Because a big reason why they started this was a rebellion against the "gold plated Bentley" model of audio gear manufacturing. Making money at the stupid priced end of audio requires spending large sums of money on things that make no difference to audio quality and some fairly high levels of lying to your customers. Extremely expensive audio gear in many cases isn't even a little bit better sounding than more affordable gear. You pay for exclusivity and shiny bits. If you pride yourself on being a good engineer, why would you want to get involved in selling fantasies to the fantastically wealthy? A wise man once said any idiot can design a 5 dollar pencil. It takes an engineer to design a 5 cent pencil. High audio abounds in 5 dollar pencils. Heck, 500 dollar pencils. The picture below is from a review in TAS of a $60,000 line stage preamp that the reviewer went nuts over. That volume control must cost 5 grand. Do you think it sounds better than the relay controlled precision voltage divider in a Freya? No, it can't it just a really expensive way to put resistors in a circuit. The case that this preamp is in is gorgeous. In the limited quantities that this is expected to sell, I bet it costs close to $10,000. That doesn't make it sound better either. If you were in engineering school and your project was to build a device to select from one of a half dozen 20-20khz bandwidth limited inputs at a couple of volts peak to peak, add 0 to 10'ish db of amplification with low distortion and low noise and send it out to a power amp and you presented this monstrosity the result would be laughter. This is not even like driving to work in a formula one car, it's like driving to work in a car that cost's like a formula one car but performs like an off the shelf 3 series BMW. Too much of high audio is all about how to make things more expensive. A lot of high end gear is like a high end watch. Beautiful to look at, nice to show off to your friends but functionally actually worse than a $50 Casio. I am glad there are people running companies that have said "enough" and are trying to reverse the trend.
I agree with you, in principle.
The actual parts used in that line stage could probably get you to $6,000, but certainly not to $60,000.
I could be wrong, but I don't know of any output transistors that cost $500 a pop.
Or PSU's that retail for $2,500 apiece.
I know, all the bling enclosures, R&D, 'handmade' labour, silver wiring, marketing, etc. adds up, but still.
(Rare NOS valves are a possible exception, though even expensive high end designs mostly spec current production valves.)
But to use your analogy, I believe there's merit in a pencil built for 50 cents.
Somewhere between the 5c and $5 (or $500) extremes there's a place, imho, where the law of diminishing returns has yet to come into full effect.
Like a BMW M3 that gets you close/r to the performance of a Formula One car, if you will.
Appreciably faster and more nimble than the standard 3 Series, yet still in the same enclosure, give or take, as the standard model.
This is what, for example, the Yggdrasil DAC represents to me.
Give a great designer a bigger budget and he will make a better product.
Access to higher-spec parts, fewer space constraints, more opportunity to prototype, etc.
(BTW I'm not saying this is how Yggy came to be, I'm just speculating in a general sense.)
It's only natural, then, that folks might wonder what a 50c Schiit speaker or head amp might look and sound like.
Well that's my 2 cents, anyway (analogy over).
Happy New Year.
