Hmmm, let me think of a few manufacturers who have the technical clout to R&D/build drivers completely from scratch in-house...
Paradigm, I had a driver break and sent it back to the factory, they just re-coned it.
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.
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@deep_333 You can add Revival Audio to that list. They design and make all drivers (their entire speaker actually) in house in France, at a very reasonable price. All the best, |
Makes me think of the argument made by some who’re actually involved in the making of bundled, active speakers, and how they stress that all the innards here are intricately matched. As it is though "matching" also comes down to amp downscaling because the rationale says there’s no need to use 3x200W actively for a woofer, midrange and tweeter when you can get by with 200, 100 and 50W respectively, which also conveniently cuts down cost. Sometimes there’s even a combo of Class A/B and D, but is 3x200W necessarily less of a match with 3 similar amp channels and overall topology other than (possible) excess wattages? And what if you had 3 externally configured amps of your own choice instead of built-in, cheaper variants, not to mention DAC’s? "Matching" can be a dubiously applied term, but implementation is indeed king, and active as configured externally/outwardly can be a playground of vast experimentation and great results from any segment, manufacturer, size, cost or whatever one chooses. ATC btw. seems to be one of the exceptions to any general observation about custom, in-house drivers that are considered el cheapo, because they’re anything but. Very good amps too. And Mundorf AMT’s are certainly great in the HF region with the wider (i.e.: taller) versions also picking up on sensitivity, but actively configured with high eff. horns it’s less of, if any issue (I prefer a point source from the lower mids on up, but that’s just me). |
"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." My current speakers (FinkTeam KIM) employ custom Mundorf AMTs, and I certainly haven't ever heard a better tweeter, and over ~40 years in the game. |
@phusis
TBC, I never said that in-house speaker drivers were necessarily low quality, but rather that the speaker makers ALWAYS increase their profit margins by going to in house parts. That is to say, using ATC as a hypothetical example, even if we just assume (for argument’s sake) that they have excellent drivers, by making their own they definitely decrease the amount of money they pay per unit and therefore increase margins. The calculus changes once you make in-house drivers. Instead of spending 10% of your sales price on the drivers now perhaps you can spend 5-7%. If you can also use cheap MDF manufacturing techniques for the cabinet you pretty much have a license to print money. Of course, this gets us to another issue about audio gear which few want to face: Cost to make or buy does not equal performance, at all. And this is where the ill informed speaker snob fails miserably. He won’t buy small maker speaker X for $5,000 because it has $500 worth of drivers, but he’ll absolutely buy name brand speaker Y for $8,000 which, by using only in house parts, only paid $250 for the drivers. Of course, now the driver costs are hidden from him, but it matters not. He's hot to buy! Money is a very poor indicator of speaker performance in our industry, and I know that, I just want to point out that the idea you are getting MORE driver value by going to an in-house only brand that costs the same or more is weird.
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