Price Increases

There is, supposedly, an economic recovery on the way. Which may be part of the reason. I think the main one, is that HiFi is becoming more of a cottage industry. The ultra High End, hand building Audio Bling for Hedge fund managers, seems to be doing ok. The large manufacturers feeding in lower down the scale, I suspect are doing less well. I would be interested to know how sales are going with ARC, CJ, Macintosh and the like. I doubt if they are growing. There can not be the economies of scale that there were in the Golden age of Audio in the 70's, when everyone aspired to a "HiFi System"

Another factor must be costs in China. As you know, wage rates are shooting up there, even if it is from 1 to 2 handfuls of rice a day. It is ironic, that countries like Vietnam are undercutting Chinese wage costs at the moment.

The challenge is to find, say, the $10K speaker that sounds like those $100K "high-end" ones, instead of spending $100K to get something that sounds like a $10K speaker.

With no updates to design I cannot understand why the price hikes.

Because they can ... simple supply, demand and price!

"Apple to apple" comparison? That's easy they are loudspeakers, use your ears. All speakers are in the same group, just different prices and sizes.

Seems the last 10 years they have pretty much doubled on a lot of brands. Way higher than inflation. It's gone crazy. It's starting to bleed over onto the used market in ways too. I was reading some old forum posts from 10 years ago. They were talking about the same speakers back then that were still pretty new and selling for almost half price used. Well today they are selling for almost that same price.

Well except now the newest model is twice as much as what that older model sold for when it came out. So there is more demand for the old models since now in comparison the new models are way way more money. It makes the older model appear to be an even better deal and causing the prices to cost the same as they did 10 years ago used.