Quote Originally Posted by Feanor
Speaking to my own situation, I would prefer to get 10 years out of almost any product. My days are over for constantly swapping expensive equipment in the quest for some elusive, tiny, marginal improvement. 10 years is optimistic technologically for things like disc players and AV receivers, obviously. But it certainly applies to speakers, amps, and even DACs.

To wit, my 10 year old Assemblage DAC 1.5 still sounds very good allowing that I did upgrade the opamps to OP627's. This DAC has the CS8412 receiver, PDM100 HDCD decoder, and PCM1702 20-bit "ladder" DAC. Well-regarded components, (possibly excepting CS8412), that still sound good though they won't handle hi rez.

In marketing terms, the apparent strategy of most makers is to shorten the life cycle to the least interval that development and retooling permit.
Even AV Receivers/Processors can be made modular/upgradable... So that you don't need to toss the entire thing everytime a new Dolby format is released...