First, you confessed you didn't quite understand what I said, so you judged yourself when you said "Using unrelated analogies just serves to muddy the discussion", right?
Frankly I'm starting to get the sense that you're the kind of person that wants to yell at the sun for rising and the wind for blowing...I'm not here for such never-ending fights.
What I see the problem is some/maybe many companies are too greedy. I make this conclusion based on two facts:
1. I noticed many headphones on Amazon have huge discount at ANY time. That means they admit their initial prices is ridiculous.
2. I don't know another area in electrics market has the phenomenon like audio. There are some companies like aristocrat, they can ask a price so much higher than others. This is not right from my sight, maybe many in this thread. As I said, new technology should bring down the cost, especially for electrical products. I didn't see this happened even up to our age, with such advancing of technology. This is absolutely abnormal from my sight!!!
1. That's part of Amazon's marketing/sales pitch - "look at how much money we save you!!!" They make their money through volume over individual margin, just like most other big retailers today (e.g. Wal-mart, Costco, etc). A lot of audiophile or other "luxury goods" will have significant margins worked in to support brick and mortar retailers that have higher overhead costs per unit sold than bulk/big box retailers, hence those margins are needed to survive. On many audiophile/boutique audio goods those margins can be well over 50%, which makes total and complete sense if you've got to pay rent on 5th Ave and pay salesmen to stand around and sell stuff. So what the big box retailers can do is eat some of that margin to offer "a better deal" for the customer, while also removing overhead by not having salesmen, physical retail locations, less pre/post-sales support, etc. It's a trade-off.
Additionally, I'd like to introduce you to the idea of free market economics: the price of a good or service will sell at a price the market can bear. A lot of companies selling boutique goods don't have a clear idea what the market will bear for their product, precisely because they're introducing something that is intended to offer features/status/whatever beyond its utility value, so they offer the item or service at an "ask" price, and let the market whittle it down to whatever it will bear. Some manufacturers (like Grado) have a history of strongly enforcing that "ask" price as an MSRP, but conversely others (like Koss) will largely let the market do what it will (this also helps those brick and mortar retailers because it lets the salesmen "cut you a deal" after you "haggle them down" - of course they're still making a profit, but there's enough margin worked in not only to make sure they still get to eat dinner, but to let them bring the price down from the initial "ask" price).
This behavior is extremely common in many other food and non-food goods, like automobiles, computer hardware, real estate, etc (and is the foundation of commodities exchanges). This is basic econ 101.
2) The whole premise that you're starting from "new technology must bring down the cost" is itself flawed. There is no such rule. *Sometimes* new innovations or technologies can result in reduced costs, like for example being able to mass produce DRAM devices more cheaply dropping the prices on most computing machinery in the late 1990s, but that isn't always a gurantee. Consider, on the other hand, the "massive runaway increase in prices" on mobile phones over the same period, precisely because they introduced newer and more complex technology and features (and before "well but its free now!" - no, it isn't - go look up the retail price for an iPhone or similar). Point is, there is no such rule, and that's a flaw in your logic.
As far as the "aristrocrat brand" - let me introduce you to another concept in economics and marketing: Veblen Goods. The idea is that there are some objects that are expensively solely for the reason that they are expensive, and they represent something known as conspicuous consumption. A Rolls-Royce car is usually a prime example of this. It costs *far* more than its utility value could bear, and *far* more than even the sum of its parts, but it sells precisely because it is very expensive and represents a luxury good. Your argument, if we took your premise as a fact (which again, it is not), would be that this is "a disease" because a Chevrolet can be had with similar outfitting (and really, it can - Rolls-Royce does not have a monopoly on leather seats, V8 engines, four door sedans, powered accessories, etc).
As I pointed out previously, none of this is new or exclusive to headphones - there have *ALWAYS BEEN* (going back to the 1980s) very expensive (multi-thousand dollars per pair) headphones, and this is not some new phenomenon that you've happened to discover. Additionally, the average price-to-performance ratio has come down both in absolute terms (especially for "peripheral" devices like DACs and amps) and relative to inflation, for example if we compare a "former flagship dynamic can" (and yes VandyMan, I've got your post quoted below) like MDR-R10 or MDR-Q010 at original MSRP to something like HD 800S at current MSRP, not only is it cheaper absolutely, it is also cheaper relative to inflation. So where's this "big insidious scandal" supposed to be? And we won't even get into the argument about "well technically the HD 800S offers quantitatively better performance than many former $1k+ cans."
