What's going on with the audio market?

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.

Not a class discussion.  I can buy what I want for the most part but nobody wants to put a new car into their system. Nor should they have to. I'm pretty much done on the big purchases. I'm pretty much done on the behavior of some of our audiophile brothers. It's become a hobby that is less about fun and more about guys thinking they they got better gear than other guys.  Some guys even think can tell other folks what to say. I think I have ran into more snobbery and less guys that just want to listen. This hobby is changing  there are less true audiophiles and more uber expensive gear that can't be purchased by most.  Bad mix 

Pretty cogent overview there, E-Slacker. 

Calvin- don't lose faith. You don't have to feel that way- this hobby can still be fun and lot's of good used gear, DIY, interesting stuff if you are willing to invest the time. The music- yeah, that's really the purpose, but we tend to rationalize all the gear-mania by claiming that it's getting us closer to the real musical experience. I feel like I've gotten off the treadmill, and while gear still interests me, I'm probably more interested in set up, the design, the "why" of it, and the history, rather than the bling. And buying records- much fun there to be had, you can have stuff coming in constantly from web purchases- great to look forward to, to explore and hear new things (or old things that you haven't heard).  I enjoy my system now more than I ever did; I still buy stuff, but I'm not caught up in any sort of competition, and I have fun experimenting.