And that point is not to be taken lightly. The CLS speakers were first manufactured in 1985 -- that's twenty-five years ago, a quarter of a century. There is no guarantee they will continue to support these models, as they have made clear. So if they do, I don't think it is unreasonable to charge a good markup on the cost of the panels to make it worth their hassle. The older the speaker, the more markup I would consider to be reasonable.
No, you are taking someone else's reasoning in an out-of-context example and trying to apply it to my situation. First of all, JBeede was the one who said 30% would be a reasonable cost to him. I made no comment on whether that was a reasonable percentage in my own mind. I simply showed him that if he used inflation-adjusted numbers, that he was paying 30% of the original cost of his speakers in today's dollars. My point being that you can't expect ML to charge prices based on 1985 numbers as if there had been no inflation in the meantime. That is not reasonable.
Second, his example refers to speakers that are twenty-five years old and a panel type and technology that ML hasn't produced for many years. I would expect a much larger markup on a replacement panel like that than one that is from the current generation of speakers.
To put your example in the proper context of my reasoning: I purchased my Summits new in 2007 for $10,000. If my Summit panels needed replacing in two years (after the warranty runs out), I would expect to pay a lot less for replacement panels than if they needed replacing in 2029. By the time they are twenty-five years old, I might expect to pay $6,000 for a new set of panels (that's 30% of the cost of them new, adjusted for 25 years of inflation). That would not seem unreasonable to me at that time.
I call out people for blindly supporting the company in the face of facts which indicate that support is unwarranted. Likewise, I call out people when the facts show they unfairly criticize ML because of their own unreasonable expectations of what the company should do, as in this case. I don't see that as a double standard. I see it as using facts, reason, and honest analysis to come to your conclusions on a given topic, rather than blind faith or blind skepticism.
The electrostat panel is the primary component of an electrostatic speaker. It is the only speaker driver in a CLS speaker. To pretend that you should be able to get a replacement for it twenty-five years later, for a mere 15% to 30% of the cost of the original speaker, is just absurd in my mind.
Please feel free to point out any flaws in my logic.
