Some years back now, I simply grew tired (to the point I'd had enough) of waiting in vain for manufacturers to somehow 'divine', or to pluck out of the ether, exactly what kind of build quality, sound quality, feature sets, etc., etc. that I wanted, at any given price point. It wouldn't have taken them a lot of money for them to do it, either, nor was it tech-intensive. Early on I tried contacting them many times to try to fill them in on what I, and perhaps others, might be looking for, but to no avail.
The budget stuff didn't measure up for me, sound-wise. And after the intermediate levels of gear, the high end to me just seemed to be, more or less, an exercise in gold-plating everything...while the sound quality seemed to start to slip in their rank of priorities. It was hard for me to find any examples of gear that had what I could call 'definitive' (meaning very well-rounded) performance for its class. IOW they would get a variety of things right, but then fall down on at least one area of sound or other. This is something I've found that does not really seem to change, even the higher in price bracket we go...it's still the same story. Bad execution?? At the higher levels it doesn't look like that to me - just plain bad design. It's as if no one can be bothered to actually sit down think through a design comprehensively any more...at any price level. I'm sure they could if they wanted to, they just evidently don't want to. I literally think they see themselves as too busy making money.
So, I had to build my own speakers, for one. I'm not enough of a DIY'er to do circuit design, but if I had that skill, I'd probably use it.
In the end, I settled on medium priced gear that was as close to the ideal performance-to-price ratio as I could find and that was also still cheap enough that it wouldn't scare me too bad if I got under the hood and changed things around some. That and some power conditioning success and I was able to build the 'dream system' that now gives me bliss. It's just that I couldn't have done it nearly as well for the money - or even as well at all - without resorting to DIY now and again.
But the more dissatisfied I was with the market offerings, the more voiceless I found myself among the manufacturers. Everybody these days seems only concerned with either the high end or the "average audiophile". Experienced audiophiles who are looking for something of inherent value tend to be shut out, I think.
But, maybe that's just me, I've always thought of myself as a frustrated designer anyway.
