Martin,
I realize this is going astray, and board mods won't take me to task too much, but in my recent tours of all the pawn shops in the vicinity of Ft. Hood, Texas, looking for the increasingly elusive(at least to me) Soundcraftsmen A5002, I talked to a lady at one shop, and she said something interesting. She'd been in the business for a long time, and said "Once we pulled the bulk of the troops out of Europe, we stopped getting so much of the audio stuff, probably trickling down in terms of serious audiophile gear by the mid-nineties."
I found that interesting, because any number of guys like me bought huge numbers of pretty decent gear at discount prices, mostly, in our post and base exchanges. Most of us eventually sold off some of it, or like so many, after arriving back in the states, virtually all of it.
But I suggested to the lady one thing, in addition to what she cited, that may have been a factor. You're looking at it. Right now.
I signed on with Prodigy for the first time in '92, and compuserve in '94, and "the real internet" in 1995.
Fits the timeframe, doesn't it? And oh, yeah, what was the first upgrade people rushed to shove into their store-bought $2000 386s? That's right: SOUNDBLASTER!!
Those young, single GIs who still go to Europe and Korea and all over the globe don't buy audio equipment much anymore, maybe some, but not like pre-1990. Most of them buy PCs and all the gadgets to go with them, and yeah, they do most of their music in digital format.
It's funny, as I was beginning the massive chore of re-assembling the beast of 2 decades gone by, I was bidding on an item on Ebay, a KLH TNE (transient noise eliminator-originally designed and manufactured by [Dick] Burwen Laboratories) and she asked me what it was for. I explained the basic principle on which it operated, and the use for which I expect to [again] use it, and she asked me a simple, poignant question(out of the mouth of a 17yo babe): "Why not just buy the CD?" I looked at her for a moment, and then I looked back as I checked the last-minute status of my bid(I won the auction), and all I could come up with is: "Well, I still have most of my old LP collection and I'd like to be able to listen to them again without buying them on CD, and besides, some of them probably aren't even available on CD."
She says: "Just download them... Duh..."
I suddenly felt very old with my TNE, my DNF, by Types 1 and 2 DBX boxes, my Dbx range expanders and my Sansui P-L95R. Old, and tired.
I had my moment a few days later, after the Amp arrived, and I got the steal on the Polk SDA-2Bs. I had purchased a CD, corny I know, but it was a favorite of the guy who introduced me to Soundcraftsmen amps, and I wanted to play it in his honor, I think a song that was representative in his mind of a sweetheart back home. "Your Song" by Elton John
Now the secret to this is, of course, that I knew that this CD had been originally recorded to tape, so there was likely to be tape noise in the quiet segments of the recording. So I queue it up, and played it, Burwen DNF OUT, and said to her: "Watcha think?" She says "EEEWWW..." "No darlin', not the song, particularly, but the sound of it." "It's nice, I guess." "Okay, close your eyes, and listen closely." So at this point, I put in the DNF and adjusted it from memory, until the two lights, one red and one green, essentially alternated. She said, eyes snapping open: "What did you do? It got better, less ssssssssssssssssssss in it." I explained it to her, and I said: "See, this is why all the stuff."
A little redemption, anyways...
So the point of my story, I suppose, is that it's easy for them. Too darned easy. They get on the ol' PC, any old PC will do, pretty much, and they download audacity and all the free filters and so on they can find, and they can do all the effects, and changes to sound that they want, without buying a single piece of hardware, although better speakers still help.
See what I mean? I think in the last 20 years, our population thinned quite a bit. R/C airplanes, as a hobby, is seeing sort of the same thing. They can fly on the simulator on their PC without investing nickel-the-first in a glow-fuel engine. They don't have to fool with any of that to get roughly the same experience, minus the stink of castor oil. And crashes cost nothing.
With fewer people to whom they can cater, the market is going to play that nasty, cruel cut: As something, anything, becomes more or less obsolete except to a few diehards unwilling to change, what happens to the price?
Oh, sure, for a time, it goes down, down, down, but for the still useful however long-ago eclipsed technologies, they get pricey. They completely depart the realm of something akin to necessity, or even mass-market desire, and become the province of the few. Those businesses predicated on catering to that crowd will have to do something different. It's a shrinking pie. To justify production, prices will have to go up.
And so, in high end audio, apparently, they have, and it has largely crowded out the mid-level stuff. My Soundcraftsmen amp, for instance. I now own a collection of gear, each piece of which has a single thing in common, aside from general vintage: Every piece was purchased used. (Except cabling)
The closest I have to something that looks totally mint, like it emerged from the box yesterday, is my tuner, also a soundcraftsmen. Note that a tuner is frequently the least-used part of any system. Most of us listen to recorded music most of the time. We don't listen to the radio unless we're in the car, and even there, we can toss in a CD or plug in the MP3 player or whatever.
And what became of Soundcraftsmen? Oh, they were bought out by MTX that mostly manufactures CAR stereo equipment.
See my point?
Yes, I looked at the link somebody else provided, and you do nice, really nice work. Yes, I'd love to audition some of them, out of the sheer joy of discovery. But we here seem to be a dwindling antiquity, don't we?
Of course, I'm that way with PCs too, except that I've stayed up to date out of the necessity of earning a living. The first one with which I plinked was a TRS-80 with 64k of RAM and an audio-cassette recorder as its only storage device. It was a huge thing when we upgraded to 5-1/4 floppies. That was around 1980.
I'd like to ask you this, however, and it's completely up to you, but I always thought it would be downright awesome to build my own speakers. Thing is, I can operate a soldering iron pretty well, and I can work my way around a circuit board, but designing circuits is something out of my league. I plinked with some radio shack kit stuff as a teen, apparently like so many here, but I have little memory of anything specific, or at least much less than I wish I had retained. So here's the thing: I know next to nil about crossover designs. I'm a pretty fair carpenter, and welder, and mechanic, and I have done all sorts of wiring. I build fairly sophisticated remote control airplanes.
I want to build some speakers. Not just any old box with drivers... I want to build something massive and awesome. Something smooth and warm. Something capable of power and finesse. Something on par with the SDA SRSs I once, however briefly, possessed.
Is that possible? Can a speaker be designed that sounds that good, or better, and be within range of the average DIY-guy? I don't know... I'm so out of touch with modern technology... You see what my points of reference happen to be.
BTW, while I now reside in Texas, I was born in Buffalo, NY, and my father's family hails from the Plattsburgh and Chazy vicinity up near Lake Champlain.
It's been nice chewing the fat with you. I hope you post more often, and lurk less. Looks like you have a great deal to teach, and I'm an eager student.
Thanks!
Mark
Looking forward to your posts. 
