Point of diminishing returns

Some years ago, I saw a graph on the relationship of dollars spent to sonic improvement in speakers. Every dollar spent yielded a straight vertical improvement in sound, up to $1200.00, where the graph started to curve, showing less and less sonic improvement per dollar spent. You still got improvement, just less and less per dollar.

When you wife says "If were ever get a divorce, I'm keeping this stuff" that is the point of diminishing returns.

when your divorce attorney asks to see your financial statements <(:{

Macrojack,

Most of the responses seem to have addressed the theory of diminishing returns, but you asked about point of diminishing returns. Imagine a plot of goodness as a function of cost. Assuming you have a metric for goodness -- the great devil for audiophilia, at some point the resulting curve will reach asymptot, goodness will cease to rise in direct proportion, or even substantially, with cost. That's the point of diminishing returns. For some audiophiles, cost and the concommitant bragging rights are intertwined, so their sense of goodness rises in lock step with cost. For them, a point of diminishing returns will not exist. Same is true with collecting, where the metric is rarity and rarity usually corresponds to cost.

db

Most of the threads here are a prime example of this theory at work, in that the effort spent to read post #70 will require the same energy that it took to get 90% of the answer in post #4. And yet, post #70 may provide you with only 2% of additional information. But when it finally clicks, it all gels like magic, right?

That's why that 2% is priceless, IMO.