Why Is Hi-Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?!

[Mart68]

This comment is wrong on so many levels. If you can afford just one car they both are the wrong choice as daily driver. If you can afford a Ferrari you can also afford a daily driver that will be as quick as a Porsche, more reliable and much greater, more practical as a daily driver.

A product exist because some one can afford it and fulfil what the buyer expect, high end audio is no different.
Does anyone ever need high end in any activity/market? No. Majority buy something rational, with good value.

The “value” of high end audio, is not just how it sound, many other factors will enter in the equation and fulfil the buyer expectations, if he buys it for the right reasons.

Most here not getting the audio high end concept already own something that has disproportionate ratio of value vs what that thing can achieve, cars/watch/house/motorcycle/clothe/jewelry, etc... and it may also be their more cherished possession.
Life is short, enjoy the journey.

I am one of those who is not getting the high end audio 'thing.'

A Porsche or a Rolex, everyone knows that they are expensive items, and you drive about in public or wear it in public so it is a status symbol seen by all.

A hi-fi sits in your house, only guests see it, and only the guests who are into hi-fi will have any idea what it is or what it cost. I had a work colleague come around one time and all she had to say is 'Why do the speakers have to be so big? That's ridiculous.' No status there. If I had a Porsche on the driveway now that would have impressed, regrettably I don't even have a driveway.

Plus the magazines and the dealers, and the people who buy this stuff all to a man say that it's all about the sound quality. Never once have I seen in a high-end magazine someone saying 'Well of course this twenty-grand amplifier is no different to a two grand amplifier in terms of sound, I just own it because I can.' In fact they will defend to the death that they have paid that extra 18K just to get the (imaginary) 'last couple of percentage points of performance', which as a music-lover they feel that they must have.

 

[Digby]

Hi-fi is a status symbol within the in-group (other enthusiasts) only, to everyone else is probably just unsightly and wasted space.

Never once have I seen in a high-end magazine someone saying 'Well of course this twenty-grand amplifier is no different to a two grand amplifier in terms of sound, I just own it because I can.'

Well, they won't get many review samples if they do!

I suppose most buyers don't understand how an amplifier works and what would make it better or worse, so beyond basic specs they have to trust that more money means a better amplifier. They are right, to a degree, but not entirely (value goes down beyond a certain point and snake oil starts to seep in).

There is a similar trust here about "the measurements". I am happy with measurements alone for amplifiers, DACs and such, but when it comes to speakers, I don't know if I can look at the measurements and know whether that is a good speaker or not, from the point of view of my ears.

Most of us are taking things on trust a lot of the time and have to look for certain indicators (measurements/price/what have you) that things are up to scratch, without fully understanding what we're dealing with. There isn't enough time in the world to be properly educated about everything we have any interest in.

 

[Mart68]

There is a similar trust here about "the measurements". I am happy with measurements alone for amplifiers, DACs and such, but when it comes to speakers, I don't know if I can look at the measurements and know whether that is a good speaker or not, from the point of view of my ears.

I do, providing there's enough measurements. Just from owning so many of them (and designing a couple) over the years I can correlate the two as to what I'll like, and what will work in my room.

It can never be an exact science though, not with a loudspeaker, but I'd never get it so wrong as to be saying 'I can't live with these.'

 

[DSJR]

I do, providing there's enough measurements. Just from owning so many of them (and designing a couple) over the years I can correlate the two as to what I'll like, and what will work in my room.

It can never be an exact science though, not with a loudspeaker, but I'd never get it so wrong as to be saying 'I can't live with these.'

My current ugly old amp 'sounds' the same as your first Krell 50S, but that's because my speakers are an easy load as designed. Had I more modern way out-there speakers with low impedance dips, I'd probably be on at you to buy it back Back in the 80's and 90's, getting a good double output into half the impedance load (or as near as darn it) cost money, at least in audiophile terms (no idea how the 90's pro amps fare in a domestic setting - Lab Gruppen, MC2 and so on).

 

[Cote Dazur]

I am one of those who is not getting the high end audio 'thing.'

You seem to be correct on that point.

Not every one has Porsche and/or a Rolex to impress anyone, many (most) do not care what the average person thing of them, they do things because it feels right (and they can afford it). Average people think they need to show off, project an image of something they are not to impress other poor people or even worst, rich people, who could not care less, but that is a completely different conversation.

Plus the magazines and the dealers, and the people who buy this stuff all to a man say that it's all about the sound quality

That is also true for any high end product, read the magazine and marketing about any high end product you mentioned and you read superlative about performance that any other similar product costing 1/10 will also achieve or even do better.

As you mentioned in your first line in your post, you and many other are missing the point, their is a myriad of reasons to prefer one product over an other, many people triggers are different than our own, as long as it fulfils what you are craving, it is none of anyone business to judge. High end exist because it fills a gap/need, magazine and marketing will speak about it.

