As I contemplate the audio market I am unsure as to why better quality has gotten so expensive. My frame of reference is televisions. If you look at the price history of TVs against their quality and feature history, it is clear that the quality and features have gone way up as the comparative cost has come down.
The first color TVs were about $500. Today $500 will buy you a very nice quality and size TV, and inflation has driven the value of the dollar down considerably in that time. Now tell me why audio has not followed that path. Solid state audio equipment should not be mega dollars, I will leave tubes out of the discussion for simplicity of the question.