Which is fine in so far as it goes. Both propositions, properly applied, make perfect sense. The problem comes in the massive assumption seen in both the examples above, that cost and quality are somehow equivalent, a leap of faith so enormous as to make people dumping entire record collections as soon as CD arrived seem almost sensible…
“Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” – Warren Buffett
There are two, huge problems with the notion of cost/quality equivalence. Not only are qualitative improvements non-linear with cost, they are not comparable across different products employing different materials and production techniques even if they are aimed at achieving the same goals, let alone if their goals are different.
Look at it this way: try to produce a record player, a CD player and an amp, each of equivalent quality. Do you think the cost will be the same? Now try the same exercise but with three 100Watt amplifiers: one Class AB, one Class D and one running tubes. Leaving aside the whole issue of tube Watts versus solid-state Watts, it’s pretty obvious that costs are going to differ – and not just with circuit topology. Where and how a product is built and in what numbers has a profound affect on its final price. One amplifier might be mass produced on automated lines with flow-soldered boards and casework auto-machined by the thousand. Another might be painstakingly hand-built, one at a time. The means of production does not translate directly to the issue of quality: after all, building something by hand comes at the cost of unit-to-unit consistency and is utterly dependent on the skill of the artisan producer – and that definitely isn’t a given!
The myth of a linear cost/quality relationship…
The point here is that, no matter how something is built, or where, each approach has its own distinct cost structures and qualitative return on investment. There is no nice, neat, ruler straight gradient to map the cost/quality returns. Instead, there’s a profile that looks more like a Pyrenean col, with steep sections, false flats, plateaus and yes, dips too. There are plenty of product lines where cheaper models outperform the more expensive ones. There are some where the cheapest product a company makes is also its most musically satisfying. Simply spending money really doesn’t guarantee improved performance, whether it’s spent on design and build or system ‘upgrades’.
But perhaps the most telling example of relative cost versus quality is when you compare source components for different media. Your source, whatever it might be, has a fundamental impact on the overall musical coherence of your system. Remember – garbage in, garbage out. Now ask yourself how much it costs to buy a musically satisfying and genuinely coherent CD player? Or streaming solution? Yet, even a surprisingly modest record player like a Rega P3, installed and set up with the requisite care, can be relied on to produce really engaging, entertaining and yes, musically coherent results – for considerably less than a four-figure price tag. Comparable performance from a CD player? Between five and ten times that price. From a streaming rig? Good luck with that!
