Has the cost of HiFi gotten a bit too much?

Inflation and government over-spending is harming everyone. Even SpaceX had to raise their prices of a Falcon 9 launch from $62 million to $67 million. Fuel and shipping costs, raw materials, and of course labor (if you can find people to work) are all adding up to 7% (maybe more) inflation.  I noted audio speakers jumped 20% at the first of the year, some by more. 

It is the price of admission if you want to get the best you can for whatever budget you set. 

The only good thing is that technology continues to improve. Speakers today at any price sound better than similarly valued speakers from 20 years ago. And integrated circuits, discrete components, etc., have a much higher quality as well. 

So, at the end of the day, we live in whatever times we live in and made our choices based on price, performance, and our budgets. And we can hope some manufacturers will occasionally run a few "specials". 

As others note in the high end, that may mean buying lightly used and well cared for products to get the most bang for your bucks. 

I do hate it. I was all set to buy some new speakers instead of tackling the job of replacing the crossovers (capacitors) in my vintage ones, but now, that job is looking more palatable and more logical and saving the money for a better DAC. 

This is not coming from the mouth of a neo nazi...

Instead of insulting people, some must READ books...

This one article about the PONZI financial global scheme did not come from the neo nazi either..

Educate yourself... The writer teach economy in London...

Then some MUST refrain themselves by ignorance to insult others members of this thread  with neo-nazi or anti semitic  scapegoating or strawman  accusation here...

PONZI FINANCE AND GLOBAL LIQUIDITY MELTDOWN: LESSONS FROM MINSKY

Anastasia Nesvetailova

https://www.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/83993/CUWPTP002.pdf

And this very serious article will give to you the REASON why inflation tool are the main tool of central bank and their way to make the poor paying for the debt accumulated by the financial ponzi scheme of the rich people and the catastrophic politic of most politician corrupted by lobbies of big corporations .....

It is not Bill Gates who will pay for the hyperinflation crisis it is you and me...Thanks to the global Ponzi and fiscal evasion...

By the way this author is not neo nazi... Anti semitic? i dont know ... 😁😊

I will cite the conclusion :

«. It also makes clear that, once the mystique of the balance sheet is taken away, the choice facing a central bank during a crisis is a familiar one: to inflate or not.»

I agree with just about everything that tsacremento @ 03-28-2022 at 04:12pm said.

If I may add the following.

I got into audio - we called them stereos back then - when I was 14 years old, in 1968. That was a very good year to get into audio, imho.

As a high school freshman, I mowed lawns, shoveled snow, washed dishes at restaurants, painted homes, weeded gardens, etc whatever odd jobs I could find. With the money earned from that, I was able to save enough money to buy a Dyna 70 and Dyna PAS kit and build my own amplifier and preamp, buy speakers and a tuner from Lafayette Radio, and a Garard turntable with a Pickering Cartridge. The whole shebang set me back less than $300.

That setup held up through college. In my 20s, I upgraded to a Dual 129 table with a Stanton Cartridge, and a pair of Altec 604Cs.

In my 30s, I wanted to seriously upgrade, but the budget of an artsy fartsy such as myself didn’t really permit it, even though this was still the mid-80s when audio inflation had not really kicked in yet. I solved the problem by always buying second hand or floor demonstration models.

I think that it is since the 00s that audio inflation started to severely ramp up, in lockstep with the increasing wealth gap. I guess audio companies saw that they could get rich quick ’n easy with marketing gimmicks / shenanigans in the face of the law of diminishing returns, rather than serve a wider public. Speakers for $600K? Are those speakers really 100 times better than a pair costing $6K?

To that point, many of you have heard the anecdote that I am about to repeat, but I never tire of it, so here we go again.

A few years back, I was walking home from work. I pass by an audio shop window in NoHo, NYC and see a pair of floor-standing speakers whose size and scale looked suspiciously familiar. I go inside to take a look.

The salesman comes up almost immediately and asks if I have any questions. I ask if I could find an LP on the shop floor that I was familiar with and listen to it on the speakers. We find Kind of Blue By Miles Davis and listen to the first track.

The salesman asks what I think. I say they sound great. I then say that the speakers seem similar to the Altec 604C. He said that I was mistaken. I got up and went to one of them and said "You are right. They don’t seem similar. They are in fact the 604Cs. I know because I have a pair myself, and the drivers are (as I am pointing to one) identical to this".

So the salesman then goes onto explain how Shindo - the company that "made" these speakers - did yadda yadda with a unique crossover design and after a few minutes I say "They are not perhaps by any chance based on the Mastering Lab crossover that Doug Sachs made (allegedly for Bruce Botnick of the Doors)?"

So the salesman goes on yadda yadfda about the special cabinet and I cut him off and say "Yes, they are gorgeous, but cabinets are not rocket science. Clearly Shindo followed then same geometry that Altec specified, as the dimensions are identical to my own".

"So, what I would like to know is the following. You are asking $34K for these speakers, and while they sound a little different from mine and do sound great, they do not sound in any meaningfully way better than mine, and as I paid only $3,500 for my pair, they absolutely don’t sound 10 times better. Why should anyone pay anywhere near $33K for these?"

At this point, I have attracted the attention of other customers, and so I give him my business card with my email address and I conclude "I have to get home for dinner. Could you please contact Shindo, send them my question and ask them to send a reply to that email address? Thank you!".

I leave, shaking my head and wonder to myself: some Wall Street guy is gonna walk in there, not knowing how to spend his money, and buy the damn things.

The following week, I stop by. I have no response from Shindo. The speakers were sold.

Btw I subsequently learned that Shindo did in fact call them the 604 Alnico or something, so Shindo was not being entirely disingenuous. Why the salesperson did not share that information with me in the first place I do not know.

You can still buy on eBay the Altec 604C drivers for less than $2,000, the Mastering Lab crossovers for about $900, and have cabinets built for another $1,800, that’s less than $5K total.

Sigh.

As for thecarpathian @ 03-29-2022 at 09:22am attack on the audioguy85: I loathe what he said myself but do we have to go over the top with an attack? Just click the arrow in the upper right, click Report Comment, and hopefully the moderator will remove the offending comment.

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