"I'm a believer"

Quality of design does not mean ACTUAL quality of sound ... It means ONLY potential quality of sound ...

Actual experienced sound qualities need controls over the three working dimensions of any gear at any price to be OPTIMAL : mechanical,electrical and acoustical ...

Quality of design is not in any way LINEARLY correlated with price tags ... This does not means that there is no relation between price and sound quality ...

Put all this together and the question about "how expansive is it to anyone" to reach some satisfaction level had not so much meaning in term of price...

All vintage speakers at low cost are not trash ...As my Vintage Tannoy dual concentric Gold , a design marvel ...

All contemporary low cost speakers are not all trash either ... My actual low cost modified and well embed small speakers beat all headphones i ever listened to and their basic price 12 years ago was 100 bucks ...In spite of their good reviews i disliked them a decade BEFORE modifying them because i had no other speakers to work with ...

Their ratio sound quality/cost is insane AFTER modifications of the resonator box with a new refined and more complex porthole and after mechanical and electrical and acoustical embeddings ...

Now very costlier speakers will beat them for sure as my Tannoy would have too well embedded but not by a so far margin ...

it is why i am happy with them ...

You can laugh , it is me who laugh the last ... 100 bucks speakers with 4 inches woofer in the race ( 50 hertz now ) ...

There is a minimal acoustic satisfaction threshold which is correlated with the diminishing returns  zone ...

Diminishing returns can suddenly materialize and bite you in the ass - just look at EV's now. Same with audio equipment which is always subject to unforeseen technological displacement. You hear lots of cheerleaders now touting the demise of class A and AB amps in the face of GaNFET's. They may suddenly gain enough momentum to cause a feeling of diminishing returns for everybody in possession of outmoded technology or what is perceived to be outmoded.

Since pricing seems to be so arbitrary, I don’t see how anything can be deduced from MSRP.

If you leave the 80k speaker as is, and just change the people invovled in it’s design, manufacturing and marketing, it could be a 40k speaker or even a 100k speaker.

Cheers

Everything in high end has diminishing returns, DACs, cables, speakers are just part of it.