Hi-Fi Is Getting Damned Expensive!

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'entry level'. At Richer Sounds, you can get a Marantz amp and CD player, and Mission floorstanding speakers for £350 each, so just over a grand all-in. And those are by no means the cheapest models they sell.

I did some sums. When I bought my first 'proper' hifi way back in 1982, it cost me just under a grand (from memory; £250 for turntable/arm/cartridge; £300 for integrated amp; £350 for speakers. Cables were free) Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over £3000 at today's prices, so not far off the prices you quote. Then, as now, you could go lower by shopping around.

There is beer budget stuff around that is silly cheap. Upgrading to something well built and with a bit of cachet seems to cost a lot. Then there’s the high end which seems to be the “how high” end.

Most of my box swapping has been driven by bargain prices. You do need a pot of available cash but the money just gets recycled and you don’t have to sell what you have. It’s was my biggest problem earlier in life. I had to sell what ihad and gamble on my next purchase being better. I can’t stress how wrong this approach is if you can avoid it.

I’d say to anyone, get a grand or whatever you feel is right as a fighting fund. Don’t sell what you have, just wait fir bargains you fancy. When you sell, you may end up with a growing fund if you’ve really got bargains in the first place. Your hifi will never go backwards because you only change when you get abetter sound.

Why worry? The good vintage stuff we use now will probably be cared for and still be available years from now.

I'd bet the new Tannoy Cheviot Legacy speakers will have a limited lifespan, with ferrofluid tulip waveguide tweeter coils drying out and cone surrounds failing, whereas many of the classic Tannoys from the seventies we enjoy at the moment, with the pleated cone surrounds and pepperpot tweeter horns will likely still be going strong.

Well the demand for proper Hi-Fi may well contract and it will probably become more specialised, with small makers catering to the bespoke market at a premium, but I think real Hi-Fi will carry on and no doubt the more skint end of the hobby will be offered products.

No. AR turntable, Rega tonearm, Linn K9 cartridge; Nytech CA252; Mordaunt-Short MS20. The turntable and tonearm are still with me, as are the speakers, though the speakers are a bit knackered and live in a cupboard.

I keep reading comments like that but I don't see any real evidence for it. I suppose Veblen goods have become more popular, hi-fi ones included. But by definition you have to be seriously wealthy and a bit shallow to be forking out for Veblen goods and those people only make up a tiny sub-set of society and an even tinier subset of hifi enthusiasts.


What there still seems to be a lot of is people who assume that price correlates with performance. I still see comments like 'You won't get a good sound with a component that only cost £XXX you need to spend £XXXX to do justice to your set-up.' No thought given to whether that extra 'X' on the price is actually reflected in the quality of the product, they just assume that as it costs a lot more it must be better. That's only true occasionally.

In the case of the B&O telly you are getting the name and the styling. And there are people out there who can afford to think nothing of dropping the extra 4 grand to get that. But 99.99 percent of us are not that wealthy.


Don't get me wrong you can't get the really good gear on the cheap, because you can't make really good gear on the cheap. It's impossible. But there's a limit to how good something can be no matter how much money you chuck at the parts, design, construction. Most 'high end' kit goes way beyond that now. I don't have a problem with that, as long as it is still possible to buy quality gear for reasonable money, which I think it is. Radford Revival being a good example. Okay there is (unsurprisingly) a waiting list but you're getting a new amp that will compete with anything at any price for under three grand.