Inflated prices in audio

Consumer beware. It is always that way. Human's are extremely dangerous animals. How many friends do you REALLY trust with your wallet, your car, your kids or your wife. 
Having said that many high end manufacturers have very ethical business models. They make their living on their least expensive models
not their signature pieces. They do not sell very many ultra expensive models and have to amortize the cost of development over sometimes as few as two or three units. The benefit of doing this is to use the technology down the line in less expensive units and get a few very rich fan boys to pay for the development. Pass labs is now using XS circuitry even in their least expensive units. 

I THINK the 3009II--might be wrong on that model number as it was 45 years ago--was $135.00--when I sold them.

They were considered "middle of the road" for sound quality back then--1974.  Better arms--not sure of the names these days--were put on the best tables at the time.  Linn Sondek and the new "direct drive" tables from Technics were big back then.  Thornes was considered the "old guy." 

The MOST FUN table, that did not in any way work, was the Michell Transcriptor.  We had one on display with an SME arm, as I remember--could be wrong--but it was a real showpiece.  Didn't actually play any records, but darn nice to watch turn around.  Expensive, too, and pretty hard to assemble as I remember.

Funny to see SME arms at such a high price.  Should have bought another dozen from Shure back then, I guess...

Cheers!

Try to manufacture a quality product for a fair price - what ever that means.  In today's world, how many of them do you think SME sells each year. Cost to manufacturer, dealer mark-up, etc. leaves very little profit margin unless you can get a higher priced product sold. No to mention equipment cost and maintenance, paying people on your staff even when things are not selling that well, competition allover the place, etc.

VPI just came out with their 40th anniversary model at half the price of the one they built a few years back.  Not cheap but that was a big achievement for a manufacturer.

Her is my take .
I was at the biggest and best Audio Show in the world in Munich , Germany with a good friend who was CEO of a small German audio company .
Couple other "big-shots" wandered up and he introduced me in English .They were talking about this market and that in German and kept mentioning the " sucker market" , I assume they thought I didn’t speak German , which I do , and then quite well .
As they left I asked my buddy whats this sucker market ? He smiled and said the USA .

@clearthink I don't like cables because there are just too damn many - I have tried quite a few (as per my post) and having gone in circles come back to my DNM cables which are as cheap as chips but work very well with my amp/system (which actually love DNM cables). 

People go on about the r&d in cables - well how about the R&D into creating the CD player/Blue Ray/ OLED TV's - now that's research. 

Please note my prejudice is system specific and I am sure that some systems do favour certain cables, and the further caveat that from the Vetere cables I have used they are much better than Lavardins' own interconnects. I just get slightly sick of the claims over cables - that's all