Hifi Stuff that has changed in the last 40 years:
1. The UK has become a backwater of ignorance and penny-pinching: you may be different, you will undoubtedly think you're different, but the wider buying public is united in wanting something-for-nothing, and doesn't give a damn about Quality, only cheapness and poseur-bait branding.
2. Most of the hifi industry is - directly or indirectly - Chinese now: Chinese owned, Chinese made, Chinese designed, intended primarily for Chinese markets, which are, after-all, by far the biggest and growing all the time. This is true of all luxury goods. All Things, really...
3. The UK is a dumping-ground for B-stock and bad designs: no-one in the industry will admit it - for blindingly-obvious reasons - but it was before Brexit, and now that internal market prices are spiralling due to scarcity of imports and exporters know we have less legislative protection than before, it is even more so. Karmic adjustment: we used to be the ones doing it to our export markets - back when we had export markets...
4. Top Trumps: people buy on numbers they don't understand and which don't matter - the bigger the number, the better The Thing. Tw@s!
5. Online Retail = the death of the demo - people choose a price segment they feel comfortable with, and then buy on looks - cos that's what mummy... er... sorry... wifey will Let them have...
6. Unfixable: popular forum theme - and rightly so - and no doubt mentioned already but I can't be arsed to read the whole thread; SMD is a curse upon mankind, sh*t-on-a-chip even more so. "Meh, just bin it and buy a new one, consumerist drones!"
7. Music as Social Anaesthesia: the big consumers of music are not noddy old gits like us with our 1950s sensibilities - it's people with tinny earplugs trying to cope with the horror and squalor of public transport and the zombie-apocalypse of plague infested meat-roadblocks shuffling around them... This extends somewhat into the predominance of streaming - music has become an increasingly anonymised commodity, we just don't engage with it like we did: 100% brain-off numbness seems to be the aspiration now.
What's really sad is that streaming should have given artists themselves more control and a greater share of the profits, but as usual exploitative mega-corps have gained the upper hand and are cash-raping the music industry to death. Some things never change, eh?
8. Performance: nah, just kidding! Since the demise of leaky PIO caps and drifty carbon comp resistors at the end of the 60s, the tweaks to actual performance have been minor. We all know it in our heart-of-hearts, but we are not here to be objective, we are here to share in the rosy glow of a shared belief system. Long may it continue! Not even being sarky. There's nothing wrong with placebos when they do the job.
