@cdc Nice topic. Here's my $0.02.
(1) The sales norms of this hobby have/are changing from a home-demo norm to a pay-to-play norm. Just like a price hike for a product, this change elicits a painful emotional response from consumers. But, the market is changing, we can't do anything about it. The auto market is also now shifting away from a retailer/dealership model. Our auto retailers are disappearing.
(2) The whiskey market is largely a pay-to-play hobby. In this area, the consumer is confronted with single barrels and special release bottles that can often cost ~$100-$1000, depending. Many times, these bottles are complete duds, and it's painful to spend $300 on a bottle that falls flat. Other times, we get lucky when we take a chance on a bottle and find something truly amazing, but which we will never find another bottle of. There are at least a couple things I do as a whisky consumer in this pay-to-play market:
(a) I can purchase the affordable staple bends from a distiller to survey the landscape. The good affordable bottles are going to be the distillers where I am willing to spend more the next bottles up their lines. Going this route, I've found that I've missed some great higher-end bottles from distillers that had poor affordable bottles--but by and large, I'm doing a better job buying whiskeys that I have a higher chance of liking with this method. This method applies to Hifi--we can buy the entry level components from manufactures we're interested in. With the components we like most, we can start to climb their lines. One downside to this method is the amount we'll spend over time. For the same amount of money we would spend sampling the offerings of various manufacturers, and maybe climbing the lines of a few of them, we could spend that money once on higher end components.
(b) We're entering the era of influencers/reviewers. With whiskey, I've found one reviewer in particular whose palette matches mine. If he recommends something, I know I'm going to enjoy it as well. This applies to Hifi as well. We can find the reviewers whose preferences match ours, and we can even engage with them in our audio journeys. The benefit to following a professional reviewer is that they will have the ability to review higher quantities of components than we would be able to alone. But one downside is that no reviewer will be able to get to many of the components on the market, so we may not get good intel on a product we would like to explore but don't have the funds or time to get to ourselves.
So, while we're moving into an era of direct-to-consumer businesses and may have more limited home demo options, the two methods above become some of the better ways to explore a hobby.