Excellent posts above. A good rule of thumb is that a speaker with a good-quality box will retail for 10 times the retail cost of the raw drivers. This is just due to the economics of manufacturing and distribution. The retailer typically gets 40% of the retail price, so now you're down to a factor of 6. The box will often eat up as much as or more than the cost of the parts (MUCH more if truly done right, and there are VERY few boxes in the world that are done right. In fact, if it looks like a box at all, it really isn't right!!!) This doesn't even begin to address development costs, crossover parts costs, overhead, advertising...
Thus for a given budget, there is a lot of room to improve on commercially available stuff IF you are willing to spend the 10 or 20 years it takes to truly master the subject. And don't even begin to count your time in the process, because if you did, you might as well have bought the $85,000 DynAudio Evidence Master and simply been done with it. I'm not kidding. Amateur speakerbuilding is best approached as a hobby, not as a way to save money!
Even if you don't want to get into the full project, there is still tremendous potential in replacing the crossover parts in a lot of high-end speakers. A couple hundred dollars here can make a lot more improvement than thousands in cables, starting with the tweeter series caps and the woofer series inductors. This is a very easy place to start playing around without having to "go the distance" on a from-scratch design. Yes it voids your warranty, but that's the risk you take.
Thus for a given budget, there is a lot of room to improve on commercially available stuff IF you are willing to spend the 10 or 20 years it takes to truly master the subject. And don't even begin to count your time in the process, because if you did, you might as well have bought the $85,000 DynAudio Evidence Master and simply been done with it. I'm not kidding. Amateur speakerbuilding is best approached as a hobby, not as a way to save money!
Even if you don't want to get into the full project, there is still tremendous potential in replacing the crossover parts in a lot of high-end speakers. A couple hundred dollars here can make a lot more improvement than thousands in cables, starting with the tweeter series caps and the woofer series inductors. This is a very easy place to start playing around without having to "go the distance" on a from-scratch design. Yes it voids your warranty, but that's the risk you take.