A few thoughts on this - I'm not defending the price points, but if there was true money to be made in this space you'd see more competition in the low and mid tier to drive costs down. I'm no capitalist, but that to be makes enough sense. There has to be some reason you don't see more competition here - it's an easy enough standard to produce on your own. I know what a low-budget intercom looks like (Pi) but I don't even know what a mid-tier mid-featured Analog Partyline
system would look like.
First - The
current lineup of 700 Series products has actually innovated quite a
bit over the prior generations. They sound a ton better than other generations, and because they are all micro-controlled you can gang
power supplies together to expand your
system as opposed to just tossing your old
PSU when you hit capacity and getting a larger more robust
PSU. They trimmed the product lineup and added features in (most notably all 2
channel belt packs now have program, there is no special model of 2-channel pack with program). Once you start popping them open you'll see they have a lot of features hidden behind DIP switches that do an awful lot if you're an advanced user and need features.
Second - On inflexibility, Analog partyline is inherently inflexible and as productions grow I'm always itching for a 5
channel remote station, once folks have touched IP they don't want to go back to Analog or have the same demands they had of Analog. That being said you can do a lot with a Switchboard Station or by simply using a 1
channel PSU and a number of Pin 3 drops into splitters to create more channels. You can work around some of the limitations.
Finally - On IP Intercom. Once you're working at a large enough scale, IP almost makes sense financially compared to Analog. I understand I work on different scales than most, but once you're looking at signal distribution on a large musical for 12 channels of Intercom across 5 departments on a huge show the amount you're spending in copper for analog distribution almost competes on price with Helixnet. You really only have 2 major players in the IP Space right now - you have Helixnet and you have Riedel Artist. You can get a ton more Helixnet for the price of Riedel, however Riedel is a ton more flexible and robust. If there were other players you'd see downward pressure on pricing, but right now you have 2 and one is the high-end player and one is the budget player (never thought I'd say Clearcom is a budget option ever).