The mistake armchair speaker snobs make too often

I think a little historical perspective may be helpful here?

There have been many cases where the "in house" driver was "the thing". The home-grown technology was the differentiator. Pioneers of electrostatic, ribbons, AMTs, etc. placed them on the radar -- and, kept them there. A Japanese company that builds motorcycles and pretty decent musical instruments developed the berryllium dome in house. This is just one example.

Then there’s the case of the Dahquist DQ10. An off the shelf woofer used successfully in a mid-range bookshelf speaker along with an array of "nothing special" components -- including a $5 Motorola plastic piezo super-tweeter. It was the attention to "other" factors that made the speaker a future Audio Hall of Fame’r. More recently, Golden Ear has had success bringing vintage technology that has been somewhat domant back into the spotlight. And uses off the shelf drivers from "others."

I can think of may factors why amanufacture would want to make components "in house", possible supply chain issues being one of them. To me, it’s not the cost of components that is the major factor. It’s whether or not the end user gets their money’s worth at the end. A measure of commerical success is usually a prettty good indicator.

@waytoomuchstuff 

You are reminding me of the Snell A/IIIs, which used inexpensive (but not bad) mids and tweets, along with modified woofers.  What made them special however was the incredible detail to the crossover and the hemispherical baffle the tweeter and mids wer eplaced on. 

Not too different from the Sonus Faber Stradivari IMHO.  The drivers are good, not exotic, but the wide, curved baffle is everything.

PS - Many of you making comments about cheap off the shelf tweeters would absolutely die if you know how good some of the inexpensive Vifa tweets were in terms of smoothness, low distortion and frequency extension.

The ring radiators especially, which have been used in everything from cheap Polks to Magicos, Krell and other ultra expensive speakers were very good within the low to mid power handling area and cost peanuts.

I never quite could figure out the knock against speaker manufacturers that use off the shelf drivers?

I tend to agree with @simonmoon here although I’ve no experience like him or Eric building speakers to back it up. Companies like Scanspeak, Seas, Vifa, RAAL, Dynaudio, etc. have been manufacturing drivers for decades, and if I was building speakers I’d have to have one big set of cajones to think I could meaningfully improve on their drivers’ performance. I’d think optimizing and using better parts in the crossover along with improving the cabinet structure/design would be higher on my list than trying to design/manufacture my own driver and reinvent a pretty damn good wheel that’s already been refined to a high level. I think those who think speakers that use excellent but off-the-shelf (or modified versions thereof) are somehow sub standard are kidding themselves or maybe just have a lot of $$$ to burn. Not saying in-house drivers don’t or can’t have significant advantages as they clearly can, but in terms of the overall speaker design it’s not tops on my list of concerns given the quality of good drivers today — or at least not until we get high enough up the price scale where the other critical speaker components have already been largely addressed. But that’s me. Good/interesting post BTW.

Worth noting that while there are a lot of inexpensive drivers that perform very well in terms of frequency response and distortion the big money goes to power handling.

It's easy to find a tweeter < $50 that's super smooth and clean sounding when it only has to handle 10 W or less, but an entirely different thing when you apply power to it. That's where, IMHO, the adults are separated from the boys. 

For this reason alone, though I may not use them, JBL professional products get a knod of respect from me always.