Price Increases

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",

Well, there are some giant killers out there Ack, largely the small manufacturers selling direct. I spoke to just such a small manufacturer a couple of years ago, who estimated the material, labour and delivery costs of a $80000 loudspeaker, was probably $20000, including a modest profit. The rest is marketing, dealer and distributor margins, which can easily add 50% to the cost+ a large margin to the manufacturer.

Who are they? Well ones I have heard myself, Devore, Silverline and the ones I bought and am very happy with, Daedalus. Others I have'nt heard, but who you hear good things about, Vapour, Tyler, Odyssey. Vapour and Odyssey get uniformly good feedback at the shows, from reviewers, as does Daedalus of course.