If all you want is a small fishing boat to go fishing on a nearby river, no need to read magazine who caters about those boats:

but then again, don't blame them for catering to a demographic you are not part of.
Now if some idiot on minimum wage somehow convince himself that he needs one of those to be happy and fulfilled, don't blame the magazine.

 

[mhardy6647]

Looks like an 80ies boom box. Maybe it sounds like one too … that might even be an insult to the boom box …. Oh well, I take it back and apologize to the boom box.

Like this Yorx...



which, as the photo clearly indicates, was outstanding in the field.

 

[Balle Clorin]

I had an professional speakerbuilder make my cabinets for a DIY project. 2way high efficiency TQWT speaker( Troels Gravesen TQWT mk2, google it)
Speaker and crossover parts 700 USD
Cabinet 500 USD
Paint/lackering by professional. 500 USD
The speaker builder told me it was really good drivers, not seen even at 7000+ USD commercial speakers.To sell them some years later I had to go down to 800USD,the buyer was very happy and told me he loved them.
The speakers I bought after was Revel F36 1800 USD and much better.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

High end audio was alive and well before the Boomer Generation; I have copies of ads from the 1930s for console radios which illustrate this. The Ampex ad below from 1954, along with ads from high end companies like MacIntosh were typical of marketing intended to target the upper income audiophile. The people pictured in the ad would have been the parents of the Boomer generation. The the snob appeal of the illustration is obvious. The USA at the time was prosperous and at the top of its game in the aftermath of WWII, so it is natural that 'buying the best' whether in audio or cars was part of the mindset. I lived through this time, and although I was still playing with my hobby horse, I remember how things were vividly.

In my estimation, things went off the rails because of J. Gordon Holt who took the subjectivity already present in audio and turned it up to "11". The snobbery in audio was already there and hasn't changed in my opinion. Its the subjectivist mindset and acceptance of outright voodoo and junk science, coupled with that snobbery which birthed the state of high end audio as it exists today.

 

[Mart68]

$5875 dollars in today's money.

 

[MattHooper]

I am one of those who is not getting the high end audio 'thing.'

A Porsche or a Rolex, everyone knows that they are expensive items, and you drive about in public or wear it in public so it is a status symbol seen by all.

A hi-fi sits in your house, only guests see it, and only the guests who are into hi-fi will have any idea what it is or what it cost. I had a work colleague come around one time and all she had to say is 'Why do the speakers have to be so big? That's ridiculous.' No status there. If I had a Porsche on the driveway now that would have impressed, regrettably I don't even have a driveway.

Plus the magazines and the dealers, and the people who buy this stuff all to a man say that it's all about the sound quality. Never once have I seen in a high-end magazine someone saying 'Well of course this twenty-grand amplifier is no different to a two grand amplifier in terms of sound, I just own it because I can.' In fact they will defend to the death that they have paid that extra 18K just to get the (imaginary) 'last couple of percentage points of performance', which as a music-lover they feel that they must have.

Generally I agree.

I've made similar points before. There certainly may be some people buying expensive audio gear as some status symbol, but generally speaking Hi-Fi isn't what you buy these days to impress other people. It's a cliche, but a truism, about how many wealthy people seem to have put money in to practically everything in the house, except good audio gear.

I haven't met an audiophile yet, wealthy or otherwise, who just bought for status. All were in to this as enthusiasts. Some can afford more expensive equipment than others.

 

[DVDdoug]

Why Is Hi-Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?!

I'm amazed by how inexpensive it is!!!

I grew-up with analog vinyl. My mid-quality turntable, cartridge, and preamp, probably cost $300 - $400 USD. An online inflation calculator says $350 in 1975 is about $1900 today. I paid less than $100 for my Blu-Ray player which has "infinitely better" sound (plus surround sound).

After CDs were introduced CD players were out of my price range, but prices were falling and I set a "goal" of buying one when they dropped to $200. Then prices started dropping rapidly and I ended-up buying one for closer to $100. Cheaper than my vinyl set-up and better sound. CDs were more expensive than records, and some music wasn't available on CD yet... But as far as I remember, I never bought another record.

I paid a few-hundred dollars for my (low end) AVR and that's about what I would have paid for a power amplifier in the 1970s. I've got more channels, multi-channel decoding, remote control, etc.

A 45 RPM single was about $1, and now an MP3 download is $1 and MUCH better sounding. 45s were generally terrible (worse than vinyl albums). CDs are 2 or 3 times as much as an album was in the 1970s (without considering inflation) but the quality is so much better that I would have been willing to pay 2 or 3 times as much if I could have bought a CD in the 1970s.

