First off Chad's releases are always top shelf sonically, so you are getting a premium product to start. His base price for single disc SACD Hybrids is usually right around $30. I think the biggest driver of this is that he does relatively small production runs (as compared to the millions of units the the big labels run for popular albums, so his fixed cost of getting started (Obtaining the source material, mastering the release, setting up the artwork, etc has to be spread much more thickly across the small production runs. And because to the small runs the unit costs of producing the discs themselves id higher as he never gets any large economies of scale in the manufacturing end. But while the prices are higher than mass market CDs, the are not really out of line for premium audiophile releases from other sources. The $30 range seems to be a pretty standard price for standard audiophile software regardless of the format LPs, SACDs, gold CDs all seem to hover around that price. Of cousre there are"premium " audiophile products out there like 2 LP 45 RPM sets and some of the new one step LPS that demand higher prices and the new generation of reel to reel releases that are way higher in price, but that is due to the cost of tape and the labor involved in producing them with realtime duplication.)
An unfortunate side effect of these small production runs is that often a run is almost sold out before it is "discovered" by the audio press which causes large competition for the remaining unit , which of course drives up the price. If you look at the titles that you see on his web site that are commanding the $50 and $60 prices I would guess that they are all either out of print or damn close to it.