I'm pretty sure I paid $500 for my HD-600s in 1999. Per an inflation calculator, that is $733 in 2017 buying power. I paid something like $800 ($1174 in 2017) for the Grado RS-1s at the same time. Maybe that price included the little battery powered amp, I can't recall. (I ended up returning them. Most painful to wear headphone ever and Grado had some build issues back then.) These were both the ToTL dynamic headphones from two of the most highly regarded companies at the time.
They never were "the ToTL dynamic headphones" - they were high end offerings, but there were certainly more expensive/fancier/more exotic options. The "era of $1k+" stuff is not new, but it is perhaps more visible solely because of the Internet and death of B&M retail. I'm not going to entertain a semantic argument about "well but I said "dynamic" so nanner nanners" - forest for the trees and all that.
It is absolutely true that the cost of ToTL headphones has gone up faster than inflation and by a wide margin.
Prove. It.
Modern "ToTL" headphones have tended to run at $1000-1500 from many manufacturers even going back to the 1990s, with a few outliers. Perhaps what you're noticing is that the players have changed - where once we had Audio-Technica, Sony, Grado, etc dominating the field, now we have Audeze, HiFiMan, and Focal. But in terms of "well its going up faster than inflation" - not really. $1500 (or thereabouts) got you an exotic flagship in the early 90s, the early 00s, the early 10s, and will probably still do so in the early 20s. That's not even matching inflation.
Oddly, this has happened despite increased competition and an explosion in the size of the market.
More likely there's just more visibility of such products. In other words, if you go back to 1990, how many people do you figure knew about the MDR-R10, ESP/950, STAX LNS, Grado HP1000, etc? In a pre-Internet, pre-personal audio, pre-social media world. Whereas today its very easy to see listicle content aggregators go out and find stuff that's expensive to create those "the ten most superlative somethings for something" filler articles.
As far as "increased competition" - I'd contend that at the ultra high end there really isn't such an increase. I'd also wager at the ultra high end the growth really hasn't been "explosive." Current (and even historic) market research is too imprecise to tell us that though - it categorizes "$300+" (or thereabouts) as one block, because of how narrow and niche that market is. Certainly in the $200-400 segment we've seen *lots* of newcomers in the last ten years, and I think this would largely fit into the genre of "there's lots of competition and folks trying to do new things so we see benefits of that as consumers" but again we don't (at least that I'm aware of) have objective data that separates that market segment out from the $500+ or $1000+ market. Basically what I'm getting at is, if you take something like the LCD-4 or MDR-R10, there's a very small number of people who will ever buy a pair, and I think that probably holds up over time, whereas something like the Bose QC35 or Sennheiser HD 600 probably sees significantly better exposure today than something like the SR-300 did back in the 1995. But as far as the market research studies I've seen go, all of those are dropped into the same category - "over $300."
Those forces are supposed to lead to lower prices. In defense, many ToTL headphones now are more complex to design and manufacture, using very thin membranes, high tech magnets, CAD design, etc, etc.
Again, "new tech" and "high tech" doesn't always lead to lower prices. If said new/high tech requires use of exotic materials, like Focal and beryllium deposition (which has always been an involved and expensive process), or Sony's use of LCPs, or the use of exotic hardwoods, leather, elaborate machining of expensive substances (e.g. magnesium alloys, carbon fibre, etc) you're probably going to see a net price increase versus injection molded plastic. And there is certainly a "balancing act" that higher end/exotic manufacturers get into, so if you take something like the new Focal Utopia - how much of their "luxuryness" is due to said high/new tech, and how much is there simply to help justify what Focal knew in advance would be a relatively high pricetag (and which then ultimately drives the pricetag up higher)? Certainly I think there's also a degree of consumer expectation as well - do you remember how berated/belittled Sennheiser was over the HD 800 being "all plastic" and "not luxury enough" - or the same for Koss with the ESP/950, or Grado with the RS and GS lines? So new-comers are certainly cognizant of what has and hasn't worked in the past, and work within that too. And that's partly where you get products like TH-900 or Z1R that have tons of (more or less) non-performance luxury add-ons thrown at them (IOW, would the TH-900 sound appreciably different if those cups were just spray-painted with Krylon vs hand-finished in Japan? do the Z1R require that beta titanium headband where plastic and spring steel would also work?).
