AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS

THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED KINGDOM

Julie Mullins

Social distancing. Flattening the curve. These expressions are embedded in our collective psyche as we to try to keep COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus that causes it at bay. Few of us who live through this will ever forget them.

But life and work must somehow go on, if at a slower pace than before. Even now—as I write, just a couple of weeks after the earliest stay-at-home order went into effect, in California—the pandemic anxiety and resulting closures have businesses across all sectors taking a huge hit. Today’s unemployment numbers were staggering, dwarfing those at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. High-end audio—a specialty niche within the luxury market—is hardly immune.

Stereophile wanted to find out more about how COVID-19 was impacting the audio industry—how companies and people are coping and adapting to an unpredictable and unprecedented situation that’s still unfolding, changing daily. Also: What else is on manufacturers’ minds? What are they anticipating? Could there perhaps—strange as it sounds—be a silver lining to all this? Not everyone, it turns out, is entirely glum.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. People are dying—although so far we’ve heard of no major figures in our own industry who have passed on. There have been layoffs—lots of them apparently—although few are willing to talk about them. One who is is Bill Low, founder and CEO of California-based AudioQuest. Low provided Stereophile with a statement, with excerpts from a recent email addressed to his employees:

For only the second time in the forty years of AudioQuest, we have had to lay off people and make adjustments that are based not on the merit of the employee, but based on the extent to which the company can remain afloat without their valuable contributions. Some of the most valuable people the company has ever employed—irreplaceable people who had been with