Has the cost of HiFi gotten a bit too much?

Ovinewar1,

Well thought out, astute, and well said.

Kudos!

Thank you thecarpathian. I have extreme faith in humanity. Rarely get to post but enjoy reading the banter.  The flu has provided me some additional time in my calendar 🙃

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.

@ghasley : clearly, you are unable to appreciate dark sardonic humor.

I also posted it as a way of protesting how off the rails off topic this thread became. 

I think the general offer of new tech or different designs increase with an increase in price at new pricier level never seen before for sure , but the possibility of buying a very good system with a better S.Q./price ratio is better than it ever was in the past...

With each passing decades more new products are  becoming more than ever  a new vintage purchase possibilities for example, then even if the higher high-end products increase in price we are luckier than ever for possible buying choices of great sound at low cost...

I paid 50 dollars my used Mission Cyrus box speakers...They had insanely good potential for their original mid-fi level....It is not a Fritz speakers for sure but not so far behind i am sure... I dream to buy Fritz speakers but i will live with my 50 bucks used marvel with clear bass i can feel all over the room...I cannot fault them even if better speakers exist like my past Tannoy dual gold concentric...

My 400 bucks Tannoy of 1976 will be priced how much today with inflation? 2,000 bucks... It is the price of the Fritz speakers or near it...

But there exist nowadays over 100,000 bucks priced models with way less equivalent products offered at a comparable  stratospheric price level in the past , the audiophiles basin was not the same anyway in numbers across the world  nor the audiophiles were the same species either...It is a darwinian evolution of the customers basin  with time and the environmental  technology pressure on him...