I've been at this for over fifty years. Lately I've been reading the old High Fidelitys and Stereo Reviews [previously HiFi/Stereo Review] over the last week.
worldradiohistory.com has all the issues, it's a great website for all things in broadcasting and audio:
RADIO and BROADCAST HISTORY library with thousands of books and magazines (worldradiohistory.com)
STEREO REVIEW: Consumer audio and music magazine beginning in 1958 (worldradiohistory.com)
HIGH FIDELITY - Consumer audio and music magazine (worldradiohistory.com)
I haven't read the old Stereophiles yet:
STEREOPHILE: High-end monthly audio magazine beginning 1962 (worldradiohistory.com)
I've been reading the issues from 1970-1965, so far. It presents a picture of the "Audiophile" very different from what it has mutated into.
The most useful thing Thomas Pynchon wrote is his third Proverb for Paranoids: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." "Why are audiophiles so bound and determined to make others waste money" is a wrong question. There are a number of questions worth asking and answering. The first is why is "High-End = Audiophile = expensive gear a thing? How and when did this fantasy realm of ultra-expensive audio nirvana come to be? Posing the question "Why are audiophiles so bound and determined to make others waste money" places the action, the fault, on the consumer. How did such a consumer come to be? And shouldn't the question be who's making the super-expensive stuff, and how did the mark-ups for audio gear become insane? How did these essentially bespoke amplifiers, speakers, turntables, cable lifters get publicized over more practical and less expensive gear? Why? What's the economic source that drives this machine? I don't see audiophiles being bound and determined to make others waste their money. They are bound and determined to waste their own money. That's their own business, of course. But still, why the cryogenically treated $30,000 RCA terminated one meter line-level stereo interconnect?
You may ask yourself: "How did I get here?"
I'm mentioning the old audio periodicals and providing links to demonstrate how taste changed along with the expectations of audio gear. I focused on these years in part to check out the reviews of Beatles records as they came out---somedays Gene Lees thinks the Beatles are a-ok, others he thinks they're they four horsemen of the musical apocalypse. But I'm also looking at the prices of the gear back then. I've gone as far back as one of my favorite bits of old gear, the all-tube Fisher 500-C. Makes everything sound "mellow". If you measure the 500-C, you can measure that "mellow", with early treble roll-off and bass saturating the transformers. The Fisher 500-C was around $300 and while not exactly TOTL, not cheap by the standards of the day. The tube Marantz gear of the time was pretty much TOTL and went for about six times as much for the combo of pre-amp, amp and tuner. I think the priciest speakers were the KLH 9 electrostatic panels, around $1000 a pair. Turntables mostly hovered around $100, speakers for $100 a pair. Shure's V-15 was around $60. Acoustic Research model 3 speakers were $300.
I don't think the companies active in 1965 were as big or as profitable as the Samsungs of today. Acoustic Research sold a lot of speakers back then, Garrard a lot of turntables. This was just before the big boom in sales of electronics from Japan and the rise of the transistor. A lot of the ads in these magazines tout the "Value" of their products. It seems as though economy was an active virtue in those long forgotten days, though it's probably more likely that people didn't have as much cash to throw around.
$1 back in 1965 was worth $12 of today's dollars. So multiply prices accordingly. But remember that some of these prices represented the upper limit of audio-land at the time There were no Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic Towers, that sell for $850,000 MSRP per pair. Nothing even close to that neighborhood way back in 1967, when I was the dandy of Gamma Chi. Of course, if you read the music reviews, you'll note that there was nothing approaching the loudness levels of today's music either. There might be a small correlation there.
I'm going to keep digging into all this old audiophilia, searching for the moment the Shaki Stone came to be, when the first cable lifter appeared, when the "audiophile cable" industry first emerged. I'm guessing around 1981, just before the CD began its attack on Vinyl Supremacy.
I'm glad I found this forum, information from this site has been very useful in getting great sounding gear for cheap, which is all I really wanted in the first place.