bangraman
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
- Posts
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Inflation calculators aren't necessarily that accurate, but all other things being equal you're looking at 300 to take the contemporary place of something that cost 150 in 2003-4.I don't think I count as an old fart yet, but I've been around for a while. I stopped reading Head-Fi regularly for some years because I was satisfied with the setup I had, among other reasons. Since COVID I've gotten more interested in some old hobbies again to fill the time, and shopping for new toys works well as a pick-me-up against all the stress from current world events.
Another thing that's very interesting to me is the current boom and innovation in the IEM scene. I still remember years back when the scene was mostly concentrated on a few western brands, and ergonomics were often bad as they were made of hard acrylic, and the price - performance ratio was relatively poor.
Nowadays you have 3D-printed ones made of resin with a pseudo-custom IEM shape and numerous different driver types, and all these brands competing with each other trying to offer the most attractive product to entice customers to buy from them. All that is only good for us as buyers.
What I'm not a fan of is the inflated and still increasing prices though. It seems that almost every brand is following the trend of charging megabucks for their new gear, and if it's not in the 4 digit range, it's too low. I'm saying this as someone who just bought a €1700 IEM so that might seem hypocritical, but I liked audio better when it was more affordable, and the ultra-expensive was limited to flagships and prestige models ("look at what our company can do" types such as the Sony MDR-R10), but expensive is more the norm nowadays.
Yeah, I know I don't need to buy things if I think they're too expensive, but it's just one of the trends in the evolution of the audio market that is not so cool.
For example, my Fireface 800 back in 2004 was £1000 - a state of the art 1U audio interface. Now, the effectively direct replacement I have for it (the UFX III) was £2700. It does far more and may be overkill for someone used to the original FF, but it is the *contemporary equivalent*.
So that says two things to me at least:
- excessive high-end consumerism isn't entirely the cause: old farts have to come to terms with the colossal scale of real inflation in this (and many other) verticals we may have been enthusiasts of decades ago.
- actually sort of highlights how unsustainably cheap all the mainstream Chinese stuff actually is. And way less than two decades from now, the 20something enthusiasts of today will be lamenting about how things have got unaffordable when all the then-mainstream Chinese makers replace their product lines with mainstream-priced stuff.
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