Speakers that are a great value!


I’ve been researching off the shelf speaker drivers quit a bit lately and smaller speaker companies as well.  I’ve been finding that companies like Fritz, Salk and Tekton offer incredibly well priced products.  I’m finding that with certain models, there really only appears to be small profit margin.  I understand that when you buy large quantities of drivers, you can get a small discount but still.

For instance, I’m seeing speakers that sell for $2000 might have $700 worth of drivers in them.  When you add in $100-$200 worth of crossovers, $100-$200 in cabinets, $50 for miscellaneous components like binding posts, damping material, wiring, solder or connectors you come up to around $1200 worth of raw components. Now add in labor to construct the boxes, possibly put veneer on them, solder and put together crossovers, install drivers and then ship the speakers, the value is really quite good.  I haven’t even talked about obtaining the woodworking tools to do such a product, rent on a building, utilities on that building and the labor costs if you have any employees. 

My point to all this is to open a discussion and to help people understand that there may only be a $400 profit margin on a $2000 pair of speakers.  I think that these are an exceptional value at full asking price and that should be taken into consideration when thinking about buying speakers from these manufacturers.  
I sometimes hear that these speakers are overpriced and that the value is not good and I would tend to strongly disagree!  
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+1 Erik, agreed!

with this broken leg, I have had a lot of time on my hands (no pun intended) and have been listening to music quite a bit; I’ve also been researching speakers obsessively.  
Something I found that I thought was pretty crazy is that the drivers in the Salk WOW1 cost a total of $702 and the speakers sell for $1295 in a satin finish.  That is nuts!


Seas W12- $225.20 each
Hiquphon OW1 - $252 a pair
Interesting that the name WOW1 is a combination of the “W” seas driver and the “OW1” of the tweeter!  
And to add to Eriks post, the series crossovers that Fritz uses are awesome.  They tie the drivers together in a totally cohesive way and the crossover point is just not audible to me at all.  I haven’t seen any other speaker use No Rez to damp the Enclosure (I’m sure other designers use it, I just haven’t seen it yet).  No Rez is about 4-5 times more expensive than the polyfill that I see in most speakers.
Bache Audio. My Tribeca’s cost me slightly less than my Audio Physic Tempo Plus speakers and they are far better in terms of coherency, holographic presentation, and that they sound wonderful with all genres. I demoed speakers costing twice as much that didn’t come close. 
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What you say is true BUT you can also argue that companies like Dynaudio & Dali’s speakers are a BETTER value because they are COMPLETELY IN HOUSE constructed in Denmark & NO disrespect to Fritz(who’s speakers I have owned)but cabinet & finish is several levels ahead of his in the same $ range...