When someone tells you it's a $40,000 amp, does it sound better?

Thanks @mapman 

I grew up in a Jewish community, so I knew some Yiddish words even though I wasn't Jewish, but I never heard that one.

I don’t understand what motivates Jay’s audio lab? Is he trying to make money? Views are not making money even if they were quadruple what he's doing right now. I used to kind of like it but it's always the same thing. It just goes on and on and on and on and every once in a while there's something of value. He's got a great body if you're into that kind of thing

Everything he shows is ultra expensive and very few people buy the stuff. He doesn’t show you other people systems so he seems to never leave that room.

He’s into click bait it’s just kind of weird.

SNS hit the nail on the head.  Seems like a lot of snob appeal to me; but what do I know; I'm just an old engineer !!

@atmasphere wrote:

One example I've seen given to showcase this is college tuition. Colleges found that if they decrease tuition enrollment goes down and goes up when they increase it.

Another example is Campagnolo, a well-known bicycle parts brand. Rather than price according to a formula, they price according to what the market will bear. 

Exactly. For some reason though there's the sense of this permeating blanket of suppressing any notion of such expensive gear being also, and maybe not least a way of accommodating/is a symptom of what you describe above.

However, very expensive and overbuilt monstrosities of amps can also be a symptom of what they're feeding, and the severe bottleneck inefficient and passive filter-heavy speakers represent. When you have to muscle up such power capacity/PSU stability to come near relative load indifference while maintaining headroom, which is really to be strived for with any serious "hifi" setup, it should be obvious the load looked into is (too) significantly draining. It's amusing actually seeing pictures of setups with amp towers (McIntosh comes to mind), per channel, lining up to such heights to even diminish the appearance of the typically small-ish speakers flanking them; here the bottleneck effect of the speakers wrt. to their power requirement is visually striking.

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At least as inefficient, passively configured and multi-way speakers are concerned I'd be inclined to side with those feeling the bigger/more expensive amps actually do make a difference for the better, because the speaker context calls for their sturdy PSU's and prodigious power capacity, all the while trying to diminish any negative sonic side effects building amps of such massive power volume can lead to. Perhaps a crude/simplistic measure as a generalizing stance at least, my approach (with exceptions) would be to limit linear PSU-supplied amps to no more than ~100W per channel (i.e.: class A/B, lower for class A), and use the more efficient class D topology above that power requirement. The former to the central midrange on up (or if sensitivity and SPL need allows, below that range as well), and the latter below that. If power requirement is an issue in the central to upper octaves, address speaker sensitivity accordingly.