I know the date you’re seeing at the top of the page indicates it’s the first of June, 2025, at the very earliest. But you should know up front that I’m writing these words around the middle of April. I say that only because I have no idea what the future holds (no one does), and by the time this is published, I could look like either a lunatic or a prophet, or a bit of both.
I should also add that what follows is mostly for my readers in the United States, but there are repercussions for the rest of the world. And as you may have gathered by now, this is going to be a very political editorial. Sorry about that. Everything is politics at the moment. Literally everything. So it would be cowardly and a disservice to the truth to skirt around the issue in an attempt to avoid hurting the feelings of the ever-shrinking minority of my compatriots who are still on board with the chaos created by the Trump regime.
What am I going on about here? Mostly tariffs. But also knitting needles. And, of course, hi-fi.
But let’s start with those knitting needles.
In a weird stroke of luck, timing, and generosity, my wife and I recently came into a literally life-changing sum of money, which for folks in our socioeconomic class amounts to four figures (all prices in USD, for now).
There’s all manner of ways we could have spent that money. We desperately need a new mattress, as ours is giving us both back problems. My truck needs some repairs to fix latches that prevent three of its four doors from opening. The frame around our home’s back door is slowly rotting due to some flood damage. I’ve lost nearly 170 pounds in the past 20 months since starting hormone therapy for Hashimoto’s disease, and although I’m doing fine for summer clothes, I desperately need some winter garments that don’t flap in the breeze.
In any normal year, I think we would have prioritized those necessities and knocked out at least a couple of them. But this is not a normal year. The country I love and call home is sliding headlong into fascism, and the ruling regime has started a trade war with the whole rest of the world—like, seriously, all of it . . . even islands inhabited only by penguins—so my wife and I agreed that we would set aside most of that unexpected money to make sure we can afford groceries for at least the next six months or so.
But we also agreed that, given how dark the world is becoming and how desperately we all need a little joy right now, she and I would splurge on a few small luxuries for ourselves before we batten the hatches and prepare as best we can for our dystopian future. My wife spent most of her luxury money on some really nice thread, as well as some new headphones. I upgraded my cracked and dying phone—which is going to only cost me an extra $5.88 a month for a couple of years—and decided to get a really nice set of interchangeable knitting needles so I can tackle some projects that my current hodgepodge of needles won’t let me really do justice to.
And just as I had decided on which set to buy, the tariff chaos started to kick into high gear around April 5. Almost immediately, the needles on my short list began to skyrocket in price, before settling down a few days later—once the regime backed down slightly because bond yields started to go up as the rest of the world stopped buying the only thing we know how to make in the US anymore: debt. But that seems to have been a temporary plateau.
By a weird quirk of e-commerce, on the evening of April 8, I put a different set of needles from the same company—although in a different line (sort of a Denon/Marantz situation, if you will)—into my online shopping cart at a particular yarn store. That night, it was selling for $136 or thereabouts pretty much everywhere, so the specific store was of little consequence. I didn’t pull the trigger, though, given my analysis paralysis.
The next day, that set was selling for more like $170 everywhere around the web. But the store honored my shopping cart. Or at least they claimed to have. Weeks later, I’m still waiting for those needles to arrive, and the unfortunate reality is that if they end up not honoring my purchase, my $136 refund is going to buy me a lot less in terms of knitting needles. But for now, even the US distributor of the needle set I think I’ve purchased doesn’t have any in stock, which is not a good sign.
Oh, there’s one key detail about the knitting-needle set I had my eye on that’s relevant here: it isn’t made in China. It’s made by a family-owned business in Jaipur, India. Oddly, the needle sets manufactured in China and Nepal that I also had on my short list haven’t been nearly so volatile in terms of pricing, at least not yet, I suppose because there was more existing stock in the hands of US distributors.
But it’s all so chaotic and unpredictable that there’s no real way to make sense of why some needle sets are going full tulip mania and others aren’t, other than supply and demand. And even some needle sets by the same company, sets I had eliminated from my short list for various reasons, have lagged behind in going absolutely bat-guano insane in terms of pricing. But they’re getting there. And, keep in mind, this is on existing stock, not new stock coming in from overseas.
Why should you care about my knitting-needle woes? What does any of this have to do with hi-fi and electronics? Well, consider this: from my perspective as a hobbyist in both domains, knitting seems to be a much more mainstream pastime than hi-fi, although the demographics are so different it’s hard to be sure.
