Quote Originally Posted by RGA
Ajani

Don't associate price with quality or enjoyment. Quality is a factor and $600 is next to impossible to create a good system with but $6000 certainly is very possible to make a very accomplished set-up.

Design, Room size, how much bass is needed, design, type of music you need it to play, and did I mention design.

Design is a key factor because if you "like" something of a certain design type then you may very well like a certain design of speaker at $4k over other designs at $30,000. I would not trade my speakers in for the majority of speakers in the $10k - $40k range that I heard at CES and other locations. Some in that range I liked a whole lot as well but still didn't do enough things better that would convince me to say it is truly worth spending the extra money. Some were designed for bigger rooms of course which if I had such a big room would make me switch. But the "design" and the quality of sound trumps the quantity of sound.

This also applies to SET amplification where to my ear relatively modest Single ended power has a certain magic and truth not captured by drop jaw prices of high powered Solid State. I also find that with the design of zero oversampling CD players. The result is that I could put together a $15k -20k system that I would take in a second over the top Wilson, Soundlab, Avalon, Vandersteen, Scaena, Infinity IRS beta(in Seoul), Quad, JM Labs rooms I heard at very very high end prices. Spending more within a company line will get you more.

The top Vandersteen or JM Labs etc will sound generally better than their lower models so if you like the house sound it is worth the money but if you prefer a competing brand's house sound better than the house sound of Vandersteen then it is very possible to like a $5k speaker over a $45k+ speaker.

The other aspect is some companies are simply more efficient or less greedy. Two companies could build very similar loudspeakers and one company may charge $4k and another may charge $14k. One company may be smaller and own their shop and have a smaller 5-1 mark-up another company may be spending more on advertising, spending large on overhead and expecting a personal salary of $5million per year while the other guy is happy to make $200,000 a year. Factor in the companies operating in China, quantity of sales or pricing to where they feel their product fits against the competition. Also, some designs may require more expensive parts to get the result they want (even if it isn't as good as what another company can achieve using less expensive parts).

To give you an example of people's views on design and price audiofederation has done a series of reviews of high power solid state and lower powered tube amps. They list them from least good to best in given areas. They have sold and auditioned them all. You will see for example that they feel ASL and Manley does better in certain areas than much more expensive Cary amplifiers. http://audiofederation.com/blog/archives/741 they note that a dash means the differences are not that large. A dash with an arrow means that basically the amps following the dash-arrow is a major step up. Price still factors in because there are no cheapies at the top but there is still a lot of cheaper amps that do better than much more expensive ones. It's an interesting way to try and evaluate and compare stuff. They did the larger power amps here and again very expensive didn't always do well - some were pretty poor for them http://audiofederation.com/blog/archives/656
I don't equate price with quality or enjoyment... I've heard expensive gear that sounds like crap to me... Also I agree that (other than buying used/DIY and putting a LOT of sweat equity into the project) it is next to impossible to build a truly satisfying system for $600... Also I totally agree that $6K is a very reasonable price point. My favourite small room stereo costed exactly $6K (when the components were available)...

However, I would expect that if you have $60K available there really is no excuse for not being able to put together an utterly brilliant system... Sure, you might be so rich that you trade out gear for the hell of it, but if you aren't then I would expect you to put together a fantastic system...