Price Increases

Jmcgrogan2- You are correct, but I fear that this discussion is about to go seriously off the rails!

Yes. Price inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenom. Thank Ben for this round. Seen the price of art? big city real estate? farmland? Our money (future debt at least) is flowing upward.

There is, supposedly, an economic recovery on the way. Which may be part of the reason. I think the main one, is that HiFi is becoming more of a cottage industry. The ultra High End, hand building Audio Bling for Hedge fund managers, seems to be doing ok. The large manufacturers feeding in lower down the scale, I suspect are doing less well. I would be interested to know how sales are going with ARC, CJ, Macintosh and the like. I doubt if they are growing. There can not be the economies of scale that there were in the Golden age of Audio in the 70's, when everyone aspired to a "HiFi System"

Another factor must be costs in China. As you know, wage rates are shooting up there, even if it is from 1 to 2 handfuls of rice a day. It is ironic, that countries like Vietnam are undercutting Chinese wage costs at the moment.

The challenge is to find, say, the $10K speaker that sounds like those $100K "high-end" ones, instead of spending $100K to get something that sounds like a $10K speaker.

With no updates to design I cannot understand why the price hikes.

Because they can ... simple supply, demand and price!