You guys do note that when the Shure 846 came out there were screams about the high price was but only a year later there are many flagships selling for 50-80% more. The market has evolved into a reverse price war to see who can charge the most. Yet those ultra high priced models are all back ordered with people lined up to buy. This is a crazy business.
I am beginnig to sound like a bronken record--though many of you probably never heard a broken record--but this is only the beginnig of price escalation, and unfortunately the beginning of the end of the HP/IEM business as we know it.
I am no good at prediction--as the Nobel Physicist Niels Bohr said, preditions are very difficult to make, especially about the future--but I have seen the same thing happening with High-End Home Audio.
When the business sees the ever increasing appetite for better-quality gears, they will embark upon the ill-advised pursuit of ever higher quality gears regardless of price, ignoring the engineering wisdom of making the best quality product possible at a reasonable price, i.e. not erring too far from the point of diminishing return.
I believe with the IEM/HP currently available, we have already passed the point of diminishing return. So now, any small increase in quality will comes with a doubling or tripling of the price which will reduce the number of units sold which in turn will increase the unit cost even further. Let the vicious circle begin.
In the end, we will arrive at the same sad situation we are in with Hihg-End Home Audio: we have mass-market products of pretty sad quality and then just a handfull of ultra-high end products selling ultra-high quality products at exhorbitant prices ($5,000 cartridge, $20,000 turntable, $25,000 amplifiers and $50,000 speakers) that a mere millionaire has trouble affording. There are a few hold-outs from the old days like Magapan that continue to make state-of-the-art products at reasonable prices but they are few and far in between.
Of course, high-End companies will do just fine selling to just a few very wealthy customers but making much more profit per unit. But devoted audiophiles that supported the high-end business at the beginning are left in the cold. This has aleady come to pass for High-End Home Audio and we are seeing signs of the same thing happening with High-End Headpne/IEM. Already, $2,000-$5,000 HPs, $5,000-$10,000 HeadAmps and $1,000-$2,500 IEM arer fairly common place nowaday: they will be the bargains of tomorrow.
So, let's enjoy these golden days of HP/IEM while we can. They will not last and soon we have to look for a more affordable hobby: High-End Quilting anyone?
