Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@lonemountain , I would "question" saying a 15" woofer costs almost the same as the 10, especially at current aluminum prices. It is not just the added material costs of the basket, but amortized tooling of what is invariably lower volume, and a much bigger tool as well. That is not even getting into cabinet size, packaging, and shipping. It may seem neither here nor there for active speakers, but a product goal of active speakers is delivering superior performance in a smaller package for those who either don't want a larger unit, or cannot support a large unit in their environment.

Reliability is a different argument for professional and consumer speakers. Professional users expect they are going to replace their speakers every 10-15 years, or sooner, and will have fully depreciated them by that time. Resale does not have a lot of meaning. Audiophiles keep their products a lot longer. To your point, the lack of connections aids reliability, and being able to control designs means being able to alleviate electrical stress. For the consumer market, at an elevated price point, the issue is not failure rate, but the ability to repair a product that may be 20+ years old. We, like other vendors (one hopes), track failure rates and adjust our spare parts and spare assemblies stock to ensure we can support a specific service life. Finance accepts that is a cost of doing business and builds it into cost. Engineering attempts to minimize BOM creep and increase reuse.

We don't have large cost gaps in our product families, but that is intentional, and is a marketing and engineering design collaboration. Know what the "best" model in the family will cost and then understand how to build out the family while maintaining product goals. You don't have to be Fortunate 500 to have a good product plan. Active speakers significantly help in regards to supporting that business model.

@texbychoice , it is not attitude it is simply a matter of fact. Mentioning frequency response is my point. It is inconsequential for a basic active speaker. Any active speaker with a DSP crossover can have an effectively perfect on axis response. Balancing perfect on-axis response with off-axis energy is where it is at. With active speakers, like the example I gave above, Kii 3, you don't have to rely purely on an inflexible acoustic design to do that. How about being able to push a driver 6db higher in output while maintaining the same distortion?  How about reducing IM distortion in a small mid-woof 10db at elevated volumes. How about an electrical drive method that reduces the impact of power compression.  How about an electrical drive method that can reduce breakup?  If you wonder if any of those things improve the sound, they most certainly do.

@texbychoice --

Well put. 

@thespeakerdude 

Full support of commercial anything beyond 10 years is rare.  So you have the ability to fully support, today, a product that is 20 years old.  Based on failure rate predictions and field failure rate data there is an appropriate stock of fully assembled amplifier boards and/or individual parts in a warehouse for a 20 year old product. That is a sunk cost the Finance department approved for every product and baked into the cost of every product sold?  

Or could support consist of a limited supply of custom items backed by purchase as needed resistors, transistors, caps, op-amps etc.?  That seems like an approach the Finance department would support.

@thespeakerdude Wow, I listened to Bruno’s talk about the Kii, He is making a speaker just like a microphone, I’ve had this idea for 30 years. The way directional microphones work is there is vents along 2 opposite side and when the sound comes in from the front the sound also comes in from the opposite sides but out of phase thus canceling out except the sound that comes from the front of the mic, the more directional the microphone the more vents there are. Rruno is doing the same thing in reverse electronically in the Kii. Condenser microphones are "active" dynamic microphones are "passive" interestingly enough the "active microphones" are of course better in practically every way but they need power (Phantom, usually 48v). Also all the audiophiles that understand this analogy are probably all using "passive" systems that we know in reverse ie. microphones are not nearly as good in sound reproduction.

One can easily see that this support model is very different for large public companies with strict product plans and clear cut departments that operate the business vs small engineer owned private companies that pursue new ideas and build what might look risky to the large corporation.

The different responses in this thread make sense with different scales of business. What amazes me is the level of intelligence expressed in this thread - starting all the way back to a baseline of Kenjit all the way to engineers and operators of consumer audio businesses. An excellent discussion overall that should help users understand that engineering and science drive most audio innovation and the day of the freewheeling entrepreneur who just experiments in his garage are over. Bullshit may still sell but not for long.