“That is exactly what I am saying. If a hobbyist is willing to pull the trigger at a price of $40K or $60K then yes, I am pretty certain that this very same hobbyists can afford a $100K. Otherwise they probably shouldn’t be pulling the trigger on either.”
The $60K LP12-50 is history now and it did sell to people who’d didn’t spend $100K. It is a bold claim that a customer with £40K to spend on an LP12 is likely to suddenly decide to lash out an extra $60K on top of that. In any case, these customers are extremely rare. To say that they don’t walk into the average HiFi store every day would be a vast understatement. My dealer said that has never happened to him. Every single one of them is an individual case, so we can’t generalise about them.
“One question...and I think this is maybe where we differ: At what price do you decide that the upgrade cost of the LP12 is a bridge too far?”
How long is a piece of string?
“IOW, the cost to acquire the latest and greatest Linn upgrade now puts it squarely in competition with a table that you suspect betters the platform in all ways ( maybe even in most ways)”
What does IOW stand for? Not Isle of Wight, I presume. As I have said before, that puts an improved configuration of the LP12 into a new market segment. This can’t possibly mean less sales for Linn.
“My question does assume that you have knowledge of what the competition offers, something that I am unsure whether you ( maybe most UK based Linnies?), or for that matter Linn themselves, are truly cognizant of!”
I am confident that most people who have bought a turntable that they are happy with don’t waste time researching hypothetical alternatives. If you’d seen Linn’s factory and met Gilad and the other people there, you’d realise that they will most definitely have researched their markets. If they didn’t do that, they would have come a cropper years or even decades ago.