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.
Hidden cost factor: For what my woodshop cost, I could have bought top end Wilsons! Same with the misconception you can build furniture cheaper than you can buy it. Your post is illuminating for those of us that lack "the skills to pay the bills". You have me curious about getting one of Danny’s kits to dabble a bit without the expenses you mention above, THANKS! |
@fleschler - Not only is the topic of room treatments off-topic in this particular thread, but I can find absolutely nothing mentioning J. Gordon Holt and carbon wall panels. I totally respect the OP and of course he is correct, I started a new thread if you care to share over there 😀 |
@erik_squires Wrote:
See: Dennis Foley Mike |
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. I personally measure value when I compare speakers around the same price point. If the manufacturers have high or low margins at that price point has little interest to me. I think consumers are more conscious about where a product was assembled/made today then the sum expense of the parts used, do you agree? |
I build speakers also and relative to the enclosure, drivers are inexpensive. The driver market is huge and there is lots of competition. Take a Big Wilson. All The drivers might cost say $10,000, probably a lot less. However, the speaker pair retails for $350,000. For the sake of argument let's break this into 3rds, the actual cost of the speaker including labor and associated costs, Wilson's profit and lastly dealer's profit. That would be 117,000 each. The actual cost of the speaker minus drivers would be $107, 000 My point is that relative to making a speaker enclosure the cost of drivers is minimal even with a very inflated figure. It is difficult to spend more than $2000.00 for the drivers of a two way system. The best subwoofer driver for my purposes cost $256.00 each. After all the work on those enclosure I am not about to put a second rate drivers in them and I investigated the entire market before putting pencil to paper.. As for crossovers Eric is correct that the active approach is superior in every respect and easy to implement. The active part need not be in the speaker itself. Outboard equipment is seriously superior and electronics companies are starting to get the message. DEQX has a preamp coming out that has a complete 4 way digital crossover which is extremely flexible giving you a choice of filters from 1st to 10th orders, butterworth or L-R. in 1 Hz increments. |
Acoustic Fields