Has the cost of HiFi gotten a bit too much?

Numbers and facts matter.

Yes they matter indeed...

But the conceptual dymanic behind interpretation of numbers matter more...

The control imposed on humanity is not well understood by the Piketty numbers only : «The richest 10% of the population now takes 52% of global income and the poorest half just 8%, it said.»

It is way clearer if we put all this on a graph trees analysis...

Because at the end ONLY three ou 4 nodes at the pyramidal peak control all the rest directly or indirectly...the powerful people DONT NEED TO OWN EVERYTHING nor to be the richest...Only idiots or narcissist superficial personality want to be known all around the world...Powerful man search for power not for celebrity...Their ego dont need to be assured by others at all ...

Then it is worst situation than the situation depicted by Picketty in a simple linear way...

All humanity is controlled by few people, an oligarchic class that cannot be reduced to wealth at all...

One of the most powerful man in the planet is the technocrat director of the B.I.S. for example who is very poor compared to Gates but not less powerful and not known , ask his name even to Biden, he will stay mute...... The Blackrock investment fund financial director Larry Fink has more power than Bill Gates and he is very "poor" compared to him...

«The world’s three largest asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, and UBS) alone control $21 trillion, roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy in 2017 and nearly twice as much as the entire world’s hedge fund, private equity, and venture capital industries combined.»

People who think they are free now in Canada or US read comic books...We mimic marxist China social control method now , methods which were invented in the British empire anyway, and the Chinese surpassing us here nowaydays appeared to be our master in the covid crisis social control... We then imitated them or our governments under the heavy fist of the corporate lobbys imitated them and cannot wait to geolocalize our body information... Ask our friend Bill Gates...For our benefit for sure, think the comic book reader of captain America...

"Brave new world" Aldous Huxley

The pursuit of fine audio like so many of the other fine things in life depends upon the amount of disposable income one has. In fact quite a lot of happiness depends upon this.

Therefore it's of paramount importance that our governments actually work for us and not for corporate interests. 

@mahgister 

It was an eye opener for me to discover that so many of the so called bitter rivalries such as Microsoft v Apple, McDonald's v KFC, and of course Pepsi v Coke weren't really such bitter rivalries after all.

At least not when the owning parent companies such as the above mentioned BlackRock and Vanguard were often one and the same.

Whatever happened to the monopolies commission? Or don't they bother to look beyond the brand name anymore?

Thankfully, this is the age of the internet - the real information age.

People can nowadays access business data much more freely, at least up to a certain point, and then make up their own minds on how things are really being run.

Or if they prefer, they can stick to the old hegemony handed down for generations.

The real point is that things are changing fast, maybe faster than ever before in our history, and that's something that might need to be understood.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that those who do not have access to online information are now at a serious disadvantage, is it?

It is surely no exaggeration to say that those who do not have access to online information are now at a serious disadvantage, is it?

They are not at a disadvantage, in many case, it is worst they are lost...

Without spiritual intuition protection, the falseties in society kill the freedom of the mind...Save for some already very strong spiritual person...

In the same way before this information age we were most of us lost and more easily prey to all religious and political and economical powers ploys and manipulations ...

First: i know someone of my age that never owned a computer and trust only official TV news...

He is so lost about anything that it is impossible to discuss with him about what occur in the world... He cannot BELIEVE anything because the reality is so much incredible, that the sanitized version of event and the superficial one ONLY appear rational and not too frigthening for him... I understand that myself because what i learned is so disturbing even for me...

Second point...

Even in this forum where most people, if not all, enjoy an internet connection the level of brainwashing expressed through these threads is so great , even among intelligent people furthermore, that i think the access to some truth is not enough... We must search for the truth, in spite and over of our own ready made opinions, to accept it ..

And very few people are ready to loose their past politicial, social, psychological, economical philosophical illusions and paid the price to pay to discover and admit the truth...

Truth is without mercy and it is not surprizing because truth is already silent justice in the working bench ...

If justice seems absent around us, it is an illusion, truth is working already from the beginning and you can turn your back on truth but nobody has ever been able to bury it, truth ressuscitate always... Hindus called it karma...It is for me for "mathematical" reason that i believe in Christ resurrection and in our own resurrection ...The distribution of prime numbers contain all perspectival truths from the beginning to the end... It is the skeletal appearence of a universal "memory" working in and out of time....But this is another matter i will not enter into here .... 😁😊

No justice exist without truth....

And truth is eternal...

The ultimate truth is love...

And we are ourselves the balance between justice and love...

Guessing the bar is set low.
 

Actually, the opposite.  You’d be amazed at the quality of sound a pair of Etymotic ER4 and a phone streaming lossless can provide your ears.

LOL my phone is for business only. Email, Calls, Navigation and Audible Books.