Why Is Hi Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?

@temporal_dissident I don’t particularly disagree w/ your lusting after gear theory.

I built a fairly nice system when I was married to the mother of my kids, which gave me a taste of good sound. Years later when I decided to build another system I decided to implement a little bit of a strategy, because I had learned about how expensive the upgrade bug can be.

So glad I decided to just go ahead and do things right the first time around.

Also thankful I had already learned about how important synergy in a system is, including having a complete loom of whatever cables/wires you use. I’ve learned some really valuable things from reading these silly posts.

It’s a good feeling to be completely content with what you have and not be the least bit envious of what others have. Like others have mentioned, relatively good sound can be had for a fairly reasonable amount of dough. I would consider our buddy @mahgister to be sort of a master of that particular domain.

"I recently heard a small 2-way stand mount speaker at a show. The sound was excellent. The product was priced at $50,000 or thereabouts, per pair. Allowing for distribution and marketing leaves about $25,000.  Add management and cost of capital, that leaves maybe $12,500 per pair for parts and assembly and engineering. Say the cost of parts was $5000 and assembly was $2500. Could engineering realistically cost $5,000 per pair? "

$25,000 for marketing and distribution of every pair of speakers? What do they do? Fly them to your house on a private jet? Seems to me that that cost would be amortized over whatever number of units were manufactured. Same with the rest of his justifications.

In High End Audio, price is not as important as intention.

However, parts, development time and labor costs do, mostly, dictate cost.

However, most companies use a 5 or 6 times multiplier.

However, many companies have gone to direct to consumer sales.

However, most of those companies continue to use that same multiplier.

$$$

Quad 57s were mentioned. And there are many other affordable speakers that one can joyfully live with. Certainly, the same can be said for many components.

However, IME, a $13K cartridge is certainly $10K more amazing than a $3K one.

Maybe it had nothing to do with the speakers.  Maybe the stands were made of Unobtainum? 😀

On a more serious note, I also bought  a pair of the Ohm 2’s for $7xx.  Between improvements and inflation the new Ohm 5’s cost almost 5 grand with shipping and handling.