The cost of hi-end audio: is it worth it?

Having recently actually bought some new (not used, not my own design, and relatively expensive) audio gear, and from 47 Labs no less, the following question has been occupying my thoughts of late:

How much would you pay to not have a component installed in the audio equipment you buy?

The traditional price scheme for audio equipment is [BOM-times-X], where BOM is the cost of the parts used to make it, and X is a multiple to cover fabrication and distribution costs, as well as profit for the various parties involved. My understanding is that for consumer audio "X" is about 4, though companies with strong brand recognition can get away with higher multiples. And do.

The basic problem is this: how much it costs to build and how good it sounds are not the same thing. There is some correlation: a large, high quality transformer is pretty much guaranteed to improve the sound quality, but for the rest, stuffing a pretty box with many cheap parts - or a few expensive parts for that matter - is neither here nor there in terms of what the final result will sound like.

At the end of the day I realized that I am willing to pay someone just as much to not use a part as I'm willing to pay them to use it. That is to say, I place a high value on their experience and judgement when designing the circuit and choosing what parts to use... and what parts not to use. The price I'm willing to pay is completely decoupled from the BOM, and almost entirely set by how highly I rate the designer.

Now, some of you will say, fine: let that person test 10 or 100 different configuration and choose the best part or circuit element, all we need to do is copy the final configuration and we can build the same thing - and obtain the same result - for a fraction of what they are asking. This is strictly doable, distasteful as it might seem, and indeed what we did with the 47 Labs Gaincard and the Gainclone amplifiers. It helped that the circuit was so simple, and essentially the datasheet recommended configuration, but still... reverse engineer is what we did, no way to sugar-coat it.

Even as improvements were made, though, the copy is never guaranteed to be 100% as good as the original. There is a certain peace of mind that comes with spending the money to get carefully optimized and tuned bit of audio gear from the original designer, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing that in doing so the person who made the effort is rewarded appropriately.