Is it possible for a high end manufacturer to overprice their goods?

A few points on the OP;

There are 5.3 million millionaires and 770 billionaires living in the US. The market for ultra luxury goods is bigger than you think.

We are in the situation now that extremely high prices for products are a feature not a bug. In other words, exclusivity is a selling point. If you have $50 million in Microsoft stock spending 7 figures for a stereo is reasonable in your world. What else are you going to do with your money? Give it to the homeless?

To reinforce a point made above, volume and mass production is critical in the pricing of any complex product. I don't think anyone would argue that a Toyota Venza is magnitudes more costly to design and manufacture than a Rockport Orion yet the Venza sells for less than half the price. If Rockport could sell hundreds of thousands of Orions they would be a lot cheaper.

A $100k speaker or amp is not just an appliance, it is a work of art with a story behind it. It has the advantage of reproducing musical works of art as its purpose. People pay over $100k for paintings all the time. Why not buy a nice stereo?

I've been to a few audio shows and it's thrilling to hear some of these ultra expensive systems even though I will never own one. The sound they achieve gives me a target to shoot for and has allowed me to enjoy this hobby even more. I've been able to put together an affordable system that was state of the art 25 years ago and it holds up to the modern ultra expensive systems surprisingly well. I'm glad the ultra expensive stuff is out there and I hope that it brings joy to its owners.

@tomcarr Yes, I've seen the 22 million millionaire figure also. I believe that the 5.3 million represents the number of households worth a $1+ million and 22 million is the total number of people in those households. Since each household would probably have a maximum of 1 ultra expensive stereo system I used the lower number.

@grislybutter Good point - "millionaires" may not be a good measure of the disposable wealth in our society.

I was trying to make a point about the market for ultra high end luxury goods being very deep and I would make the same point by saying that there seems to be a race in the high end audio industry to introduce extremely expensive products. All of the evidence I see indicates that there is no limit to what people will pay for ultra expensive stereo gear.

Is seems that every month a company introduces a new six-figure audio component. There must be a selection of at least 50 speaker models that cost over $100k and dozens of other components that cost over $50k. The anecdotal evidence is that wealthy audiophiles wait in line to buy this stuff. In an interview with Dan D'Agostino he said that he is selling his Relentless $250,000 amplifiers as fast as he can make them. There are other similar anecdotes from manufacturers including Wilson regarding their top end speakers. They sell out their entire production run shortly after the model is announced.

The other piece of evidence is the number of new high end audio stores that have opened in the last decade. They seem to be thriving. To go along with this, the two surviving audio publications seem to be very healthy with each issue getting thicker with more advertising.

So I guess my answer to the original question is to say that boutique audio companies haven't found the upper limit to how much money some people will pay for audio gear. I don't know how many people have $1 million+ in disposable income but there sure seems to be a lot of them.