ultimately to be successful selling luxury goods the key is to have a firm grasp on the psychology of your customer.
if you start out making good products expecting somebody to appreciate the quality you will fail.
you must start out with the absurdity of customer's desires and reverse engineer them. the new Bugatti Tourbillon is a perfect example of how to do it right. as a youtube commenter put it " a grotesque car for grotesque people " ... EXACTLY RIGHT !
although i am actually very good at this ( analyzing the psychology of degenerates ) i don't have any desire to cater to them.
so for Bugatti Tourbillon they put in 16 cylinder engine ( that makes no more power than turbo V8 in the new corvette ) just because they wanted to be the only car with 16 cylinders. the customers loved it. the customer is dumb and while i can reverse engineer their stupidity i don't want to.
in Audio if you want to reverse engineer the stupidity of customer you use vinyl turntables, vacuum tube amps, silver cables, alnico magnets and exotic diaphragm materials like Synthetic Diamond. some of these things ( silver cables ) have no effect on sound. others make it worse. Diamond tweeters are good but the difference versus aluminum ones is entirely outside of audible spectrum unless you're a teenager ( which all the 60 year olds buying those speakers think they are ).
the sad reality is the more you learn about Audio the more you understand that what makes for a better speaker and what people actually want are the exact opposite things.
people want something that sounds impressive when they describe it to people who will never actually hear the speakers, for example " my speakers have tweeters made out of diamond ! "
on other hand nobody can explain that digital sound processing in their speakers so it can't be a selling point, even though that's where the sound quality actually comes from.
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but probably the biggest reason this won't work as a business is because only poor people listen to music at home
middle class people go to concerts
and rich people hang out with artists in the studio
what i have come to realize is that so-called "high end audio" is just fancy furniture.
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but that's not the disturbing realization
the disturbing realization is you can't make money by studying existing technology
you can only make money by creating new technology
in other words:
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
i love to learn but it doesn't pay to learn ( unless you're a dentist ).
Audio is a very old field. You can't make money in it because of that. only innovation happening is in software, DSP and high frequency switching amplifiers and to a lesser extent compression drivers and subwoofers. For the most part everything has been studied to death before i was even born.
even Artificial Intelligence is an old field by now, but there is still room for growth in AI at least.
to make money you have to look forward, not study the past.
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Related to this was a quote I heard from some local people who did case studies of entrepreneurs in the area. They described entrepreneurs as "the opposite of Renaissance Men" and "overspecialized". They were obsessed with ideas and often had little outside of their field in which they were innovators. Many began working on their niche at a young age. They are described as "not fun at parties" and always thinking/strategizing on improvement within their specialty. Sometimes they were able to imagine markets that didn't yet exist and then will them into existence through persistent effort.
Interesting perspective and important for people like those in our circle who are both historians and Renaissance Men to think on. I love the quest for knowledge but I agree there's not much money in it, unless the quest updates your salable skills (something I did in a very hit or miss way this past year). I think there is hope for generalists to become entrepreneurial, actually, but it involves fighting one's natural tendencies and developing a more intense focus.
it's possible that obsessive people are simply more common than renaissance men like Elon Musk
