small companies making today's best products

Most brands in high-end two-channel audio are made by one to four-man outfits who often work out of their garages or basements after they get home from their day jobs. There are very few that sell $1 million in product a year. They may have a tech or two assembling gear and helping with repairs. Many hire consultants on a per-project (per-product) basis to design much of their gear. Some of the speaker companies are "real companies", like B&W and Focal. Wilson is a real company (albeit a small one). But most of these brands are basically one guy. This is especially true for cable companies - Transparent, Kimber and Cardas make their own products, but most of the others are a guy designing on his computer and outsourcing production to companies like Belden.

And that's perfectly fine - there is no correlation between size and level of service. "VAC" is Kevin Hayes and Brent, with Kevin's mother answering the phone when he's out - they make great gear and give the best service I've seen.

"i think those middle/large companies offer the best of innovation and technological superiority"
I could not disagree more with the above statement. I think the small guys can keep costs down by removing the distributor and dealer and to make a blanket statement that the larger companies are somehow more technically superior and more innovative is naive. Costs dictate the vast majority of the amount of superiority and innovation in larger companies you will ever see come to market.
Some of the small companies have as noted by posters on this site have better service and reliability than alot of the big guys.
If it sounds good , is built well , is reliable with good service who cares what the label says or if they dont have a huge name that you pay for with every purchase.
Cheers

Elizabeth, I think that your statement borders on being an insult. It is also a complete bullshit. Maybe you got wired to music a little too much. Something to consider..

Mrtennis, thanks for taking note of the sound quality of (at least some) small companies.

We trade off economies of scale for the economy of direct marketing, and hope that we can build a better-enough mousetrap to generate some word-of-mouth to make up for our relative lack of advertising. The internet makes this feasible; it was much harder yesteryear because word-of-mouth didn't reach nearly as far. The price of entry into the market has come down.

But, this still doesn't answer the question of "why" a small company can build a product that excels in sound quality. My guess would be, in a small audio company, product development gets a lot of free "off the clock" engineering hours from its owner that would have to be paid for in a big company if done by an engineering department. This is true of small companies both with and without dealer networks... and, may be true of some big companies as well (I bet Jim Winey put in his fair share of off-the-clock R&D before he hit it out of the ballpark).

Duke
small company

Regarding the "technical superiority and innovation" of mid to large size companies, I'm not too convinced of that. There's not too much innovation going on in circuit design, most aspects of that part of the equation are pretty well established. Class D amplification and digital audio servers (and related products) are the only things that come to mind in the "innovation" realm of late. Larger companies have led the way in those areas I'd agree. With established products like amps, preamps, analog gear, etc., there are many smaller companies that give up nothing but the advantages of economy of scale in manufacturing to the big names Elizabeth mentions. One thing I do consider sometimes is whether a company is going to be around to provide service of replacement parts if needed. In that regard, bigger might be better. Seeing that digital players have been trouble prone in my experience, company longevity and staying power were factors in my decision to purchase a Marantz SACD player.