I'm just curious what persons think is an ideal life-cycle for HiFi products:

5 years? A lot of gear seems to conform to this timeframe.

1 year? Like in mass market gear.

10 years? A number of brands also approach/exceed this figure.



Shorter life-cycles ensure that products are always up-to-date, but lowers resale value (assuming you trade gear) and are ofen regarded as being evidence that the manufacturer lacks confidence in the product (Musical Fidelity gets accused of that quite often)...

Very long life-cycles show great confidence in the product by the manufacturer, but means that potential consumers are left wondering if they should hold off on buying, in case a replacement model is around the corner... I've also noticed that many products with long life-cycles actually update components several times during the lifecycle, so initial models may sound and perform quite differently from earlier production models (for example, the current Benchmark DAC1 has numerous improvements over the original released in 2002 and sounds far better by all accounts)...

Medium length (approx 5 year) life-cycle changes are fairly standard, but they mean that there is always debate about whether new versions of a product are really an improvement or just an excuse to raise prices....

Should there even be a consistent life-cycle for a brand or should they just release new gear when they have something they want to release?