Ajani

Agreed. The Lemon aid guide for example rates cars on quality, reliability and safety - A Hyundai Elantra Touring (designed in Germany) is given 5 stars. All Mercedes and B&W Models get 3 stars or lower and basically called overpriced junk in some cases.

But because the sticker is $90,000 it is automatically viewed as being better.

I have heard $50,000+ amplifiers from Krell, Soullution, Edge that I would not trade my modest amplifier for - and it's not close. And I think back to that lemon-aid guide about the cars. I don't get it.

Even if I was to factor in performance on the car front - it still doesn't make sense - It is illegal to drive the cars to the point where the performance is going to matter - so basically the only way to get the performance factor advantage is to skirt the law and put lives in jeopardy.

With stereo gear - it comes down to design. A good Single Ended amplifier is a single ended amplifier and no amount of money spent on solid state high negative feedback will match it no matter how expensive the amp. Of course there is a subjective aspect to this in that you have to hold the design as the best sounding design you've heard. So IMO and IME are tags that have to be used. And more expensive SET tends to sound a lot better than less expensive SET. So a direct car analogy can't be truly made.