High End Audio-Gaining Higher Ground?

I live in a highly affluent town of a NE state (translated, most of my neighbors are one percenters I gather) and I'm one of two people I know of who have a tangentially high end system. Most everyone else has just a home theatre with built in speakers hidden in the ceiling if they have anything at all. There are likely more model train collectors than people with multiple component systems.

While friends tell me they enjoy what they hear at my place, no one seems interested in the complexity of what passes for high end. If friends knew I have fancy interconnects (let alone power cords) and have agonized over the great question of our age (which file format to use), they'd tell me to seek treatment for OCD.

It seems that product complexity and snobbery by manufacturers, retailers and users have worked to make this an increasingly niche hobby by aging males with expanding waistlines and receding hairlines, at least based on what I see at stores and shows.

I like the idea of starting a charity also. I think one great thing to do would be to redeploy audio systems owned by recently deceased audiophiles -- assuming, as is quite often the case, that the family members would like nothing better than clearing out heavy and sizable pieces of esoteric (lower case "e," and not a dig at the TEAC subsidiary). Perhaps we could donate the items to schools or homeless shelters.

Thirty dollars for vinyl records? Wow. How much do they charge for 8-tracks and cassettes?

Part of what marginalizes so-called high-end audio is the hopeless complication. Use a PC or a Mac to stream music? No so fast; one has to "clean up" the power supply and, laughably, place the computer itself on uber-special footers to guard against "vibrations." (This ignores the fact that the computer itself performs hundreds of computations all of the time, and streaming music is itself, one of many functions it can do in an audibly error-free manner.)

Then, there is the media/reviewers. Try to look up a simple question ("how does a certain component sound?"), and one sees gems like the following:

"A fat toroid feeds the power supply from its own chamber to isolate the main circuitry from stray radiation. Rectification is via ultra-fast MUR 860 diodes, filtering by low-ESR Elkos. The 32’000uF storage capacitance could have this or that preamp cough in amusement but [the product's manufacturer] deliberately refrain from overkill to shorten capacitive recharge times."

Can't imagine why that's off-putting.