The graf Gonk quoted is the key, of course. People who are satisfied with what they find in big box stores don't hear, see the difference between those products and higher-end equipment, or the differences don't matter to them. As I have said here before, I ventured into this world about 8 years ago when I needed to replace my 25-year-old living room 2-channel system consisting of an Altec Lansing 714 receiver,m a pair of ADC 303ax bookshelf speakers, and an Onkyo cassette player. Those speakers still sound pretty good, although the receiver needs serious work.

I listened to a lot of integrated amps, cd players and speakers from the likes of Rotel, Classe, McIntosh, Arcam, Dynaudio, Mirage, B&W and Canton, as well as what Best Buy had to offer. It was very hard work, months of enjoyable research, to get a system that sounded really good.

A few years ago, when I started building my HT system I started over, although I planned to use my B&W speakers as the mains and to add used matching B&W surrounds and center speakers. The price of my 1070 came in way below what it would have cost for a comparable ht receiver. My wife really couldn't understand why I waited for the BDP-83 to come out when we could have bought another BD player for less. But she was the one who really liked the Classe CDP .3 CD player I bought used for the living room.

The bottom line, I think, is that most people are perfectly happy with what they see and try to listen to over the din in a big box store. They see no difference between the 60 inch LCD TV Best Buy sells for under $1,200 and a 46 inch LED TV that costs twice as much. They will never be convinced to spend more for better quality, better sound and a better picture. There really is no reason to feel bad that they can't understand why we prefer equipment from Outlaw, Oppo, Hsu, ....