A Little Hypocrisy?

I buy expensive equipment and cables. I don't like paying $15 for CD that's poorly mastered. I don't mind paying $25 for the same XRCD. If the recording industry could consistently give me good quality at $18 to $20 I would be happy. (I'd be happier still if I could buy really great vinyl at that price)

I would also hazard to note that a place like A'gon is the essence of a competitive market--people pay what they think its worth, or they don't buy it, and if someone values it more, it gets sold to someone else. Contrast that with the retail CD market which has now been judged to be the subject of, effectively, price fixing. I think I'd like a CD market where I was in control of deciding what software was worth how much.

B'sides, getting back to the original quote, I complain about high equipment costs *and* high CD costs all the time. Maybe I just like to complain...

When I read the starting post, I had the same thought as Rdr4b. People complain about audio prices all the time. As always it is funny to watch some of you look at a forest with a microscope, and call yourselves biologists. When you buy a CD, you are not really buying the plastic and aluminum, and Circuit City and Best Buy, I guarantee, are not making money on CDs. From the distributor, a CD costs a store around $9, new releases around $11, but it varies quite a bit. That $16 retail CD has to pay a lot of people. Its the same thing as books.

The items offered on Audiogon tend to represent the higher end of what's available in music reproduction equipment. As such the record exec is making an argument that the better quality, presumably hi-rez, CDs should cost $15/each. That price seems reasonable to me.

I think it's strange that cassette tapes are less expensive than CDs. They cost the same or more to produce than CDs. When CDs first came out the price was 6-7 dollars more than a tape. Maybe they were more expensive to produce then, but now that production is so cheap why are tapes still less expensive? It seems to me that CDs should have actually dropped in price over the years instead of going up.