Design a $60,000 Speaker - Start here

Also, sorry should have been more clear:

I've never listened to Tektons. I meant the price/parts ratio is very good.

I'm talking about consumer parts here. JBL/ATC/TAD have what we may consider outrageous priced drivers intended for high power/continuous duty.

Better? I know of at least one mega movie score producer who gave up on his mega speakers because he could only hear them when played loud.

Listening style matters, as does lack of compression in normal use.

Best,


E

@erik_squires     

I don't know about Magico but modifying a mass market driver doesn't sound like engineering but more like tweaking. If a run of special drivers is made for them by the OEM then what happens when they run out - owners are left with no spare parts...no problem on a $500 speaker or $300 lawn mower but not good on something more costly that is meant to last decades.

Vertical integration allows companies to support their products for a lifetime which is a different philosophy and a different target customer. Obviously this  should be important to speaker owners in $10,000+ speaker market as it could be frustrating to find that your beautiful speaker is only good for the landfill after only 5 years and a costly mistake that blew up a couple of drivers....

Vertically integrated companies should have all the tools and equipment in house to make replacement parts long after those who use entirely outsourced manufacturers have long run out of spares. It is a very different philosophy with long term horizons with customers that do not intend to replace their equipment for possibly a lifetime....

Or you could buy some high-quality vintage drivers.  Let's see, a matched pair of Jensen M18 field coil woofers with Western Electric power supplies would be nice, but then that would eat up your entire $60K budget. 

@shadorne

That’s fine, but vertical integration:

- No guarantee of best parts
- No more or less incentive to have spares on hand than driver makers IMHO.

Pros:
- Hides cost and makes comparisons with other makers much harder.
- Increases profit margin for manufacturer.

There are some manufacturers that are vertically integrated I like a lot more than others. As a business owner however, I absolutely would want to be integrated. As a consumer, meh, I am going to build my own anyway. :)

I think that this is very often the goal. If you look at JM Lab / Focal for instance, it started as 3 different companies. A cabinet maker, a driver maker, and a loud speaker manufacturer (either JM Lab or Focal, forgot which was which). All three in close proximity in France. I believe cooperation and alignment allowed this merger to eventually take place.

Their strategist is a brilliant guy who focuses on increasing brand value in the minds of consumers and drives design towards this goal with all his energy, quite successfully.


Best,

E

Oooh, no.

As a manufacturer, I need to sell these speakers for $30k / pair, which means I must spend no more than around $10k to make them, including labor and packaging.

Let’s not even get into top end Copper Foil capacitors!

Of course, my goal is to spend no money at all, and sell you speakers, so I will engage a marketing and sales team to separate the retail price from manufacturing cost as much as possible. That’s where the profit lives.

Best,

E