I am with Beemer. I have a pair of Infinity 4.5's that can compete admirably with my Martin Logan ReQuests in many areas. I still use and love tubes. I still enjoy vinyl. I think the prices today are truly out of touch with reality. Don't usually bother to post on it because it is a personal choice for folks. I paid $500 a pair for my JBL L200 studio monitors brand new. (My first "serious" speaker in 1973) Even with inflation, and so called advances, what does a competing albeit better "horn" speaker cost these days or what do they go for used? Apparently if you can get close to 2 grand for "used" JBL's then we have not "advanced" to awfully far.
Nothing new under the sun?
Reading all the material available on audio, there seems to be fairly widely divergent opinions about how much progress we're making, about whether anything truly new is coming about, or whether it's all just marketing.
On the one hand, you read constant reviews, both professional and personal, detailing how the new speaker takes the listener places they've never been before. "Performance like this cost 10X the price just a few years ago", or was unavailable, etc. Not just speakers, any component. The implication is that major strides are being made and the result is much lower prices for much higher performance.
An alternative view is that there is nothing new under the sun, just slick marketing. With this view, you can buy some excellent equipment from the last 20 years, get great sound, and never look back because nothing being put out today performs signicantly better.
Which is it? Should we all just admit that what we have today isn't going to be bettered any time soon and find another hobby?