What’s the Sweet Spot price point wise in your audio journey?

Audio is such a personal hobby I think this is the last place you want to try and impress people with how much you spend.  I believe, outside the few on these forums, most view spending a lot to be more foolish than impressive.!  My wife and kids included!

However, if you limit the list to the "audiophile" group I think @calvinj question is an interesting one.  I would tend to agree that a well-chosen $50K retail system is a logical sweet spot for a single analog or digital path.  If one's careful, buying used makes all the sense in the world.  Quality/$'s in this hobby is clearly an asymptotic function and spending beyond this level I believe is because you want to and can rather than obvious benefits.  As I think @mahgister points out there are so many other factors that impact the benefit of just spending dollars, especially when the incremental benefits are increasingly small.

My experiences have been a BOM between apprx'  £10K down to approx' £1K.

Casing costs and EE's design and build time are extra. 

Bigger build requirement adds up to quite different costings. 

Phonostages - DAC - Pre Amp - Power Amp are all produced using this method. Q

Real Bang for Buck is found in this method. 

A pair of Cabinet Speakers are to be purchased in the vrry near future using an almost identical approach. 

I know more about the Speakers than any other purchased item, I do not disbelieve the claims I have seen that strongly suggests that 20 - 30 x the expenditure  outlay is required to find fair competition in the  Commercial exposed Brand Speaker market. 

@kerrybh "...Everyone has a different mix of financial capacity, priority and goals."

Exactly. It is a balance of those.

In particular these parameters often set folks "point of diminishing returns". It makes one feel that one has made a decision that is absolute instead of relative. 

For me, I am an audiophile, I see no point of diminishing returns... I see my financial limitation. 

@ghdprentice +1 

Agree completely 

@deep_333 I have a similar experience. Last Christmas, I got my lady friend a system for less than 5K. It sounds really good and she loves it and gets a taste of this hobby that can be quite consuming for many of us.
When I ask her if we might get something to improve her system for this Christmas, she said “why? What I have sounds great and I don’t need anything else.” That’s a great attitude, one I wish I had, but she is much smarter than me. 
 

we are all different and should respect the differences