The Economy.. will hi end audio mfgs lower prices?

If you can afford to buy $10k preamps and $30k amps, you probably aren't working for the State of California, and job security isn't one of your top concerns.

If you can (could) afford 10k pre-amps and 30k amps you may have worked in the finance/mortgage/RE industry and are currently unemployed.

Fixed that for you. ;^)

"There is a lot of disinformation out there."

Amen brother!

I agree Ellery. Ther have been over 10,000 pharmaceutical
reps for all of the "big pharma" companies laid off
in the last year alone. There "were" quite a few car salesman making big bucks on those $50,000 SUV's people
cannot make their payments on now. This is a different kind of economic downturn vs. the 1930's and even the early 1980's. There are many $100K-150K jobs that have been lost over the last year that will never be replaced.
IBM, Microsoft, Sony and even Starbucks. A General Manager
in a good Starbuck's store made a good living.

These are the people buying and upgrading their
equipment and keeping the economy going.
How would you like to have two kids in college and
lose your $100k a year job? My local high end
dealer markets Sony and Pioneer televisions.
Only the better Sony televisions. He is the oldest
Sony dealer in our part of the state. Made a killing
on Pioneer plasma tv. If someone told me two years ago both of those lines could be in trouble, anyone on this site would have called them nuts.

Again the basic Law of Economics.

Plenty of supply.....low demand.

Good for us audiophiles though!

WOW, I did not know we had so many economist types here. I'll use a rather straight forward terminology. It's called "cleaning the pipes". If cars and houses do not start to significantly sell in the next 6 months, the system will start to clean out all the weak businesses, and I would assume a somewhat luxury hobby market as audio will suffer just as all other business. It is just a matter of who.

" the system will start to clean out all the weak businesses"

Unfortunately perhaps not until after the execs are done funneling off all the bailout money being handed to them.