The new dynamic in speaker pricing

Look, if anybody wants a million dollar speaker come to me and I'll do you a custom tuned speaker system and charge you a million bucks. Solid concrete no rattling whatsoever, custom crossovers and custom tuned TO YOUR EARS after a thorough audiometry hearing test to find out exactly the extent of your hearing loss. Name me ONE speaker company that would go to that trouble. These charlatans are selling you mass produced overpriced junk. If you charge even $50k a pair, I expect a custom tuned system hand made and hand tuned to MY EARS and MY ROOM and nobody elses. I expect diamond woofers for that level of cost

Get on with building your own then and spare us the repeat of this diatribe.

+1 @facten 

In most cases with ultra high price speakers one thing (many things) you are certainly paying for is a very large number of drive units.

Sensible speaker designers who realised that bling is not the way to go for good sound discovered many years ago that above two a proliferation of drive units worsens the sound quality.  This is easily explicable by the number of interactions between drivers:    2 drivers - 1 interaction.   3 -3     4 - 6     5 - 10     6 - 15  and so on.  Don't think about the designs with 10 or 15 drivers.

Multi-way cross-overs don't help either.

Keep it simple, good design and build quality is the way to go.

When you're a billionaire oligarch, you HAVE to have loudspeakers like this to demonstrate to everyone else just how wealthy you are.  Why does this have to be about music?