Margin on speaker sales by high end dealer

When you call a dealer and order a pair of 20k speakers, which he then orders and when received will deliver. He does not have your model in his listening room and a consumer has to go through the dealer to get the speaker. Seems a margin of 40% or more is a lot. Maybe dealer spoke with you for awhile, sent a quote and then took a credit card number and delivered it.
Fortunately there are multiple dealers in the area and competition would seem to be present. Maybe order out of state for a longer range delivery to avoid state taxes.

i really don’t need the services of a dealer so 8k 40% seems too high. Maybe 3k.
If margin is really 40% it impacts resale of product in secondary market so it would seem. Dealer or any other dealer certainly ain’t gonna pay you more than 12k as a credit during an upgrade effort. That’s why I am interested in learning what the margin is so I can get a feel for speaker value if I upgrade.

You can't look at gross margin in a vacuum.  You need to understand the dealer's monthly overhead cost/cost of operations.  That's why it's so important to push volume through.  Only through volume can you even start to cover the fixed monthly overhead.  If you don't sell enough widgets you could easily post monthly losses on your P&L even if you show a 40% gross margin on a single product sale.  This is really a ridiculous analysis the OP is trying to apply because the equation is far too dynamic for a linear thinker.

Someone mentioned, buy used. I have done this several times (at a dealership). If they have a demo item you are in the market for, you can get a good deal and a full factory warranty.

Three_easy_payments is correct. 40%-50% GROSS margins might seem like a lot. However, once rents, utilities, insurance(s), wages, unemployment, flooring costs, etc. have been paid, the dealer might be left with 10-15%, if they are lucky. Then, they get the privilege of paying income taxes on that. So net profits could be less than 10% when all the smoke clears.

Too many people have no idea about business or how they run so they try looking at things like gross profits in a vacuum and think that when they buy a $12k pair of speakers, the whole store closes early and rents a private jet for a trip to Milan for the week, or something.

three_easy_payments and also paradisecom are both exemplifying exactly what I outlined, above.  We are on the same page.
emergingsoul, however, seems to have a view of business whereby the consumer would only be purchasing directly from the manufacture.  He doesn't state it that way, but his ideology of how business should operate, regarding profit margins, leaves only the "Direct to Consumer" business model as an option.  I imagine he would then complain they should be selling the items at a lower price since they have cut out the middle man.  An endless cycle of simply not understanding any business models at all, and that he (and all consumers, I guess) should basically be able to purchase products with little to no profit in play for the manufacture and/or the retail process to flourish.  An utter lack of understanding of business.