I guess if you’re the kind of audiophile who’s constantly changing combinations of gear in search of the perfect system, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive to repeatedly buy new.
If like me, you’ve kept items for 25 years and in one case 40 years, the high depreciation cost of buying new is spread over a much longer time period.
Also, I’ve stuck with one manufacturer, Linn that tends to facilitate upgrades of existing products, sometimes at heavily discounted prices. For example the latest model of their top streamer cost me about 50% of the full retail price to upgrade to.
Only once, did this backfire on me when a new much better DAC upgrade came along only a couple of years after I belatedly did the previous upgrade. Fortunately, that was an outlier. The upgrade was so significant that I bit the bullet on that one.
Basically, I’ve been happy with my system for the past 25 years and have just been refining things as new developments came along. Now I am old, I am less inclined to pay huge sums to keep up.