Either way, I think this is the future we in the US are facing over the coming months and years with regard to any pastime that costs money. On the one hand, I’m hesitant to recommend anything resembling the sort of panic-buying that is quickly making knitting accessories into Veblen goods instead of tools for a thrifty lifestyle. On the other hand, if you need a new hi-fi component, it isn’t likely to get cheaper anytime soon. In fact, it’s almost certain to get more expensive. A lot more expensive.
Another day, another hill on this never-ending roller coaster of economic chaos
It’s April 30 now, and I’ve just deleted about 1200 words off the end of this editorial and started writing fresh, because market turmoil caused by the Trump regime is making my job incredibly difficult, and a lot of what I’d written earlier now seems quaint. Just a few weeks ago, I wrapped up work on my unboxing preview of Onkyo’s GX-30ARC active speaker system, and I was putting the finishing touches on my full review today when SoundStage! Network managing editor Gordon Brockhouse informed me that the price of the system had increased from $299 to $399. Then, a couple of weeks later, the price settled at $349.
At $299, I had a decent amount of praise for the system. At $399, I was less enthusiastic. Honestly, I’m quickly losing the ability to accurately frame what’s a good value and what isn’t—not a good sign for a value-driven hi-fi publication.
News also just dropped that KEF is raising prices worldwide, a reflection of the fact that there’s no such thing as a US economy anymore—there’s a world economy, and this regime is tanking it for everyone.
Today’s biggest news? Amazon has backpedaled on a proposed change that would show the upcharge on any item due to tariffs, which they already do with state sales tax and the like. Why not spell out this new tax? Because the Trump regime threw a childish tantrum in response to such a flagrant display of honesty, and Amazon now claims it never actually intended to implement this plan on the main Amazon site at all. But honestly, who knows?
I’m now officially late filing this story because I keep having to rewrite it in real time
It’s May 1, a day celebrated around the world as International Workers Day, and it’s becoming clear to me that I’m not getting the interchangeable knitting-needle set I ordered. The shop is ignoring my chat requests and my emails asking for a refund.
Thankfully, I paid with PayPal, so I’m filing a complaint there and will escalate it if I don’t get a response soon. Meanwhile, as of today, I can’t buy the needles I want anywhere in America; I don’t know what tomorrow holds, so I’m importing them from Denmark, as much as I hate to do so. Nothing against Denmark, of course—I simply prefer to support small businesses a bit more local to me.
This Danish retailer is warning me that even if my needles ship today, they have no way of knowing what sort of duties I’m going to get hit with when they go through customs. Trump has been saber-rattling at Denmark for months, because the techno-feudalists who form half of the cabal pulling his puppet strings want to procure Greenland and don’t like taking no for an answer. It’s anyone’s guess whether he might institute a bazillion-percent tariff on Denmark tomorrow as a result.
And this is how things are right now for a lot of people trying to get electronics from China, where most affordable electronics are made. Stories abound about Americans not being able to afford to get gear out of customs, or not being able to figure out if there will be tax to pay to collect shipments already en route. Brent Butterworth and I also discussed how we had to shift gears with a recent segment of our podcast, Audio Unleashed, because we’d planned to talk about cool audiophile gear on AliExpress, but that avenue has been cut off for Americans now. Hell, even Canadian e-readers are getting taxed to hell and back when they cross the border—but inconsistently and unpredictably, seemingly at the whim of whoever is in charge of customs that day.
Don’t panic!
It’s now Cinco de Mayo, which all American subjects will soon be required by law to refer to as “Cinco de ’Murica” (be honest: are you 100% certain I’m joking about that?), and my knitting needles just arrived from Denmark. I paid extra for expedited FedEx shipping, which brought my total cost to $176.90. Not great, but that’s a lot cheaper than I fear they’ll cost in a few weeks. What’s more, when you consider how much I’ll save over the next couple of years knitting new clothes for the missus and me, this set will eventually pay for itself.
Well, maybe. Yarn is also starting to be a luxury that I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to afford. On a trip to Atlanta this past weekend for some IKEA necessities, I splurged on one final bonus luxury purchase for myself (last one, I promise!) before we hunker down and stop spending more money than is necessary to survive and/or provide mutual aid for our community. I bought two hanks of really nice hand-spun and hand-dyed Malabrigo yarn from Peru for a very special project I’m working on for a family member. I paid right at $17 per hank, which is a staggering amount of money to spend on yarn, but nowhere near as much as I’d spend on a hank of American-spun/American-dyed yarn, which I wish I could afford to use for every project.
