High End Amp Price Collapse musings

Look, I was a curmudgeon myself....as i said, I owned the Class A and AB $20K amps and preamps and the Wilson speakers and the Dyn C4's and the B&W 802D2's etc...!  What I am hearing coming out of a $799 BlueSound integrated and Vault 2 feeding my Totem Forest Signatures is crazy good by any measure.  In fact, it effortlessly trounces anything I've owned before....maddening actually!  3lb integrated and 40lb speakers absolutely melt my heart and entrance me like nothing I've heard anywhere...period.

All things digital carry a sense of instant obsolescence once the next version is announced.  I wouldn't buy a digital amp because I think it would be a poor boat anchor (too light) in a few years.  There are many old "analog" amps, speakers, and tonearm I'd love to have, but any old digital gizmo falls into the Atari, Windows 2000, iPhone4 graveyard.  Maybe it's an unfair association with computer products, or an unfair label of "digital" but DAC's have the same arc of obsolescence.  Analog dies a slower death in the used market.

I grew up with vinyl and I can say that Hi Rez ripped CD's through my BlueSound rig delivers that vinyl magic without it's fatal flaws.  My ripped CD's now sound like great vinyl when before, played through my $12k SACD/CD PLAYER sounded good but lacking in that vinyl dynamic vitality.