

Your MP3 player is a marvelous thing. But the one thing it isn't, is high fidelity. People are coming to the realization that pretty good sound reproduction is good enough, and that is spelling doom and gloom for the retailers that depend on high-end home stereo for their livelihood.

Tweeter Home Entertainment Group Inc., a Canton, Mass.-based retailer of mid-to-high end audio equipment, is closing 49 of its 153 stores nationwide. Slumping sales at Sacramento, Calif.-based Tower Records led that former industry juggernaut to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August.

And Circuit City, the nation's No. 2 electronics retailer, is laying off 3,400 of its most experienced clerks.

Year-to-date data from a recent Nielsen SoundScan report shows sales of prerecorded CDs in the United States down 20 percent from last year.

"Everybody has a certain amount of money to spend. It's not that they're choosing not to spend it on the old-style audio. It's that something new came along," said James McQuivey, principle analyst for media technology at Forrester Research Inc.

The Supremes sounded great on the AM car radio. Steely Dan sounded dynamite on my Onkyo receiver with the Acoustic Research speakers. OK Go seems to be fine coming through little earbuds at 128 kilobits per second.

Tags: iPod, Tweet, IPO, IP, K

Your iPod Is Killing Tweeter

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