Audiophile Malls Asia: Highsun/Haiyin Plaza - Guangzhou, China. (And thoughts about China and the global order.)

Last time, we talked about Seoul's Yongsan ETLand, so moving along in my Asia trip, let's check out another audiophile mall, this time in Southern China, in the city of Guangzhou. I've been in this city before (as per 2016 post) but not at this exact location, the Highsun/Haiyin (name used interchangeably) Plaza.

It looks like in the last 10 years, this place has really become quite concentrated with many audiophile stores.

Audiophile Malls Asia: Yongsan ETLand - Seoul, S. Korea

I don't know about you guys, but I'm like one of those husbands/boyfriends/partners who sit outside surfing the web at women's clothing stores. So while "the girls" were out shopping and getting pedicures in Seoul, I decided to take a couple hours' detour to the Yongsan ETLand which is about a 10 minute walk away from the massive Yongsan subway station (take Exit 3).

I suspect in the Western world (North America and Europe), it's quite rare to find a good concentration of stores selling hi-fi hardware any more, if even this was ever the case. Unless one is fortunate enough to have a large dealer in town, audio shows seem to be the only place left to see a large number of brands under one roof. However, as you might remember for past articles (like this, this), in Asia, the concept of an "audiophile mall", or "hifi-mall" still exists, so let's document some of these places in 2026... this time, we take a peek in Seoul.

Small Room Acoustics: Example of impact with (ultra) high-end speakers in Stereophile. (On AI audio writers, and Asia vacation pictures. 😊)

Last time, we discussed small room acoustics and audiophile listening rooms. In that article, I used an idealized loudspeaker with flat frequency response from 40Hz up. As I'm still traveling, away from my gear, I figured for this article, let's look around published data in audio articles to examine room effects and consider what this means.

One widely available and consistent source of objective data over the decades comes from Stereophile. While there are clear examples in the magazine where they perpetuate the "woo" in audiophilia, I appreciate that they do provide measurements for audiophiles who can read graphs and consider the technical performance of devices beyond subjective claims of how "great" something sounds, at some point in time, to someone, in some nebulous-quality sound room.

So let's take a look at a very recent Stereophile article - this one reviewing the Marten Mingus Septet Statement Edition loudspeakers - and consider the effects from room acoustics. Clearly, at an asking price of US$200k/pair, we're in the zone of "ultra high-end" luxury audio hardware. These speakers would be way above and beyond what the vast majority of audiophiles (never mind "music lovers" at large!) would ever spend.