sqlsavior
Lunatic Member
Inflation calculators, for a lot of reasons, just don't work for consumer electronics. For example in '76 I bought a Yamaha CR-600, B&O Beovox M-70 Speakers, B&O Beogram 1900 turntable and a pair of Yamaha HP-1 headphones. At $2500 this was an expensive system, not available through the usual deeply discounted mass-market outlets of the day. There's no way that system would be worth anywhere near $11,000 in 2017 dollars. The headphones are probably the closest. $200 for TOTL orthodynamic headphones converts to $900 which today gets you very good, if not TOTL, ortho's today
The inflation calculators certainly don't work for computer memory. 4K of DRAM cost $275 in 1975. Putting in 4G of DRAM (a million times the quantity) would have cost $275 million of 1975 dollars, (over a cool $billion today) although I assume you could get a volume discount...
They don't work for college tuition, either. It's about 2.5 times as expensive as it was then in constant dollars. Cars are twice as much now. Coffee is about the same. For the stereo you described, I'd say a $3K turntable + $3K speakers + a $2K amp + a $1K disc player (to replace the tuner) + a $1K pair of headphones is somewhat near $11K...