The term "High End" needs to die. Long live Hi-Fidelity!

The comments: “I think its capitalism at its finest. Not only that but the market is shrinking and manufactures need to increase their prices to make a living getting by. That, and greed.” Are totally off base and just foolish.
Technology keeps improving things and usually the price increases as well. Have you heard of the trickle down effect? A lot of the Uber expensive components/technologies are often found in the companies lower cost components over time. 
We need people to think outside the box to try new ideas that take advantage of current technologies so we can improve over what is out today. 
Mad for greed, the more expensive the component, the less you are going to sell so when you have to recover costs on a new product that is going to be outside the reach of the majority, it will cost more.
You will never see a Bugatti go for the same price as a Toyota, this isn’t greed, it’s reality

The heart of the original proposition, I think, was to consider that money does not always equal best quality.  Since I'm getting close to meeting my maker, I had the opportunity in the 50's and 60's to build amps out of various magazines--and found that a very good quality could be had for very cheap if you were a bit of an engineer. I went on to become a physicist, but never lost my love for designing and building my own amps.  For a while in the 90's I tried to share DIY kits and ideas via forums, but found that the heyday of home engineers had passed.  I had enough money back then to spend on the "high-end" stuff, nevertheless found it fairly easy to build something for a 1/10 or 1/100 of the price that was the equal or better in sound quality.  Naturally, because of the ease in building them I gravitated toward tube designs.  

It would be nice to see a real resurgence of DIY movement--it could certainly give the super expensive stuff a second option.  Consider for a minute a "Macintosh" type power mono-block, built in China for less than $200-$300 and sold in America for $3000-$5000, or $15,000-$30,000 with the right marketing and name recognition.  It may have some bells and whistles that are hard to add as a DIY, but then most of them are not needed if you are the user and can control your environment.  


Well, I'm pretty much out of date with everything today, but it is fun to ramble.  Thanks for listening.

I just love music and to enjoy it well in my home I have to learn something about the equipment, in order to get the best value for what I spend. I am curious about how different types of components and speakers sound though, but that is nearing its end. You have to get through the equipment to get to the music. I just let my subscription to Absolute Sound expire and will not be renewing. I got tired of all the high price equipment, descriptions of components and their sound that seemed like reviewers were describing the most beautiful thing on earth or the most wonderful experience they ever had. It’s a piece of equipment, not a beautiful human being! It’s silly really, to me anyway. I still subscribe to Stereophile but will let that expire also. At least it has measurements and comparison type reviews, but much of the equipment is too expensive and would turn newcomers off as well. Audiophile? No. Music lover. Yes. 

As a newbie, I love these comments “Audiophile? No. Music lover. Yes.”  I don’t know if I will hang around once I have updated my system, but what I have enjoyed is “what are you playing tonight “ threads and some of the more subjective reviews. I want to find out what others enjoy in their equipment and I quickly am learning that is different from a price tag, because what we enjoy is different. Soundstage is really important to me. And I just bought speakers I love, but when we were listening to speakers in the stores my wife and I heard speakers worth 10x what we bought, and the labs could tell us the more expensive speakers had an extra kw here or amp there than the less expensive speakers didn’t, but this is subjective, I enjoyed the less expensive sound better. This is about joy not dollars. Wayne