Speaker manufacturers or box manufacturers with off the shelf drivers?

Lets bad rap the world since were home an board.

It's mostly about economy of scale and available resources. Most speakers companies are small compared to main steam manufacturing. It's impractical for most speaker companies to build drivers in house especially when considering they use eight to ten unique drivers in their lineup. Furthermore, the skill-set and tool-set are somewhat different. There are people and companies that can do it all but that's rare and usually yields expensive drivers and products. Every manufacturer has vendors. No speakers company makes everything. It's much more expensive building your own drivers, unless you can build and sell many thousands of them, than buying from a vendor.

We are a small speaker company that decided to design, develop and build drivers for our own use. We build our own AMT drivers. It was a major investment in many ways. We went through the process because we wanted something very specific which didn't exist. We have had seven speaker companies (4 well known) contact us about using our AMT drivers. We politely declined because we don't want to be a driver vendor.

As with most things, it's more about good design and implementation than the actual parts. Aluminum, wood, MDF, carbon, carbon fiber, concrete, gold, unobtainium, plastic, plywood or whatever all have their place with their own properties. Anyone stating one material is better than the other without showing multiple materials optimizes for that specific application is engaged in marketing. Cost is part of the equation.

There are some brilliant speaker designers that can build excellent speakers using off-the-shelf parts at many price points. Buy what sounds best to you. What's inside the box is secondary.

 What's inside the box is secondary. ?  Not all speakers are boxes.

Magnepan, Quad, Martin Logan and others.  But if a person wants a box with Scanspeak or other "of the shelf" drivers...that is good for them, it does help for making many more choices.  I guess we could talk about the crossover components, but that would also be secondary. 

There are some brilliant speaker designers that can build excellent speakers using off-the-shelf parts at many price points.

Anybody can do that. Its a matter of opinion if something is excellent. 

I’m not the expert here when it comes to this!

Well this is an interesting topic. I had a conversation once with another audiophile who said a box store salesperson told them that "X" brand of speaker were no good because they use "off the shelf" drivers. Hmm I thought, that’s interesting because most speaker manufacturers do. The magic comes in how those drivers are implemented, the design of the cabinet itself ie. bracing, time alignment etc., the cabinet materials used, crossover design and voicing of the speaker. Not everyone can afford to design & build their own drivers.

Salk Sound & Daedalus are examples of small manufacturers who build wonderful speakers but use "off the shelf" drivers. If you want a truly hand built design from cone material up, look at Voxativ. Then compare the prices! Still other manufacturers have driver companies build drivers to their specs. Which is better? I guess you have to let your ears decide.