A parallel thread to How much have you spent buying cars.
I don’t think this has been asked before, so, like the car thread, how much approx in total over your hifi career have you spent also indicating year of starting out?
As with the car thread, please initially give total actual outlay not corrected for inflation, and show any recovered from sales. However, if you are also able to estimate same corrected for inflation that would be interesting additional information, but of course can be time consuming to calculate hence only optional.
In my case, from 1969, I reckon I’ve spent approaching £40k, and certainly not more than £50k which is interesting as that top end is about the current new value of my present system, despite being the culmination of over five decades of progression. The lower figure is also interesting in being very similar to my expenditure on cars, though hifi has been my primary hobby - fortunately decent hifi being cheaper than decent cars!
My recovery from sales is a little less clear, one item not counting as it was traded in part exchange and so included in above figure. I guess only about £2.5k, though I have about £7k’s worth still to sell.
I shall try to tot up inflation corrected expenditure some time, though given that hifi seems to have suffered exponential inflation I’m not sure how much difference it will make.
Given that we’re all anonymous here, or most of us are, are people likely to resist identifying their overall spend over time? It’s nowhere near as risky as revealing existing kit on the pics pages or in profiles, as it says nothing about what you actually have now.
I did it the much more programmatic way. I pulled out all my receipts, corrected for inflation and currency (FOREX) rates . . . then I built a depreciation table as well as a table comparing changes to msrp/rrp to the overall inflation rates in both the UK and the USA.
I have the spreadsheet, covering 3 systems. The initial cost is a lot/too much. Allowing for resale, given most was bought second hand, is much more palatable. And cost per year is very reasonable, around 5% of the household budget, very reasonable for a single hobby and quality systems.
I paid NZ$15k for a new 555dr power supply 7 years ago, recently selling it for NZ$7k. I think the enjoyment I got out of it powering my 272 was easily worth the NZ$1000 per year.
The 272 cost me NZ$7500 8 years ago and I got NZ$10,000 back for it as a trade-in on a Linn Klimax DSM recently so that was pretty good.
Overall I would have spent over NZ$100 k since 1990 selling most items at around 40% of what I paid for them. An expensive hobby, similar to what I have spent on cars in that time.
I have a spreadsheet covering the total cost of my current systems, not the entire duration of my hifi career. I have lost track on the total expenditure and funds recovered from sales since the day I first started which was more than 30 years ago!
The total cost spent on the current hifi is approximately £60k.
The current listening cost for me is ~ 3€/h (equipment) + ~ 1€/h (music) ≈ 4€/h (total). If I compare that to e.g. the standard movie experience which currently here is about 10€/h it does not seem too expensive.
However, if the total amount of my spending on hifi were mentioned to any of my friends or relatives most of them would roll their eyes and think that it’s madness. Still I assume my system is at the lower end of the spectrum in these forums.
I find this trade in business modell interesting. It’s not that they gave you 10 for the 272. You got a price cut on the DSM which has huge margins as many products in the higher price range The value of the 272 is what it is and what they will sell it for which I guess is less then 7500.
But it feels like they paid you a lot more than the market would and that’s when they got you in their claws
The value of the 272 is what it is and what they will sell it for which I guess is less then 7500.