Back in the day, there was a palpable sense of the art advancing by the month, and we waited like junkies for the next issue of Absolute Sound to inform us of the next advance. Many of those advances were available to the young and the working class. For example, the Apt Holman preamp, the Advent and Dalquist speakers, Shure cartridges, and even Sherwood receivers. Those were heady days, but more importantly, we were in the audio stores as potential buyers, and not just window shoppers outside of Tiffany's seeing how the rich lived. The thought was, "Do I want to spend that much?" and not the dismissive, "Out of my league."
Technically, technologies go through an awkward youth, a vibrant adolescence, and then a maturity where the new is derivative of the past Think Windows and Intel. The performance of many audio components began to plateau, with smaller and smaller improvements, especially when you're up against the limits of human hearing. You can only keep getting halfway to the limit in ever smaller steps. Except for Class-D, we're way past vibrant adolescence in most components.
Economically, as the market began to contract, companies had to make more money on each unit, and we saw a great price inflation just as salaries and performance were leveling off. But there were more wealthy, both here and globally, so a lot of potential and past customers were just left behind as the wrong demographic.
But at the heart of it, audio systems used to command a much bigger share of our fascination and entertainment, but now our vested interest is in looking at screens instead of what's being projected between stereo speakers. Audio has lost the eyeballs more than the ears.
All IMHO.
