Why is the price of new tonearms so high

Cerrot, always nice with a nice watch although I think there more of a status item than a tonearm. I think a tonearm can be better or worse at reproducing sound than a watch at showing time.

My take is that the Physics was available many years ago and companies like Fidelity Research knew them and had big enough manufacturing runs to keep the price down, but why dont they produce those excellent arms again?

Good audio products are produced on a small scale. Small scale production is unfortunately quite a few times more expensive than mass produced items.

I there were a factory in China churning out Triplanar arms, 1000x an hour then that arm would have cost next to nothing. In the real world those arms are hand-built, one at a time and that is one of the reasons for their elevated price.

I briefly worked at a high-end amplifier manufacturer and my eyes popped open to see that it is a labour of love and nothing comes cheap.

Funny thread that is.
Just now we had: "Why are oldskool tonearm so expensive"
(thread got 'lost' during database cleanup - yes?)
And now this?
Next guy that talks about FR arms again, will get dumped.

Look there are very decent arms for less than what an 'old one' can cost you, else there was no need for a ~ 300 post long thread on that other subject, or?

If you need an arm that needs a compressor, and 'diamonds on the soles of it's shoes.." spend 12k or more.

As the other post mentioned, if you don't want e.g. a 'Breguet' watch
see: http://www.breguet.com/ for 100k plus, a 'Swatch' will also tell the time :-)

Horses for courses, no?

Greetings,
Axel

Axelwahl, I noticed that thread got "lost". Doesn't surprise me. It is a real pity that a lot of decent information/contribution/experience had to get disappeared because a couple of guys couldn't keep their elbows down in a crowd. It's not the first time that the same crew has been responsible for a decent thread with decent information getting disappeared.

FWIW, it is a shame that the moderators could not do something like the Audioasylum moderators do and just move the offending thread line to a different thread in a "dead end" category (make those threads permissioned so that they only show up on the "My Threads" list of those who posted the offending remarks).

Axel, the naming must be pure coincident:-)