Point well taken Eldartford. But in mild defense of the high end, I'll note that in the long run, although the audiophile marketplace doesn't demand that price be reasonable by mass market standards, it does demand that price should correlate in some identifiable way with sound quality.
Generally speaking within audiophilia price is agreed upon by tacit, voluntary consensus to represent a proxy indicator of sound quality, and if that presumed correlation isn't backed up to a worthwhile degree -- after subtracting for the cache factor -- then a product that's priced too high for what it delivers sonically in comparison to the overall high end marketplace will eventually be weeded out. (True, some of these products may deliver more sonic fetishism than fidelity, but the principle still applies.) In the high end you have to earn your stripes in some perceivable way, not simply by making your design attractive and pouring money into your ad campaign, although that can sometimes work to a degree for a little while. But if your $30K product sounds no better than a $5K product (or at least different, in a way that's judged to be subjectively better by some), and offers no more physical and engineering substance, experienced listeners will catch on.
With the Bose, in its marketplace, there is no corrective process at work based on sound quality -- the cache factor alone is almost the entire ball of wax. IMO the success of the Wave's marketing plan is actually integrally dependent on most customers (and popular press 'reviewers') not being knowledgeable regarding matters of sound quality. Absent Bose's astutely calculated marketing strategy the Wave is just another unremarkable little plastic radio offering mediocre sound, and wouldn't be a famous name or able to command near its price.
Audire: Just so you can better guage my words here, I'm not impressed by the sound of the Tivoli One for what it costs either, often seen as the 'audiophile-approved' alternative to the Wave. Obviously other audiophiles disagree with my takes. But as I've written before, I feel the classic Advent Model 400 (of which I own one) and its predecessor the KLH Model Eight table radios still outclass these pretenders to the Kloss legacy.
