Is it possible for a high end manufacturer to overprice their goods?

Someone is buying a $133k speaker while someone else is living in a cardboard box.

And some are eating fillet mignon and others are eating a hot dog. So what does that have to do with the topic?

@russ49 -- It has to do with one construal of the OP’s question, as to whether the speakers are overpriced. Clearly, one reaction to the price is moral revulsion; we

read this all the time on Audiogon -- "How dare they ask that much for X?" We all understand that there are no *laws* against pricing things as they wish, so there are a couple other ways to explain why this question gets asked.

(a) Is the price justified by the economic inputs (parts, labor, research, etc.)? Here the answer is hard to gauge, because every company adds in their "margin" and it’s hard to question what kind of margin is "correct."

(b) Is the price justified by the wider social conditions? Here the answer is often "no," either because of what people themselves can afford or what they see around them (hence the cardboard box comment). Many people get angry at this question because it brings up issues of injustice and how dare we talk about that. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!

(c) Is the price creating a distortion in the audio market? Here, people divide up. Some see the pricing as part of a trend which is distorting the hobby into an ultra rich guy thing. That makes regular hobbyists feel priced out. Others look to the opportunity to buy this ultra-gear at used prices or hope that there is trickle-down from the technology (the way the Apollo program lead to all kinds of innovation.)

In short, the OP’s question is a kind of Rorschach test, and this leads to a fun but chaotic, cross-purposes thread.

@daveyf 

Do a search one million dollar speakers, there’s a bunch of them! Over priced?  Well they are for me, but…

IMHO,  once you have established what the law of diminishing returns is on a piece of audio equipment,  any money spent above that price becomes questionable.

Of course,  I am basing this on common sense.  For instance,  does a $200,000 audio system sound ten times better than a $20,000 system?  For that matter, does a $20,000 system sound 10 times better than a $2000 system? 

It's all relative to how much money you have to spend and how good your hearing is.  

@hilde45  +1! 

There are no laws for pricing products. Manufacturers must establish what they think they need to run the business, and then what kind of profit the product might drive. Do these products have some type of exclusive patented technology? Maybe sometimes? Hype? Bet your life on it. There is always a market for products marketed toward super high-end customers who have so much money that the price is irrelevant and those same customers are the least likely to be customers who do a lot of technical research or get too deep into learning the nuances of a hobby such as audio. It might be a hard pill to swallow but in many cases all that matters to this demographic is that they have something extremely rare and expensive, no matter what the thing in question might be, and that they can show it off simply for the fact that it costs an obscene amount of money. Price is not always a great measure of performance or quality, especially when you leave the reasonable bounds of high-end-high-quality to the level of ridiculous-price-no-added-performance.