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

I think there are too many people that cling to the concept that price is proportional to quality/performance. I'll leave it at that.

@llg98ljk +1

I would also add what has been said many times, once you get to a certain point, it is not necessarily better, just different.

Apologies for potentially being slightly cynical, but I do not subscribe to the notion of an ROI or 'diminishing returns' in audio. Not because I have an open-ended budget, but because many others do.

“Cost-to-Audio Experience” doesn’t mean anything. Debates about how much one should spend on audio gear assume there’s an objective relationship between cost and experience. But the idea falls apart because audio value is entirely personal (and therefore subjective). ROI in audio depends on who you are, your budget, expectations, sensitivity to detail, and what an “audio experience” means to you.

A small upgrade can feel life-changing to someone on a tight budget, while someone with more means may barely notice it. The same improvement can be high ROI for one listener and negligible for another. There’s no shared metric because everyone starts from a different place.

What a listener expects, warmth, realism, detail, impact, all determines whether a change feels meaningful. One person may be moved by subtle improvements, whilst another may not care at all. If the goal varies, so will the value of each step toward it.

The idea of diminishing returns assumes everyone hears the same benefits and values them equally. They don’t. Some find immersion at $200, others at $20,000. No curve exists outside the individual.

Audio satisfaction is therefore completely subjective. Cost-to-experience has no universal meaning because only one ROI matters: yours. Your ears, your expectations, your budget, your experience.

Perhaps a divisive perspective, but I'd rather just sit back and enjoy the music.

For me, it sits at about 20K. I have a system put together right now for about 20K that realizes pretty much every dream I've been striving for years for in terms of pure sound quality. It was lacking at 10K. The next thing I do is probably move from Arendal 1723 THX Monitors to the new Sonus faber Sonetto VIII G2. At that point I will feel like that is end game for me. 

There is no diminishing returns "point"...

It is a variable surface defined by three factors for everyone : price/budget, design quality and innovations, subjective evaluation ability and knowledge , and a ratio defining the surface between these three factors which differ for each one of us...