I design and build most of my own stuff. A SET amplifier using the best parts such as heavier duty output transformers than the most expensive factory made amplifiers you can buy and polypropylene capacitors in the high voltage power supply rated over twice the voltage they will have to filter and better filtered. My power amplifier, which uses 833A triodes running at1000 Volts can be built for under $2000 for both channels using the best parts. You can buy one for $350,000. Additionally, I saw a tube amplifier on Audiogon selling for $10,000 and it has the only slightly cheaper but inferior electrolytic capacitors which go bad every few years.
I also do not believe five figures for cables made by companies that use bad physics or well-neigh voodoo such as golden ratio for litz strand size contribute anything to the sound, not that decent cables do not help. The effect of electric fields reflecting off nonconducting floors requiring putting speaker cables on little tripods can only be too far below anything anyone could hear or tell in a double-blind listening test.
I never bothered to add up what I had spent over the years.
Does anybody remember in the 1970's you could buy what was agreed upon as "the best" such as a Marantz amplifier for $1000 or MacIntosh for $500? Today you can't buy "the best" for under the cost of a large house. In a way this liberates us to accept decent sounding components within what we can afford.
As for wives raising hell over the cost of stereo, I wonder what they spend on clothes and hairdos. Marital disapproval of extravagances goes both ways. For the man who after layaway of $5000 deceived his wife into thinking he had only spent the final $2000, was he defending himself against toxic femininity which can be just as abusive as toxic masculinity? This is why I do not put any faith in any claimed validity of cultural gender roles usurp through uneducated folk wisdom.
