Where are the young audiophiles?

@syndication.
If you have $20K invested in used equipment at age 35 you have spent more than I had at your age ($ adjusted). High end audio has always been the pursuit of a few people of the best possible musical reproduction and experience. If you are one of those... then along the way you will discover the overall sound is strongly influenced by all the components, and that interconnects and cables are a part of the system. If not, you will enjoy what you have, which is likely better than 99% of the folks out there. Hope you are enjoying it.

@ghdprentice Those most I would spend on interconnects would be in the 30-60 range per cable and I would tend to lean toward Blue Jeans Cable because it’s supporting someone making the cables in the United States. Anything above that is excess and un-necessary. I’m sure more expensive cables might be better but there’s that law of depreciating returns along with your hearing loss as you age. Everyone rationalizes after they make an expensive purchase that it sounds better but sometimes this is a placebo. Cables are that placebo. You might have an argument that analog signals degrade and are subject to interference and attenuation, but let’s not say that optical/toslink, RJ-45, and usb are the same beast because they’re not. The signals are digital and there’s a lot of snake oil about selling expensive cables from vendors saying they make digital audio sound better. Bullshit. Digital is digital, data is only flowing on 2 wires in the usb 2.0 spec and either it works or it doesn’t. (Usb does retransmit if it doesn’t get an ACK packet) Same with RJ-45, either it works or it doesn’t. Most home networks use TCP/IP and the packet retransmits if it doesn’t get there. That’s in the TCP spec. No expensive cable is going to change that when a cheaper shielded cat 5/6 cable will work just fine. If you have packet loss, the wireless signal sucks or if you have other issues with your network. (Bad cable/bad route).

“Much less than  1%”

Wow. To read some of the accounts from the period you’d think everyone and their brother had extensive systems. 

Most people are content listening to music on the AirPods or beats via their phone. Probably doesn’t help Hi-Fi is full of eccentric weirdos who believe a power conditioner makes their computer crash less or run faster or that buying some expensive black goo to spread on your interconnects makes the sound come alive.

It has always been a very esoteric pursuit. It takes unique interests in music, a technical bent, with an appreciation of achieving the pinnacle of what is possible. Typically someone that likes to spend time alone.
.

In the 60’s and 70’s many college students were exposed to stereos systems and pot together. Everyone liked listening to the best systems their friends had (none remotely high-end)... and an extremely small minority went on to put together a true high end system... I don’t know anyone that did, other than me. of the thousands of people I have known in business and outside of work I ran into one or two. I met many people claiming to be an audiophile only to proudly state they owned Bose... the marketing scheme worked for decades convincing people they were buying a high end system, to the horror of those of us that actually knew what good equipment could do. We have always been a very small minority... but dedicated over our lifetimes.

The assessment of the popularity has always been in aggregate. Number of attendees to shows, subscriptions, and sales of companies... and bankruptcies.