It got me thinking, though: even most so-called American-made yarn is spun from imported fibers, with a handful of incredibly rare exceptions. What on earth is this foolishness going to do to the fiber-arts industry as a whole for us Americans?
On a lark, I checked Temu, from which many of my fiber-arts friends have purchased some decent yarn at stupidly low prices. Now, even on Temu, the cheap, knockoff, no-name stuff of questionable pedigree, blended with acrylic to make it even cheaper, is selling for as much as I paid for the Peruvian yarn that I would have considered a luxury even if the global economy weren’t in a tailspin.
All of which ultimately pushed my thoughts back to my primary hobby—hi-fi. I don’t simply write about attainable gear as a beat-driven opportunity. I truly believe that affordable hi-fi gear can deliver transformative listening experiences, and I think the world would be a better place if more of us still had stereo systems.
But is affordable hi-fi even going to be a thing going forward? How long can my friend Dan Laufman keep prices down at Emotiva? What’s going to happen to Schiit Audio? Remember, we can’t make this stuff entirely in the US. We’ve been conditioned to think of Asia as a source of cheap labor, but we really need to start thinking of them as the world’s source of skilled labor.
Truth be told—and I know this is going to infuriate a lot of people across the spectrum of acceptable opinion within the Overton window, but it’s what I genuinely believe—as many issues as I had with the US federal CHIPS Act, especially in the way it failed to constrain corporate power, it at least put my country on the road to one day being able to build an integrated amplifier, soup to nuts, on US soil.
If we could do so, I honestly wouldn’t have an issue with selective, thoughtful tariffs to offer our manufacturers a level playing field for a while, to give them time to catch up. But the Trump regime seems dead set on undoing the CHIPS legislation, which only makes sense when you consider that strongmen of the sort Trump emulates and aspires to be always thrive on chaos, even if—especially if—they’re the ones who created that chaos to begin with.
Destroying our country’s ability to join the 21st century in terms of electronics manufacturing while simultaneously punishing its subjects for buying electronics made with components sourced from anywhere else is a magic recipe for the sort of economic strife that always allows strongmen to seize even more power.
What gives me hope
I will say this, though: things seem different this time around. Since at least the rise of Mussolini, strongmen who didn’t have majority support in their own countries have relied on international legitimation and financial backing to seize and hold power. And again, since at least as far back as Mussolini, that legitimation (and sometimes the financial support) has often come from the US.
Nobody with any real economic or military power seems to be stepping up to do the same for Trump. Somebody is dumping our debt, but it’s unclear for now who that is. Trump claims to have made new trade deals with 200 of the world’s 198-or-so countries, but none of those countries seems to be aware of said deals. Voters in Canada and Australia recently rejected Trumpalike candidates, recognizing just in time that neoliberalism may suck, but at least it’s better than fascism. And Canada’s new PM is openly mocking Trump to his face with zero consequences, which sets an example for the rest of the world.
In the long term, most of the world will be okay. History bears that out, I think. Trump is now either a pariah or a laughingstock among his peers. The global economy will eventually recover from the mess this regime is creating. And affordable hi-fi will remain a thing for most of you around the globe.
For my fellow Americans reading this, though, bear with me for a bit. As I said above, my sense of what is and isn’t a good value is going to have to be recalibrated on a weekly basis. I’m going to be rewriting reviews in the days before they’re published, just to keep up with price hikes. And that’s only going to get worse as our existing stock is depleted and we fight over the scraps of new goods coming into our ports.
But don’t panic. It’s hypocritical of me to say that, I know, given that I just panic-bought a set of knitting needles because supply is drying up and prices are climbing higher, and the only interchangeable sets made in the US are cheap plastic crap that are to well-made needles from Germany, Nepal, India, and China what the Easy-Bake Oven is to a flagship Molteni stove. Please understand how simultaneously conflicted I’m feeling about making a purchase based on fear and uncertainty.
Hi-fi is simply too important to me to do the same. So my best advice is this: keep a level head, purchase now if and only if you can afford to, and know that even if American corporations and media outlets seem outright convinced that there won’t be a post-Trump era, history says otherwise. We will get through this.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
