More potential bad news for some big names...

What will the lack of these products do to the used market is the question. Many products are all ready higher than they used to be. I’ve seen Palladium ll monoblocks and Aragon 8008 BB amps, each nearly 30 years old selling for $3k and $2k respectively. That’s simply one example of the used market that I’ve observed that’s truly out of whack. These products were available for less than $2k used when they were 3-4 years old. Now they’re 27 years old and selling for more? I don’t get that!

There was a day that you could spend $2k and acquire a very solid audio product. It’s rare to find a quality product at a great price anymore. Well, at least that’s one thing I’ve noticed. 

There's not a lot of point to be made discussing what young people today are going to do with their money.  Their seniors (you and me) grew up with terrible products and experienced a revelation when they almost accidentally found themselves in a high end audio place.  For me it was when a friend and I cruised down to Jacksonville and I heard Dahlquist DQ-10's.  Nowadays it is an easy matter to get acceptable audio at low cost, and it's ubiquitous.  Also, things are tighter for this generation and the entertainment options broader and widely distributed.  How many of us would have gone crazy over audio if we had had computers to play with?  We had the opportunity to access audio as an art form, literally.  I can see where today's up-and-comers have more things to get involved in, and I imagine some will become audio nuts, but the numbers will be smaller and the days of the revolutionary engineers are probably over.  What's out there now is excellent and affordable, making the hobby aspect of it less attractive.  One more thing:  the quality and diversity of the media.  Classical music used to be a widespread thing.   Now it is most definitely not, and if you know a young person with any knowledge of such whatsoever of it you are dealing with a music major.  That's just one example. Popular music is dominated by low quality artists doing low quality things. And it sells.  There are still great recordings made, and the technical abilities are better than ever, but the stuff that makes money, the stuff inputted into it, is mediocre.  So who needs fancy equipment when earbuds will do?  In the meantime, enjoy what you have and don't worry about everyone else.  You can be a niche.  It's ok.  

It is interesting to me how every commercial has a silver faced 70's era receiver, turntable and speakers in the background. It's considered cool I guess but for looks more than real function. I have a collection of older equipment from the 70's that I still use to this day. All of that stuff is worth 3-4 times what I paid for it. There are also plenty of audio companies trying to capture the retro vibe market with components that have the vintage look. Maybe the younger generation will latch on to that once they get into the working world. I think college kids with a stereo are rare as hens teeth. Polar opposite of my years in school. 

This may be a little off topic  but I would like to point out. The world has 8 billion people, And from the 1970s to the 2000. The tv brand's were RCA, Toshiba, Panasonic,  Quasar, Electrahome, Zenith, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi. Not to mention a number of early MIC brands. So the question I have is with how large the population is now versus then, what drove all the above brands away or to a fraction of what they were?

As I contemplate the audio market I am unsure as to why better quality has gotten so expensive.  My frame of reference is televisions.  If you look at the price history of TVs against their quality and feature history, it is clear that the quality and features have gone way up as the comparative cost has come down.

The first color TVs were about $500.  Today $500 will buy you a very nice quality and size TV, and inflation has driven the value of the dollar down considerably in that time.  Now tell me why audio has not followed that path.  Solid state audio equipment should not be mega dollars, I will leave tubes out of the discussion for simplicity of the question.