The mistake armchair speaker snobs make too often
Recently read the comments, briefly, on the Stereophile review of a very interesting speaker. I say it’s interesting because the designers put together two brands I really like together: Mundorf and Scanspeak. I use the same brands in my living room and love the results.
Unfortunately, using off-the-shelf drivers, no matter how well performing, immediately gets arm chair speaker critics, who can’t actually build speakers themselves, and wouldn’t like it if they could, trying to evaluate the speaker based on parts.
First, these critics are 100% never actually going to make a pair of speakers. They only buy name brands. Next, they don’t get how expensive it is to run a retail business.
A speaker maker has to sell a pair of speakers for at least 10x what the drivers cost. I’m sorry but the math of getting a speaker out the door, and getting a retailer to make space for it, plus service overhead, yada yada, means you simply cannot sell a speaker for parts cost. Same for everything on earth.
The last mistake, and this is a doozy, is that the same critics who insist on only custom, in-house drivers, are paying for even cheaper drivers!
I hope you are all sitting down, but big speaker brand names who make their drivers 100% in house sell the speakers for 20x or more of the actual driver cost.
Why do these same speaker snobs keep their mouth shut about name brands but try to take apart small time, efficient builders? Because they can. The biggest advantage that in-house drivers gives you is that the riff raft ( this is a joke on an old A'gon post which misspelled riff raff) stays silent. If you are sitting there pricing speakers out on parts cost, shut up and build something, then go sell it.
Amen, and let’s hope and pray he doesn’t find this thread. Anyway, and more importantly, I’m curious if you’ve compared similarly-priced drivers from both Scanspeak and Seas in any of your projects and if so what you found especially with the mids and tweets. I don’t recall ever seeing a direct comparison between the two so would be very interesting. Even if you haven’t done a direct comparison your general thoughts/experience with both would still be very meaningful. |
Hey @soix I know there are a lot of Seas fans out there, and if you like Joseph speakers you are definitely one of them. I’ve not had that memorable a listening experience with them (all at shows) so don’t really know. I’m about to do a center, possible L and R as well using the Scanspeak Illuminator midrange so I’ll have a better update for you later. The 7" Scanspeak mid-woofers have excellent high frequency response (the spec sheet is wrong) and just amazing bass output for the size. That combination has made them ideal for my 2-way projects. |
@soix What I love about the top end SS tweets, like the Mundorf AMTs, is they absolutely vanish and have a glass-smooth presentation. They don’t call attention to themselves. They don’t say "I’m a Be tweeter!" I’ve not measured the SS tweets, but the Mundorf AMTs have vanishing low distortion, energy storage and amazing dynamic range and much more forgiving of accidental overload than the average tweet. If I'm not mistaken, the late, great Siegfried Linkwitz did a lot of testing with Seas and loved them. |
If a manufacturer doesn't have the aptitude to R&D, build a driver in-house from scratch, he is not worth my time. If he’s buying drivers from a 3rd party, dropping them in a fancy looking box and charging a 100k (such a deadweight genius!), nope, not worth my time at all. If he insists on dropping drivers from a different manufacturer in his box and calling it his great creation, i’ll pay him 200 bucks. That’s all he is worth. |
