Tonearms: Ripoff?

@elizabeth I do worry about myself, i do not buy $50k tonearm or any audio equipment with this price tag, i am not rich and do not pretend to be elitist audiophile. I don’t drink "Château Latour" and don’t drive Ferrari car. But i am considering myself a music lover and record collector, i don’t need $50k to enjoy music, my whole system cost less than $50k with 6 first class tonearms in rotation and about 20 cartridges. When i watch reports from the modern audio shows all i see is uber ugly overpriced equipment and absolutely awful music reproduced on them, in my opinion these people have no taste (just money). I’ve noticed than many distributors knows nothing about cartridges, this industry with its marketing departments forced rich people to spend more and more on audio equipment, i am happy to ignore this nonsense.

These guys reminds me those record nerds who can spend $12 000 on one single rare record in VG condition to play it on $100 equipment. The only difference is that most of the audiophiles normally playin horrible music on their audiophile pressing LPs with $70k tonearms and $200k turntables. Those two group of people deserve each other in this crazy world. At least record nerds have great and interesting music. If it's all for the music, then the music must be great first and then everything else. 

If my posts are annoying for you for this reason then do not read it.

But i have no idea what do you contribute on this site, any usefull information about analog gear for others?

Surely this is getting a bit out of hand, doesn't it? We all know there is a group of people with excessive wealth and in our current economic system this can only go in one direction: further up.
So what do you do when you already have a dozen houses around the globe, a few yachts to play with, a bunch of cars, watches, should I continue?

Somewhere down the line of such trophies comes our precious little hobby. Even when only a very small portion of the global 1% takes a fancy to high end audio, there is still big money to be made. Which explains the existence of 10k+ cartridges, 100k+ turntables, etc. Audio designers are just like normal people with mortgages to pay, so if there's a market for such items, they will produce it.

Does this make such products rip offs? Not necessarily. There are serious and talented audio designers who have welcomed this market as a unique opportunity to work with a budget that will allow them to push the bounderies of technology and performance (and still make a nice profit). Other designers may consider this to be objectional (or even distasteful) and choose to focus their talents on making high performance products at reasonable prices for regular folks. Some do both.

But as in every market there are also likely to be fraudulent types who will step into this 'trophy' market, stick a silly price tag on some fancy looking mediocre product and hope to make a handsome profit by selling it to some ignorant with money to burn. That would certainly qualify as a rip off, but why should we care?

@madavido you clearly have the wherewithal to purchase an inexpensive tonearm to go with your TA table.  Spring for a Jelco and judge for yourself.  I’d buy an SME V in a heartbeat if I had the cash and the right table to pair with it, and there’s lots of those.