These seem a bit pricey $$$

What really astounds me is I receive real estate listings of homes in my area every day and after viewing about 400 homes, I have yet to see two speakers sitting in any room of a house.  They show pictures of expensive entertainment furniture with wide screen TV and no surround speakers.  Are people really satisfied with spending $5,000 or more on entertainment furniture and listening to TV speakers?  This seems strange to me.

No wonder why this industry is doing so poorly.  Who is buying stereo gear after looking at all of these listings?  People living in these homes priced $600,000 to $1.3 million could certainly afford to purchase a sound system.  People must be allergic to music!

In the meantime, stereo equipment manufactures do nothing to advertise their equipment and this entertainment platform.  Where are the direct mail pieces, where are the TV commercials.  Today, they can obtain very sophisticated mailing lists to narrow down their audience.  Once they get traction, they can expand their audience.  I wonder if any of them are doing any advertising other than stereo publications?  People subscribing to stereo publications already have interest.  However, what about those who are not aware of this entertainment platform?  Based on viewing over 400 homes, the numbers do not look good.

@eganmedia:  "Buyers like expensive equipment. An underpriced pair of speakers may well outperform a more expensive pair and suffer for it in the marketplace."  
@rksweet: "People spend hundreds of dollars on a bottle of wine."

Perception rules.  Back in the late 80s a company called PT Aqua Golden Mississippi decided to enter the bottled water market in Indonesia with a strategy to undercut the competition with the lowest price--after a year they had nearly zero market share.  They re-grouped, re-packaged and came out with the highest-priced bottled water and have never looked back--still #1 in market share!

They first listen to it.... Then decide the price. If it sounds great? Then the price can go way up. Some buyers assume that higher price means better sound.

Not all designers work that way. But, some do. Material wise it probably does not warrant the price. It can be marketing and greed in some cases.

I love Steve's reviews but these are a bit over the top for me anyway.  I can buy a lot of quality stereo gear for $12,000.  I trust my ears.

More than half the cost of a commercial loudspeaker is marketing costs. You’re generally not paying wholesale price from the manufacturer. If you’re buying from a local audio shop, list price is a 40% markup from what they pay for it, and they’re often not getting it from the manufacturer, but from the distributor, who is also representing other manufacturers as well. So you’re paying the distributor’s markup. This means that the price you’re paying is at least 2 times what the manufacturer is charging and probably a bit more than that.

The manufacturer has to charge at least 2 times their cost because they’re in business to make a profit. Yep. If they don’t make a profit, they don’t stay in business. So this means that the cost to build a loudspeaker is about 1/4 of what you’re paying.

There are any number of excellent loudspeaker kits available. The engineering has already been done. The magic is there for the taking. The comparison I love to show is the Joseph Audio PERSPECTIVE2 Graphene, which retails for about $12,000, to the SEAS Thor kit, available from Madisound for $1,993. Depending on how you do the project, you can spend another $400 to $1000 on building them.

Even if you don’t see yourself as a woodworker, a loudspeaker is a very easy cabinet to make up. Any local cabinet maker can knock them out for a reasonable amount. The hardest part of making any loudspeaker is making it look good. You can have the cabinet maker put a veneer and nice finish, or you could take the cabinets to an auto body paint shop, like this loudspeaker:

http://russbutton.com/Russ/audio/imgs/loudspeaker_auto_paint_job.jpg

and they could come out looking incredible.

And if you’re thinking about dropping $12k on a loudspeaker, then you’d do yourself very well to think about this Thor kit.