I have an amazing turntable that is incredibly musically engaging but some nights I do just want to bring the iPad and fire up the Mosaic app and stream Qobuz on the Rossini Apex. It sounds great too.
As for the prices in the industry, I have a few observations as someone who has worked in the industry…
1. Parts inflation has been significant and real. Many manufacturers have to pass along these costs. Many parts are 4-5X what they were four years ago.
2. Like any luxury good, there has been the emergence of an ultra luxury customer segment. Catering to those folks is just good business. And knowledge from building these products genuinely finds its way down to more affordable gear.
3. Prices on some products are eye watering. But so what? Nobody is holding a gun to our heads to buy them. If the value isn’t there for you or me, we should not buy it.
4. Magazines as commonly used here is very misleading. TAS and Stereophile are digital media firms that also put out a magazine. Advertising releationships are almost always digital and print.
5. A lot of YouTube reviewers lack genuine experience. But they can be very entertaining. It’s like anything else, some are worth trusting, some are fun to watch, and some are talking their book and/or compromised.
I was looking at the MSB website last night - a brand I've never looked at. I have no idea what they sound like and I don't care as I don't have $100,00 for a DAC. The verbal diarrhoea that counts as product description was nauseating. They sort of suggest they've reinvented something, or everything, but it turns out it's just a 3-box ladder DAC. It's basically a company making bespoke products with a degree of inefficiency and high cost that is commendable in its absurdity. The fact that they have all this CNC gear and two staff running it, and one product requires 3 machined boxes, multiple side panels and containers and then hand-finishing - even at the prices they charge it probably doesn't leave much for the cost of the electronics themselves.
The cost-no-object approach to high performance takes the product into a miscrospically small elite market. At the other end, you have companies who look to ways of providing the same technology as cheaply as possible - for example the EverSolo A10 is a streamer-DAC with two high class OXCO clocks (an MSB selling point) and sells for about $4,000.
In a way my digital system is a comparable 4-box set up along the lines of MSB:
- The heavy lifting processing (Roon Server and and HQ Player) done by a computer on the network, feeding DSD256 to the audio system over a fibre-optic VLAN.
- An ultra low-noise digital transport (Innuos Pulsar)
- A 2-box ladder DAC with vanishingly low noise and jitter, the lowest Stereophile had ever measured (Holo May)
The whole lot cost me about $10,000, it retails now for about $15,000. So 15% of the MSB cost and probably sounds much the same.
I suspect it's good for HiFi that I can have a great sounding digital system for $10-$15,000, that is just as enjoyable as a far more expensive analogue system, and people who want to pay $150,000 (adding a suitable streamer) if it makes them feel better can happily do so. As long as the two appreciate that they have nothing in common and, if they do meet, respect each other's choices. I'm not even sure sound quality comes in to it.
Magazine reviews are almost pure advertising and most video reviews are for people with poor time management made by people who can't get a proper job.
Most of the time I listen through a ceiling audio system, for many hours at a time. They cost about £450 each. The same designer has just launched a £400,000 loudspeaker. Both are hifi products. All that really matters is that people buy the product and enjoy using them to listen to music.