On the recording side, you can set-up a home studio that's nearly pro-quality for a couple-thousand dollars (excluding soundproofing, and depending on how many microphones & channels you need). And again the digital equipment is far better & cheaper than pro analog equipment in the 1970s. Even analog mixers & preamps & microphones are cheaper than the 1970s, and probably equal or better in quality. ...Soundproofing (and acoustic treatment) is the biggest difference between most home & pro studios. And, that's still VERY expensive.

 

[anmpr1]

I've worked repairing a few expensive high end bits of gear. Some of those by far the greatest expense is in the fancy case that holds everything. Others did have very high quality expensive parts inside.

Somewhere (I hope I'm not making this up) I read an interview with Dick Burwen. Now, for those young whipper snappers out there, Richard Burwen is essentially an audio god, knowing more about audio in his deep sleep than I'll ever know in my most lucid waking moments. But I digress.

Anyhow...back to the story... Burwen came up with the basic idea for the Cello Audio Palette (and the earlier LNP-2). NeXT, Tom Colengelo and Mark took his basic design/idea and built it with such a quality of parts and detail in construction that even Burwen couldn't relate to it. But, the best was the best, and that was the goal.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

I keep harking back to 'The Good Old Days', but when you've been around audio as long as I have, it's somewhat inevitable.

Back in the 1950s, through the 1960s, onto the 1980s, Audio Engineering was hard, and some designers, like Quad's Peter Walker, KEF's Laurie Fincham, Arthur Radford, Willi Studer, Rupert Neve and Dudley Harwood (BBC) were rightly revered as innovators and raising the 'State of the Art' of audio performance. However, by the 1980s, all the difficult work in electronics was done, and by the mid 1980s, audio electronics were pretty much commoditised, one being as good as any other technically, there remained of course the ergonomics and facilities, but the hard work of getting noise and distortion down to vanishing levels was done. Loudspeakers were by the 1980s pretty good, and arguably are no better today, in fact possibly worse except for power handling. I think Active 'speakers with DSP-based crossovers are the only genuine advance since the '80s.

Speaker designs today are much better overall than they were in the 80s. Back then only a few were truly transparent with respect to tonality, and the drivers have advanced a lot. Designing a loudspeaker is a lot like designing an RF antenna array that needs to cover from AM to microwave frequencies, have it exhibit a constant beam width for most of its frequency range, and give a constant S meter reading regardless of where the dial is. The medium is different, but much of the math is the same: complicated. Having todays numerical simulation software means we can have even passive speakers that approach the theoretical limits of what’s possible without the need to do hokey things like smother it in felt. The waveguide/horn and baffle can be fine tuned via simulation to give the correct dispersion pattern and eliminate diffraction. Additionally the drivers have improved as well. Most vintage speakers that make it up on a Klippel don’t measure as well or sound as good as what we have today. Obviously some companies back then had ingenious engineers who would design it properly without all the fancy tools, but more often they likely fell short. It would be interesting to see how really good ones stack up. But many of the designs today are quite optimized and even modest loudspeakers can deliver much better tonality and linearity if you can settle for not having ear splitting SPL levels like some of the huge old-school ones had. Maybe people like the vintage sound and find todays speakers boring, but coming from car audio where you get every speaker defect imaginable due to the environment and poor design (there are exceptions, of course) I don’t miss it at all. It’s nice to be spoiled with speakers that don‘t make the sounds speakers normally do, and instead just give you what’s in the recording. But different people feel differently about what does and doesn’t sound good, and I can see that it’s lost much of its mystique over the years. There was a certain feel to old hi-if gear and the experience that gave it a certain charm and that’s the part I do miss. But I can settle for boring stuff that looks like a giant toaster if it sounds good

 

[tmtomh]

The entire article is just charlatanry. I don't say that based on a blanket assumption that TAS is in it just to help market this gear. I say it because - as is almost always the case when the high-end mags weigh in on these debates - the author immediately rigs the entire discussion so he can argue with a strawman. In this case the trick comes at the beginning when he says of the objections to cost, "I presume this is mostly an emotional issue."

This completely baseless assertion allows the author to sidestep almost all the actual issues - for example, he dismisses the "Ripoff #1" objection that high-dollar equipment doesn't necessarily perform any better than lower-priced equipment, NOT by arguing against that objection, but rather by saying that objection "seems like it would have limited emotional traction."

So he starts with the baseless assertion that the objection is emotional - therefore not rational - and then dismisses the objection because it doesn't seem like it would provide satisfaction on that irrational, emotional level. He literally ends up saying the objection is invalid because it is not properly irrational!

So that's why I say it's charlatanry: he intentionally mis-frames the discussion in a way that allows him to dismiss the real issues, so that he can focus only on the issue that he wants to, and that he thinks can be answered in some way ("Ripoff #2" - the "design labor cost and bill of materials" bit).

Shameful, but not in any way surprising.

