Those SS-m7s are a good example of the strangeness of the audio market. When they launched they were declared as sonic competitors to Wilsons, for comparative peanuts as far as price. Sony was trying to break into the audiophile market in the US, yet again, and it must have thought that it behaved as a traditional market where people weight performance vs price, and thought they could move the bar by selling near-equal performance for much lower price. Instead, nobody took them seriously because A: they said "Sony" and B: they were too inexpensive to be good in the minds of the US audiophile, where price equates to performance. It didn't help that soon after, they ended up discounted at Sony Style stores. Apparently the Chicago store had many for about 1/2 price way back when....the pair I had came from all of that, though I wasn't the first owner.
Then later they came back with a variation of the larger SS-m9, the SS-m9ed, that was something like $10,000...and apparently to many listeners some of the finest speakers they'd ever heard. But how do you sell a $10,000 speaker that looks like a much cheaper speaker you sold a few years ago? So that didn't seem to do well, either.
Sony recently came out with some nicely reviewed, quite expensive speakers that were also supposedly competitive with speakers costing more. SS-AR1s or something like that. I've never seen a pair outside of audio shows...and still, I don't see the US market taking audiophile gear from "mass market" players seriously, even though those mass market players would have resources far more extensive than most small audiophile companies, if they really were putting their minds towards making serious gear.
