The Insane World of High End Audio! Is it All a Scam?

Scamming or even misleading people is different than overpricing, which is a business/marketing strategy. In my business, there is a notable story, now taught in business schools, of a vendor with an inferior product but deep pockets and lots spent on p.r., trade shows, and advertising. They made in roads by creating demand from higher ups at companies, semi-knowledgeable, who liked the branding and wanted their department to buy it. Competing products did more and better, all the prices were around the same. They re-branded the company, claimed a massive engineering change, for endorsements from major players, put it all in  a black box, all hardware and software now proprietary, so they said. They also raised the price to $160,000 vs 25-40k for competition. They sold to wealthier outfits so we'll that they went public and never looked back. With basically the same thing that had been $35,000. Harvard teaches it as a positive lesson that if you have something you spent too much on to develop and can't recoup cost because you are no better than or inferior  to the competition, differentiate your product not on features or benefits but on price. They advise at least a 5 fold increase over the competing products. 

@audioguy85  I could open up the higher end stuff made by Technics, Yamaha, etc and do a back to back comparison of his 'boutique' (low iq engineering/scam priced junk made by some guy in his garage) sold by OCD dealer.

The OCD MIKEY GUY IS ANNOYONG as all heck. Looks down on All kinds of quality gear, such as marantz, Macintosh, Yamaha, etc...only raves about the boutique crap he sells, and Noone ever heard of, of which costs crazy amounts of dough.

I've watched a few of his videos. I think he’s just looking for clicks. The scam is his content to get subscribers using clickbait titles. He’s a good entertainer though.

Some ’boutique’ euro backwater crap brand he touts never had any design/manufacturing clout..I would bet my hat that all of it is subcontracted to China and the final 2 screws get tightened down in Europe.. to make audiophiles feel real special that they got something ’made in europe’ or something. I would rather buy chifi instead in such instances, give credit where its due.

The upper echelon Technics, Marantz, Yamaha, Sony, etc will be made in Japan and have some high iq engineering.. apparently it’s not special/elusive enough for some low iq OCD used car dealer.

I’ve watched a few of his videos. I think he’s just looking for clicks. The scam is his content to get subscribers using clickbait titles. He’s a good entertainer though.

Having experienced the difference between proper acoustics with really great gear then gear costing 10% in the same exact space and still having a great system I am a firm believer it is the most important aspect in audio.

In business I used to sell a dang fine automotive sound deadening product and did quite well at it, growing monthly for years in a row and without advertising. I hired a new web designer and he kept after me for months to significantly raise my prices though I had a really decent profit margin I felt it was wrong to do so. Of course it involved fancier packaging and a new name but I finally gave in and the business grew 4 fold in months. I never really liked doing so but I still had what I felt was the best product for the money available and more got to get in on it.

I came up with some ideas for a very dynamic website, had not seen some of those used before, spent a lot of money and a lot of time waiting for it. In the end the guy used my money and ideas to develop a competing product, quite good, tiny bits of product, very slick marketing and charged a huge price for it and sold a lot of it. In reality it was not better than what I sold, just marketing BS.

That said, I think there is more than enough evidence to support claims that gear is being sold that is way over priced and just does not perform that much better than other quality gear to justify the prices. Mainly it just sounds different in some cases and in others goes with the system better than other gear and or the way the customer perceives how it sounds can be related to our differences in taste and preference or just simply how our individual hearing works.

BUT, it does keep more money in circulation, not a bad thing for the rest of us that do not have the budget or do have the budget but choose to be happy with "lessor" systems.

Rick