That is not to say that there isn't some plain stupid pricing going on, ahem, Ultrasone.
Ultrasone's Edition line has always been an outlier, but the average price for a new Edition model has actually come down over the last 15 years. That isn't to say the $3000+ MSRP Edition isn't still a thing, but it isn't a new thing either - the original Edition, Edition 7, was something like $3700 when it launched back in 2003, which hasn't been met or matched by any product since excluding the 5LTD (and from my understanding the price there was precisely for the exotic hardwood and low production numbers, and the 5UL is supposedly the same headphone underneath - doubt we'll ever see any objective confirmation of that though).
Once you "norm out" the Edition line-up, and look at their more standard (and I would assume much higher volume) offerings, like PROline and HFI, their prices have remained pretty stable over the same time period as well - $300-500 gets you a pretty snazzy pair of Ultrasones today, just like it did then. Again, I'm not seeing "runaway pricing" or "an insipid sickness" at play here. The Signature line would actually support the "well there's newer tech, prices unequivocally absolutely MUST COME DOWN" - they've been very up-front that the Signature line is essentially based upon Edition 7 and 9, at significantly lower cost (and probably that's in no small part to the removal of non-performance luxury add-ons and reliance on more conventional materials in a mass produced environment).
On the other hand, for less than I spent in 1999, even unadjusted for inflation, you can now get the same or better headphones. I think that fact mitigates the high prices quite a bit.
I'd agree with this too. If the HD 600 or 650 or K701 or whatever had been done away with and Sennheiser/AKG/Beyer/whoever now wanted $1500+ for that level of quality/performance, I'd absolutely agree with being up in arms, but bottom line is that in both absolute and inflation-adjusted numbers, that level of performance has not only not gone away, its gotten cheaper too. Sure, some folks may grumble at the K701 no longer being made in Austria, or Grado no longer giving away the cigar box with an RS purchase, or Sennheiser no longer bundling the DSP amplifier with the HD 600, etc as cost-downs, but ultimately those things fit into that "non-performance luxury add" box as far as I'm concerned.
Lastly, I'd rather jam a pencil in my ear than listen to a T1 v1. (Kidding. Mostly.)
Ha!
yangian, did you ever read Jason Stoddard's Schiit Happened story? He has a chapter discussing why they never have sales on their products, nor discount them.
This. This a thousand times over as well. Like I said above, historically these kinds of products have to include higher margins worked in so that sales can still be profitable, and so that physical retailers can eat dinner at night (and honestly what's with this new age idea that "we still want to be capitalists, but if the item they're selling is more than $0.01 over its BOM cost, its a total scam and they should be executed for crimes against the state!"). Stoddard explains this really well throughout that book, and also offers musings on how the market is really changing in the face of Amazon, Wal-mart, Costco, etc employing a different method to remain profitable. Currently I think its probably safe to say that not all manufacturers/vendors/distributors/etc are on the same page, especially in more niche markets where their overall exposure is (historically) very low. Grado is a good example of this - Grado still clings to fixed pricing and very limited distribution through a dealer network, and that keeps their prices "higher" on average than competitors who have embraced more direct/big-box retail and more fluid pricing (like Koss - and why do I keep using Grado and Koss as examples here? because they're both American companies that produce at least some of their products (especially their higher end products) in the USA, so they're not an unfair comparison). Certainly some manufacturers/distributors/whatever can afford to retain this model (at least in the short term), but frankly I think Stoddard is probably right that we're going to see more big-box/direct sales in the future, and the elimination of physical retail and the margins and sales practices associated with it. It just makes more sense to offer the consumer lower prices if you can do it and remain profitable, and I think nobody is really arguing that Wal-mart's "volume over individual margin" model is inherently unprofitable or otherwise uneconomical.
