2. speakers
  3. 148038-20253

Pulsars and the Mythical Armchair Speaker Maker

There’s another thread going about Joseph Audio Pulsar speakers which I did not want to derail, but it is showing up some common logical fallacies and dead ends I wanted to talk about.


As anyone who has read my posts knows, I’m a huge proponent of DIY for speakers and cables especially. Not that I think you should only go with DIY but because the more audiophiles who can build their own we have in the community the less snake oil gets spread around as fact and there’s less worshipping of the price tag as the almighty determiner of speaker performance.


The myth I want to talk about is kind of related. It is the idea that we should value speakers based purely on driver cost. JA’s Pulsars suffer from this because they seem to use off the shelf components, in very nice cabinets, with perfectly executed crossovers. The thing that I don’t understand are buyers who look at driver cost, and say "well, these speakers should cost no more than x amount, so I’m not buying them... "


I call hogwash. Speakers are more than a collection of parts. They are curated components brought together by a designer and manufacturer. Those same people who are likely to engage in this behavior:

  • Can’t actually design a speaker themselves
  • Would NEVER build a DIY speaker even as a complete kit because it doesn’t have a brand, nor would they buy an assembled DIY speaker.
  • Would probably go with a speaker with in-house drivers which have an even higher markup
  • May not have very good ears anyway


My point is, knowing the price of the parts does not make you at all qualified to judge what the final price should be. That is, fairly, in the hands of the market, and it doesn’t actually make you a better listener or more informed buyer. I would argue you end up buying speakers for brands with even more of a markup and more likely to have questionable performance.


It’s perfectly reasonable for a manufacturer to charge for parts, and skill. So, yes, talking tech and drivers and crossover components is always fun, but please stop evaluating the price of finished goods until you’ve attempted at least designing one pair yourself.

And again, DIY is a lot of fun, and if you want to go that way, you should, but let’s not denigrate high value, high quality manufacturers and delers by reducing them to part assemblers any more than you'd judge a restaurant based on the cost per pound of chicken.


Thank you,

E
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
16,051 posts
 
I’ve made the same financial points before.


The same people think that a restaurant can stay in business by selling meals for the cost of the raw ingredients.


If you are a pure factory, you can run on a small markup, but no one is. You have salespeople, administrators, warehouses, package designers, shipping costs, and greasing reviewer’s palms to think about.


The basic calculus is that you must sell speakers for 10x the driver cost, at a minimum. If you can get higher you are more likely to stay in business. And again, this presumes all speakers are designed equally well, which let me tell you based on listening, they are not! :D
prof
3,473 posts
 

cheapskates will find a way to rationalize being cheapskates ;-)
even bad rationalizations.
erik_squires OP
16,051 posts
 
And I am among the most frugal, but making my own speakers, and working through the math, I can respect what it takes to be a manufacturer.


And yes, I meant Tyler Acoustics, not Taylor.  Sorry buddy.


Erik
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
kenjit
So why cant you take a mid priced speaker costing say $500 a pair and instead of using drivers that cost $50 a piece, use state of the art drivers costing $300 a piece? that would still only be $250 more per driver which means $1000 more than the basic cost of $500.
It doesnt come to $10,000 does it?
Many of these high end speakers are nothing more than basic mdf cabinets using higher quality drivers.
Even the ones that dont use mdf, are not demonstrably vastly superior to mdf. A cheap speaker uses no brace whereas a more expensive speaker uses a single brace. So for a tiny bit of mdf youre paying thousands of dollars more. Every speaker should be braced. It costs nothing to add a piece of mdf inside the cabinet during assembling.


Spoken like a man. A man that is who has never built a single pair of speakers in his life.

My guess is, you have never even run so much as one piece of MDF through a table saw.

Wait- have you ever even used a table saw?



bill_k
912 posts
 
There are those who rationalize that they can purchase very similar or sometimes identical drivers for a fraction of the price of a speaker at retail and assemble a speaker of similar performance. There is much more to speaker design than the drivers themselves, and even when using advanced software to develop suitable cabinets and crossovers the best designers spend a significant amount of time and resources in listening and then tweaking their final designs which is commonly referred to as voicing. When using a crossover designed by the applicable formulas you will only get a glimpse of a speaker's true potential and it requires experience, technical skill and a bit of engineering 'art' to be able to fine tune a design to capture that last degree of magic that escapes many lesser designs. When purchasing a properly engineered speaker you are not only paying for the raw parts but for the engineering and expertise that has been put into the complete design. Building your own speakers can be a fun and even rewarding venture, but don't kid yourself into thinking that you're ending up with something identical to some of the best engineered speakers on the market by attempting to copy their design.

More to discover