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.
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. |
If using a DEQX, then you might as well by your speakers at K-Mart. :) Yea, I had one. Great for a PA system. Not HI-FI. Not even HT. The last thing I want to do to my stereo is add a $2 A2D and D2A in the chain with Op-Amps worse than 5558's and electrolytic caps even if the DSP was half decent. Now, setting up for a small band in some unknown club, I would not be without one. Never done a stadium so don't know about that. I get the comments on very high sound pressure, but as I like my hearing to remain in tact, I do not consider that part of HI-FI. My humble stand mount 6 inch 2-ways can exceed permeant hearing damage thank you. One can do a DeApolitto MTM and reduce upper bass distortion at "Who concert" levels but at higher SPL, you can't hear the difference and if you play that loud, you just can't hear any more. PA is of course a totally different animal where the problems of multiple driver comb filtering are overshadowed by getting the sound to the back of the room. ( Line arrays of those nice JBL's and compression horns) I don't think the markup is PA is as high as residential. Neither is fidelity. I agree, separate the adults from boys. Adults know better than to use PA systems in small rooms. We all did that as boys of course. I also get what you are saying if you are replicating some ego-prestige all-in-the-name bragging rights like WAMM though I think you should look at that it takes to design and build such a monstrosity. ( I am not a fan having heard most of their line over the years starting with Watt/Puppies. ) But, do you think you can out-do ELAC on a D6.1? Can you equal a Dynaudio Special 40, Focal, Sonas Faber, Even a Kef R3? Size and price real people can pay? Now we have increasing direct sales cutting out the importer, distributor and retail chain. ( we still pay that on components) So the equivalent cost is about half of the traditional chain. They do have to cover the cost of returns though. An example may be Taylor who puts together a seeming well worked out SB 2-way quite reasonably. If you want to touch entry level as cheap as possible, then a flat-pack CSS kit and a can of spray paint is far cheaper than even direct sales for similar quality and the design work is done. Just glue it together. Some of the Bagby or Zaph designed kits are not bad. GR has kits. I don't really consider a kit the same as DIY. It is just slapping together some one else's work. |
@kota1 wrote:
A bundled, active speaker is a preconfigured package drawing in particular on the advantage of having its amp channels looking directly into their respective driver segments, as well as having minimized cable influence. It's also an easy plug-and-play solution. The room however is still a variable that needs attention as a separate measure, and you’re also left with accepting a choice of amps that mayn’t suit your preference if you actually had different options to go by and compare to each other. Actively amp choice is less critical, but it’s still a factor - both technically and subjectively. If you go outboard active you can have even better and more powerful amps. Although less power is generally needed actively for the same SPL compared to a passive scenario, not to mention providing power indendancy between the different driver segments where a more power hungry bass section will leave the HF segment unaffected (the same of course goes for a bundled config.), more power can come in handy for even lower distortion and more headroom. You’ll have longer cables with outboard active, yes, but look at JBL’s prime monitor, the M2’s. They come sans passive crossover (safe perhaps a capacitor over the D2 driver for its protection), and with no built-in amp or electronic/digital crossover needs to be fed externally. JBL recommends the sibling company (owned by Harman) Crown I-Tech 5000HD with DSP, an off-the-shelf item that wasn’t in any way designed around the M2’s, but it has sufficient power (1,250W/8 ohm) and overall quality. Not a smaller version to the top section, no, but two similar 5000HD’s. Why wouldn’t JBL go bundled with their top monitor if it (supposedly) meant the world into über-specialized amp-driver integration with a differentiated amp topology approach? My guess: not only don’t they find it worth it, but on the contrary they may find it the preferred route qualitatively going outboard active with two similar amps for the best coherency, while giving the customer the option of other amp/DSP choices - cable influence be damned. As they say: forest for the trees.. |
