Adjusted for inflation I don't think HiFi is any more expensive that it was in the 70s. I remember paying over $450 for a Pioneer CTF-950 cassette deck in 1979. In today's dollars that's $1400. And I bought this while working as a stock boy in a grocery store. The big difference is I didn't have hundreds of entertainment devices competing for my money. No $1500 laptops, $1000 cell phones, $100 a month cell phone bill, $500 game consoles, $80 games, $300 concert tickets, etc. It wasn't uncommon for the average college student to assemble a setup that in today's dollars would be several grand. Sure we had to scrimp and save, but we just had different priorities.
