Pulsars and the Mythical Armchair Speaker Maker


There’s another thread going about Joseph Audio Pulsar speakers which I did not want to derail, but it is showing up some common logical fallacies and dead ends I wanted to talk about.


As anyone who has read my posts knows, I’m a huge proponent of DIY for speakers and cables especially. Not that I think you should only go with DIY but because the more audiophiles who can build their own we have in the community the less snake oil gets spread around as fact and there’s less worshipping of the price tag as the almighty determiner of speaker performance.


The myth I want to talk about is kind of related. It is the idea that we should value speakers based purely on driver cost. JA’s Pulsars suffer from this because they seem to use off the shelf components, in very nice cabinets, with perfectly executed crossovers. The thing that I don’t understand are buyers who look at driver cost, and say "well, these speakers should cost no more than x amount, so I’m not buying them... "


I call hogwash. Speakers are more than a collection of parts. They are curated components brought together by a designer and manufacturer. Those same people who are likely to engage in this behavior:

  • Can’t actually design a speaker themselves
  • Would NEVER build a DIY speaker even as a complete kit because it doesn’t have a brand, nor would they buy an assembled DIY speaker.
  • Would probably go with a speaker with in-house drivers which have an even higher markup
  • May not have very good ears anyway


My point is, knowing the price of the parts does not make you at all qualified to judge what the final price should be. That is, fairly, in the hands of the market, and it doesn’t actually make you a better listener or more informed buyer. I would argue you end up buying speakers for brands with even more of a markup and more likely to have questionable performance.


It’s perfectly reasonable for a manufacturer to charge for parts, and skill. So, yes, talking tech and drivers and crossover components is always fun, but please stop evaluating the price of finished goods until you’ve attempted at least designing one pair yourself.

And again, DIY is a lot of fun, and if you want to go that way, you should, but let’s not denigrate high value, high quality manufacturers and delers by reducing them to part assemblers any more than you'd judge a restaurant based on the cost per pound of chicken.


Thank you,

E
erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by millercarbon

kenjit
So why cant you take a mid priced speaker costing say $500 a pair and instead of using drivers that cost $50 a piece, use state of the art drivers costing $300 a piece? that would still only be $250 more per driver which means $1000 more than the basic cost of $500.
It doesnt come to $10,000 does it?
Many of these high end speakers are nothing more than basic mdf cabinets using higher quality drivers.
Even the ones that dont use mdf, are not demonstrably vastly superior to mdf. A cheap speaker uses no brace whereas a more expensive speaker uses a single brace. So for a tiny bit of mdf youre paying thousands of dollars more. Every speaker should be braced. It costs nothing to add a piece of mdf inside the cabinet during assembling.


Spoken like a man. A man that is who has never built a single pair of speakers in his life.

My guess is, you have never even run so much as one piece of MDF through a table saw.

Wait- have you ever even used a table saw?



I used to know this audiophile, he was the classic case of the guy always whining about overpriced snake-oil interconnects, especially the overpriced part. Tried telling him yeah sure, they're overpriced based on the cost of the wire, insulation, and connectors, but what about the massive time and trial and error and everything they put into it? Oh its not that hard, he assured me, over and over again telling me how many of these things he'd reverse engineered or even torn down and copied. 

Strange though, every one of his supposedly just as good DIY cables sounded to me like crap. 

One time he calls me up all excited, cracked the DaVinci Code, had one DIY cable just absolutely indistinguishingly as good as this kilobuck interconnect he'd copied. 

Well, you want it to be true now, don't you? I mean, who wouldn't? Even if you were the proud owner of the $3k interconnect, if you could build a few more for $300 wouldn't you want to do that? Course you would.

So I was really hoping for it to not be just another piece of crap. Which it was. Total POC. Which even he had to admit.

Problem was, it turns out, his whole system was full of so much DIY POC it had everything distorted to the point he couldn't even hear any difference between these two interconnects. Until he put them in my system. Which made the differences obvious even to him.

Now to put in perspective, this guy had been working on this almost nonstop for like 30 years. By which I don't mean a long time. By which I mean THIRTY YEARS! To say he was crestfallen does not even begin to cover it.

Speakers, btw, same thing. Audiophile club here had a $100 speaker contest- parts budget $100. Per pair. Only they got a break- cabinet costs not included. That's a huge break! Even so, there were at the time several $100 retail speakers on the market that sounded better than the contest winner.

Not saying DIY is a waste of time. Not saying all professional products are better. Saying the good stuff isn't overpriced at all, and the best is really good value. Saying more often than not you're better off trying to find the best than build it.