 

[mhardy6647]

Two things:

1. Whenever you are looking for more performance, you are going to get less value for money as you seek more performance beyond a certain point (diminishing returns). You can buy speakers that are 65% of the very best for 500 of x currency, if you want something 10-15% better then you need to spend four figures, if you want 90% then low five figures, and the best of the best will cost a lot.

2. Is something of a response to this

Without wishing to throw stones, I think the boomer generation are the first generation to believe they have disposable income in a way previous generations would not. The amount of times I have heard boomers say "you can't take it with you"...well, no, you can't, but perhaps you'd like to leave a bit more for your children and grandchildren after you're done with cruises, hi-fi, watches, cars and *insert luxury item here*.

I don't think boomers can be blamed entirely, they were the first generation to receive advertising proper (propaganda) and to be told that they were all free spirits and they deserve it, but I think the idea of indulging themselves in quite the same way would be antithetical to the parents of the boomer generation, whether they had the money to or not.

The boomers were also the first generation to really start divorcing and remarrying, further splitting and reducing any share of inheritance, so why not spend what they have, when it would have to be spread rather thin anyway (not forgetting potential battles over the will).

Just a general observation. There are always exceptions, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if boomers generally leave a smaller percent of their wealth to their children than their parents did to them.

The luxury market has sprung up to fill a niche ("disposable income") that didn't previously exist to anything like the same extent.

Good cultural insight -- but the current crop of luxury goods are aimed at least an order of magnitude (and frequently two) higher than even boomers' aspirations.
An "average" boomer might spring for a Corvette -- but not a Veyron.

 

[NormB]

Good for a chuckle. Typical "rationalization" from TAS.

Why Is Hi-Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?! - The Absolute Sound

Why Is Hi-Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?! - RH is a reasonable and thoughtful guy, so he gives reasons - most often for why we cover very expensive gear, but sometimes for why gear seems to be more expensive than in the past. I will make my attempt here to add to what RH and JV and others have said.

www.theabsolutesound.com

That’s about $1.70 in 2022 dollars (Actually 3-4 times as much)
in ‘73 the OPEC oil embargo drove oil on world market from $3 to $12/ barrel.

It’s likely to hit $200 by 2023.

R&D, tooling, chips, shipping, storage, marginal dealer markup to cover business costs… I blame John Maynard Keynes and economically illiterate politicians.

 

[anmpr1]

So he starts with the baseless assertion that the objection is emotional - therefore not rational - and then dismisses the objection because it doesn't seem like it would provide satisfaction on that irrational, emotional level. He literally ends up saying the objection is invalid because it is not properly irrational!

The fact is that most 'reviewing' (which is not really reviewing but paid 'influencing') simply offers up, in writing, what is an emotional response to the gear in question. If you read most of what passes for reviews today, the writers don't tell you how the device performs, but rather how it makes them feel. Compare that with reviewing from the late '50s through the mid '70s, and up through year 2000. That was the year Audio went out of business... High Fidelity went south in 1989, and Stereo Review morphed into Sound and Vision in 1999.

Men like Julian Hirsch, Len Feldman, Richard Heyser, et. al. were interested in what the gear did, and not how the gear made them feel. It is a contrast (and a triumph) of Yin over Yang. A distinctly feminine approach to what probably ought to be a masculine oriented hobby. But here's the thing: anyone can tell you how something makes them feel; few can actually understand how a thing works, once the metal (probably plastic, today) cover is lifted.

 

[Doodski]

That’s about $1.70 in 2022 dollars (Actually 3-4 times as much)
in ‘73 the OPEC oil embargo drove oil on world market from $3 to $12/ barrel.

It’s likely to hit $200 by 2023.

I live in a oil rich region. I can see a major petroleum refinery from my window and we still pay full rate world prices on the stuff. Some peeps are very annoyed at that.

That pic you posted really epitomizes the era with the multiple signs of gas stations, "Mel's Garage" and the muscle cars topping up the fuel tanks.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Only now, with the advent of publications like ASR, Archimago, Audio Critic, EAC, and Audioholics are these exhorbitantly priced products being subjected to rigorous analysis and it's become clear that they in no way produce magical, transcendent audio experiences. In point of fact, these analysis are revealing poor design, shoddy materials, and substandard performance with prices that bear no rational correlation with their production and development costs.

I totally agree. All sold with snake oil marketing.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Most of everything is, by definition, average. And despite what some want to claim, average in audio performance terms is entirely sufficient. If you want an amplifier and passive speakers then you have to check that the amplifier rating is appropriate for the load, other than that it's harder to end up with something audibly degraded than with something that just works. And in terms of hero worship, engineers are like other professionals, they are educated and trained in a particular discipline and should be competent to work in their chosen field. The incompetent ones tend to be weeded out pretty quickly (though in audio that might well mean being kicked into the high end).

Bingo! Right on the money.