The “Off The Shelf” Lie

Implementation matters.

I once had 2 DACs with identical chips.  One cost 8 times more than the other.  The more expensive DAC clearly had a beefier power supply and doubtless other improvements, and yes it sounded much better than the less expensive DAC.  Now perhaps the more expensive DAC could have developed their own chip but that would have boosted the price significantly.

   I have heard turntables that use a Rega tonearm but sound vastly different from Rega tables.

   Speaker drivers are a category of their own.  My speakers are made by the company but how do I know what an off the shelf version would sound like in the same cabinet?

An FPGA may or may not be superior to a Sabre, Burr-Brown or whatever chip du jour you like, but it can be "upgraded" with new firmware which may mean a constantly improving listening experience.

Regarding drivers, closer acoustical matching can be achieved when parameters can be specified. Whether manufactured in-house or made-to-spec, custom drivers may allow for better integration/coherence than a mix and match approach. 

I have seen various brands of turntables with what appear to be Project and Rega tonearms. Many Music Hall turntables are manufactured by Project. Many ads for vintage speakers will include mentions of being built with SEAS, Scanspeak, or Vifa tweeters. Some JBL electronics of the 2000's were clearly repackaged Arcams, a Harman sister company. 

None of this is bad or good. What matters is what comes out the other end and if the purchaser is happy with the outcome.

The word in house in itself does not make the product better without having the understanding that the product will be better than off the shelf if the engineer or technician put in the necessary effort to make the product elite and above the rest. If that's the case, then yes in house will always be better than off the shelf products. But how will you know if that's the case that they put 100% effort into making the quality and performance of the product outstanding and elite above the off the shelf products. First, you must have this understanding that very few high-quality high-performance products don't actually have high performance parts inside of them and that not only goes for speaker drivers but for other so-called high-end gear. The only actual way to know this is to know the product and the name brand you are dealing with. In other words, if you have a piece of gear that the manufact and maker of this gear are selling the same product that you purchased in the past that they are now offering it with an upgrade and upon receiving you're new unit setting it up and listening to it, it was actually much better than the previous one by far. Then and only then you can know you are dealing with a company that stands by their word and products because they put 100% effort into making the product with quality parts that will outperform the last product they produced and for sure over the shelf products by far. But understand that the truth is some off the shelf products sound better than some very high-quality products only because someone figured a way to make it outperform the higher price product for less and that is when it becomes an off the shelf sales item and not listed as original equipment spec or OEM, but in many cases will outperform the original spec OEM part equipment or gare. It gets very confusing sometimes we wind up playing games with ourselves trying to figure out who's telling the truth about a product. Another way is to just open it up if it's a speaker or an amplifier look inside at what the internals are made of. In many cases you will see immediately that they are using inferior product and parts. Bottom line the actual truth is that off the shelf can be many times a better product then the in-house product designed if the in-house product was not designed to be an ELITE PRODUCT OVERALL.

GOOD DAY and PEACE TO ALL!!!

Snell speakers of the late 70’s & 80’s, some of which excellent & amongst the best available then in their respective price ranges, used good but not great drivers that they individually carefully tested to meet the specs they wanted & did the same for some of the crossover parts too. They built very solid cabinets  & then Each speaker was tested to match the original design specs within very close tolerances. & to its mate in the pair. They chucked the rest of the parts that didn’t meet specs. It was a very successful method for them at that time & produced some very nice products. I enjoyed my A - II’s & III’s very much.