"How does Krell, which you recommended way back, do to justify their price in a world where SS "SHOULD BE" dirt cheap. $80,000.US for two monoblock power amplifiers?"

I don't ever recall recommending Krell. IMO, there is no justification for a pricetag of $80,000 for a pair of Krell monoblock amplfiers. There is no justification for even $8000.

You parrot back Peter Qtwerp's line very well but you are both very wrong about low efficiency loudspeakers. AR3, probably the archetype acoustic suspension loudspeaker was among the least efficient speakers of its day requiring a whopping 25 watts RMS per channel and having a rated maximum capacity of 100. That was a lot in the early to mid 1960s. It was extremely well constructed of very good materials for their day as were products from KLH.

I don't know much about the Asian market but I would find it hard to belive that Panasonic, Sony, Kenwood, Pioneer, Teac, Toshiba, Nakamichi, Yamaha, Denon, didn't fill that market with ss products as successfully as they filled the American market. It is dangerous to generalize about America being a "throw-away" society. Just look at how much vintage equipment is still available on e-bay for instance that wasn't thrown away and how much more is likely still out there being used. Some of them are considered gems and are highly prized like old McIntosh and Marantz equipment.

High wattage amps came out because the market wanted them and they could be made at reasonable cost using transistors. The first on the consumer market was the Crown DC300 with Phase Linear 400 and 700 following shortly. There was a horsepower race of sorts in the 1970s and McIntosh and Marantz entered the fray as well.

The fiberglass in acoustic suspension loudspeakers is used to damp the speaker. Damping is a fundimental part of tuning the speaker/enclosure combination to avoid spurious resonances and is an inherent part of Newton's second law of motion. If you design speaker systems, you neglect it at your own peril. It is hard if not impossible to say much about Peter Qtwerps speakers or any of his other products for that matter except that they seem expensive and it doesn't appear that much goes into them. He doesn't tell you much about the design and there aren't many places to go hear them, certainly not near where I live and I'm not going out of my way to get to one of the few places that they are demonstrated.

It's always suspicious when someone comes here with the line that only one guy has a corner on everything that is good and everything different from his meaning everything else is awful. By your reckoning, the more than 99% of audiophiles who don't have any AN equipment all have terrible equipment that isn't worth listening to. I'm sure most people find this line hard to swallow. I know I do.