The “Off The Shelf” Lie

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. 

@easystreamer 

You must live in LA. Here in the East, people resist buying or eating ’gluten free’.

We found a tasty corn based gluten free spaghetti (yellow, as opposed to the lousy tasting and limp white rice based).

If you don’t tell your dinner guests, they always ask for seconds. IF you tell them ahead of time it’s gluten free, they expect it to taste lousy.

@jonwolfpell 

I remember how precise Snell’s were. Proper matching of frequencies L to R is Vital to excellent Imaging, then and now. I suspect Harbeth and Joseph Audio (among others) benefit from those skills.

I’m a big fan of L-Pads to adjust speaker’s in the particular space they end up with, however, I have to work very carefully with my SPL meter and test tone CD to 1st match L to R and then adjust when both playing, the combined output must be refined. Last time it took me 1-1/2 days to ’get it right’. They never sounded better. 

Meanwhile, my office, my AR-2ax have level controls, I set them by ear, took a few minutes, good enough, done. I get excellent imaging, if I didn’t I’d get my tools up here.

"Is an in-house ladder dac automatically superior to the best chips from Analog Devices, Texas Instruments or others?"

analog “discrete” circuit topology with fewer components, will perform better than IC, assuming proper parts selection etc.

designing large scale circuits such as “ladder” DAC, have significant challenges to fight, such as key performance parameters “too wide” distribution, aging impact at different pace for each component thus total performance bottom line degradation, procurement of discrete components challenge, etc. use of integrated DAC simplifies design, reduces size of the PCB, is more predictable on the long run.