Speaker manufacturers or box manufacturers with off the shelf drivers?

It's mostly about economy of scale and available resources. Most speakers companies are small compared to main steam manufacturing. It's impractical for most speaker companies to build drivers in house especially when considering they use eight to ten unique drivers in their lineup. Furthermore, the skill-set and tool-set are somewhat different. There are people and companies that can do it all but that's rare and usually yields expensive drivers and products. Every manufacturer has vendors. No speakers company makes everything. It's much more expensive building your own drivers, unless you can build and sell many thousands of them, than buying from a vendor.

We are a small speaker company that decided to design, develop and build drivers for our own use. We build our own AMT drivers. It was a major investment in many ways. We went through the process because we wanted something very specific which didn't exist. We have had seven speaker companies (4 well known) contact us about using our AMT drivers. We politely declined because we don't want to be a driver vendor.

As with most things, it's more about good design and implementation than the actual parts. Aluminum, wood, MDF, carbon, carbon fiber, concrete, gold, unobtainium, plastic, plywood or whatever all have their place with their own properties. Anyone stating one material is better than the other without showing multiple materials optimizes for that specific application is engaged in marketing. Cost is part of the equation.

There are some brilliant speaker designers that can build excellent speakers using off-the-shelf parts at many price points. Buy what sounds best to you. What's inside the box is secondary.

whatjd    Always enjoyed the work of Robert Frost. Thanks for sharing.

I don't think it's quite the same as GM. Their classic example that comes to mind is Camaro vs Firebird. Very similar cars using the same platform. In the beginning they used brand specific engines. Each brand was allowed to tune their own suspension to help built different identities. Ultimately they ended up almost identical. Marketing people know two flavors will increase sales. Major auto manufactures have the resources and skill set to built whatever they want as long as it is profitable.

Look at the smaller auto manufactures that source their engines and many other parts from other manufactures and vendors. It is not economically practical for small auto manufactures to expand their operation into building engines and commodity parts (starters, bearings....) only to sell a small number of cars. Lotus cars come to mind. They use Toyota engines and likely other parts as well. If they decided to expand into manufacturing engines they would likely fail.

Most speaker manufactures are like small auto manufactures. They buy drivers from driver manufactures and crossover parts from various vendors. Some outsource their cabinets. The parts they choose to use doesn't guarantee that the end product will be good or bad. It's up to the designer/engineer to design, choose components, develop and execute a viable product at the target price point.

Yes, what's inside the box is (should be) secondary. How a speakers sounds to the buyer should be the most important aspect. "Box" is speaking figuratively. Yes, the design, materials, parts and implementation of the design will dictate how the speaker will perform.

Obviously not all speakers are boxes with drivers and crossovers. Along with manufacturing Arion speakers we also import and distribute Analysis Audio speakers. Both our brands are exclusively open baffle designs using light membrane technology. All the Analysis drivers are designed and built in house. Arion AMT drivers are designed and built in house. We build our own drivers because they don't exist on the open market. Doing so is expensive but allows us the ability to fulfill our design goals.  Magnepan, Quad, Martin Logan and others fall in the same category.