DAPs are a good example. I have an AK380 here, as well as quite a few others, and only with well-recorded music is it clearly sonically better than any of the other DAPs (ignoring features and other factors). For a lot of music, it isn't. I think like the story of the guy who had bought a high-end system only to demo Christmas music on it to his friends (because he'd read or been told that it was a good recording!) is really the main issue -- that is, getting what will give you sufficient satisfaction for the music you enjoy, instead of what someone else lusts after because it is expensive and/or shiny.
And I'd agree with this too. Diminishing returns is a powerful force, and isn't exclusive to audio either. Someone brought up the example of computers, and someone else brought up cars, and in both cases those markets see diminishing returns as well. Some examples for folks who may want to pursue it:
- Will a Ferrari really offer a 10x or 20x better driving experience, on the same public roads, at the same rated speeds (e.g. 25-55 mph) as a Citoren or Chevrolet? Can you even quantify "better" in some way? Sure its a faster car on the race-track, but is that what you're buying it for? And is it even the most economical choice for that?
- Will buying a 6950X and Titan Xp SLI really offer a 10x or 20x better gaming experience, on the same real-world games, at the same typical resolutions (e.g. 1080p or 1440p (before "BUT 4K!!!" - go take a gander at the latest Steam HW Survey and tell me how big of a deal 4K really is - I'll help you: 48.77% of respondents are using 1080p (and that's seen growth since the last time the survey ran), and the next five most popular resolutions (which total up another 38.07% of respondents) are lower than that)., etc. Is it economical?
Sure you can respond with "well but I drive my Ferrari on the race track and that's why I own it, and its better than the Citoren for that!" or "yeah I know its "not worth it" for 1080p, but I have a 5K monitor!" and in both cases this goes right back to what Currawong said - only in specific usage scenarios is there a clear advantage, and even then it doesn't likely have a linear relationship to the price increase. That doesn't mean "don't buy luxury goods" if you want them, ultimately that's getting out of the realm of empirical discussion and trying to tell someone how they feel about something, but it does mean there's clearly something "else" beyond absolute performance going on with the pricing of luxury goods, which is where I'll go back to Veblen Goods and the idea of conspicuous consumption.
Frankly I will add that, at a casual glance, it is easy to say "yes everything is getting so much more expensive those evil capitalist pigs are trying to fleece us and its a crime against the people" but that assertion simply doesn't stand up in light of said capitalist pigs still offering previous values at the same (or lower) prices. But good news doesn't sell, so its easier to complain about the end of the world and then print a retraction than it is to just say "things are pretty good, carry on."
What I find interesting about this thread is that without the "carrot", i.e. newest, best, most expensive, this hobby would not anywhere as much sustained interest. Part of the utility received from being interested in high-end audio is being able to be surprised just after you've made an "end game" purchase that there's a whole new level. it's like looking into a mirror with another mirror behind you. Similarly, I seem to get equally as much enjoyment thinking about and researching a potential purchases as I do from listening. I'm alway looking for the new "carrot." The "stick" might get smaller with increased disposable income, but it's all relative; at most levels there's nearly always another "end game" out there waiting to be purchased.
Its like Qui-Gonn Jinn said - "there's always a bigger fish."
I think this is an interesting point as well, but I'll have to say I diverge from you on being interested in another "carrot." There was a thread a while back (I mean years ago) in the Summit-Fi section about "have you found your endgame" and at the time I said "yep" and frankly even today I still say "yep." There has to come a point where good enough really can be good enough, and you decide that choice paralysis is no way to live. Someone will always have a bigger house, faster car, bigger salary, etc whatever, and frankly I think Louis CK put it best -
"you only look in your neighbor's bowl to see if he has enough." 
). That's why in the last reply, I emphasized we see from different perspectives. SO something you think it's normal, but I think there is something wrong. For examples, huge discount all the year round. You told me other areas have similar case. But this is not a satisfied answer to me. It cannot justify such phenomenon is normal. I just make an example from our discussion. So I don't think we can have effective conversion since we see problems from different perspectives.
