I think it's not only that, but if you spend some time looking, you can often get really good deals on used gear. New gear is really expensive for what is at best a very marginal gain and all that translates into even fewer sales still. The target market isn't only people who want great sound, it's people who want great sound, have ample disposable income and live somewhere where they can actually use the gear to enjoy it.
True. In some sense, consumer digital video and audio tech have reached an end game for living room and home theater viewing of TV and movies. Once you have 4K 10-bit HDR+ with 5.1 (or higher) digital audio there's not much new you need in signal decoding, formatting and distribution. For couch-mode, living room viewing 8K doesn't deliver any perceivable difference (8K can be useful for some desktop PC and head-mounted AR/VR scenarios but those use cases are irrelevant to home theater). Hollywood studios don't seem interested in releasing their precious content in even higher quality or bitrate than UHD Blu-ray discs (4K 10-bit HDR+ 4:2:0 up to ~100 Mbps) and two studio execs I know who bridge tech and content doubt that will ever change. Most content is mastered at 4K 10-bit, some at 6K up to 12-bit and very little at 8K.
The HDMI 2.1 standard already supports 4K 10-bit HDR+ (4:2:2 and even 4:4:4) as well as 12-bit 4:2:2 (via tunneling, a trick which packages 12-bit YCbCr 4:2:2 in an RGB 4:4:4 format). This is already as good (or better) than the quality studios distribute for theatrical digital projection. The only meaningful difference is bitrate but for home users that's constrained by streaming service economics and reliable in-home wifi bandwidth but 25 Mbps in H.265 is already more than enough (theatrical distribution is in the 20 year-old JPEG 2000 compression format, hence needing higher bitrate). So, if you already have a media player and AV receiver that are HDMI 2.1 (48 Gbps) capable (which first appeared in products in 2018), it should be able to handle up to 4K 12-bit HDR+ as ICtCp 4:2:2 which is higher quality than even UHD discs and, I think, the highest practical quality that content for living room viewing will be distributed in in the foreseeable future.
Given all that, it's curious Samsung decided to buy these companies at any price. Are they just rolling up adjacent brands for the low-growth revenue and some marketing synergy or is there a bigger plan?
What also contributes to this, is that there are new (Chinese) players on the market that offer incredible value for audiophiles. Brands like Topping, Fosi Audio and SMSL completely outperform the incumbent brands.
Even then, what Chinese companies are competing in the home theatre AVR space like Marantz/Denon does? The companies I think of from China at most do speaker amps.
Indeed. My custom-built, sound proof, no-window, 150-inch screen, laser projector, 7.2.4 THX-rated speaker, 10 seat, dedicated home theater room is driven by about 80 pounds of dual rack-mounted Denon AVRs. I'm going upstairs now to disable automatic firmware updates before Samsung can start spamming me with ads.
Yeah, I guess Denon should have changed the name of their AVRs (Auvio Video Receivers) to AiVR. That might've added a cool billion dollars to their value :-).
