The mistake armchair speaker snobs make too often

This is rarely a motivator for a small manufacturer to make more money because the infrastructure and tooling costs far outweigh the additional profit of the in house drivers. In house drivers are almost always used to design/build something that is beyond what is available OEM.

I think there’s a difference between unique and excellent. Having drivers no one else has makes them unique and impossible to evaluate the same way we can evaluate small shops with OTS parts. They may also take steps to give the "impression of modernity" (from a Focal marketing slide). For instance, adding a graphite coating, which may do NOTHING to the sound quality. Boom, instant markup, zero value.

Forgive me if I’m too cynical, but of course if I was running a big-brand I’d constantly be looking at ways of cutting costs while at the same time claiming my cost cutting methods were actually purely for the consumer’s benefit. I think both are possible but if I’m not increasing profit margins by vertically integrating I’m failing.

There’s also, of course, the dozens of far east driver makers who actually make decent, bespoke drivers for cheap. Having the time and experience to cultivate those relationships is another way in which big brands increase profit margin.

Regardless of your approach though, if you are a big brand you have to pay for that factory, warehouse, repair, packaging, product development, etc. and that takes money and the only way to get to afford that and actually make a profit is to decrease your cost per driver/increase your profit margin. The other way to say that is to decrease the percentage of cash you have to pay to put those drivers in those cabinets.

Regardless of the motivation, whether purely cost-cutting or purely to deliver drivers with audibly better performance, you can’t get to success if you pay 10% of your retail to driver costs. You have to drive that number down. And that’s fine, that’s business. My message to people who can barely plug a lamp into a wall but want to complain about small businesses using OTS driver because the drivers are "only" 30% of the speaker retail is that they have no idea what they are talking about.

Drivers, this is how I roll and if it breaks, just send it back for a repair:

https://youtu.be/KXfehZbssJ4

KOTA1  Was that really Paradigms OEM supplier?  Sure that wasn't someone else? I find that hard to believe.  I would take that down if I were them.  

Whoever that was, it was NOT a clean assembly line- it was filthy!  The only part of the line that can be messy is the coil winding.....Once you assemble a coil and start gluing parts to it cleanliness becomes critical.  There is a huge issue with tiny little particles getting caught in the gap.  These tiny nearly invisible particles that don't belong will reduce performance or cause failure modes; your work area has to be spotless.  It has to be maintained and clean enough you can see anything that doesn't belong near your work. A skilled QC person would have a fit if a line that looked like that.   [Stuff will stick to you hands, your clothes, fall on the driver, get where they aren't supposed to be and affect that driver later].   

That glue bead machine applied a very irregular glue bead and this is not okay with a high performance driver.  It needs to be perfectly consistent.   Small areas where there is more glue and less glue will change the moving dynamics of the cone and will impact performance especially at higher levels. Any kind of mass irregularity in a moving part is not okay.  

That line is typical of inexpensive drivers (maybe even a "better" drivers) but not a high performance line.  You have to run an extremely clean facility to make high performance drive units and deliver consistent repeatable behavior at all levels.     

Here is a clip of a clean assembly line https://youtu.be/dF-Ux7h1Auk  Go a minute in or so.  Hopefully the difference is obvious.  This would be typical of a high performance (hand made) drive unit facility.  Not many like this left.  

Brad

Brad, that was a clip on you tube from someone’s cell phone. The link below is a "sanctioned" video that is from a year ago. The reason I posted it is because I had damage to drivers in my Paradigm active speakers which are out of production. I called paradigm asking to buy new drivers and they told me because they have their own factory all I needed to do was send the damaged drivers in. I paid a repair fee and my drivers were repaired and I just reinstalled them. This was a HUGE relief and made me a fan. When I saw this thread I didn’t realize the advantage I had when I bought speakers that had their own driver factory. The other nice thing is the dealer network, you can drop it off or send it in. When I bought these speakers I wasn’t even thinking about the service side, I kind of lucked out.

The clip you posted is excellent, it looks like speaker surgery :).

Check this out:

https://youtu.be/AvC4v2klsUQ

Kota1-Now I get it! Sorry I didn’t understand the post.

Yes having a repairable driver is a great thing especially when you realize so many factors say just toss it in the bin and by a new one.

And YES, that newer post looks much better! A lot of folks don’t know what hand making a driver looks like or they think these things can be made on machine the same as by hand- which is NOT possible.  SO that newer link does credit to Paradigm, THAT looks like proper speaker factory.

Brad