its like tube televisions, alot of people like the image quality and the colour range of a CRT, but when RCA sold its CRT manufacturing biz, all the CRT tv´s are now manufactured by generic chinese manufacturers, but then again theres the manufacturing process cycle, when a product is introduced its expencive and hard to manufacture, the process has to be fine tuned, the quality varies, when the process ages and theres a large demand for a product, the manufacturing process stabalizes, it becomes cheaper, and theres less variation in quality,
then when its discontinued, it becomes a nich product for nustalgics, it becomes expencive again but the quality does not descrese becuase the process has allready been refined to the maximum, but then again, if a cheap chinese manufacturer uses a dead rat dac for its CD players, then its a economics problem, not a design problem,