Things you did not know about what is inside your speakers and the Huge markups

@8th-note +2

Mike

when you design and build and something, you have to pay for a facility, utilities, your engineers, their health care, workers, the accountant, web designer,  trade show trips, inventory, marketing costs, distribution, shipping, etc., it's a long list. Component  markup is a very simplistic way to look at it.

I suspect there is a fair amount of truth in the story the videos tell but these videos also are representative of the AI slop that is permeating YouTube. I have trouble putting much faith in any videos that don’t have a real live presenter. It doesn’t help when the narrator says“1974“ and the number 2000 flashes on the screen.

@ghdprentice wrote:

The "look what the drivers cost" argument has been around for decades. It assumes that a loudspeaker is simply the sum of its parts. In reality, the parts are often the easy part.

The late Peter Snell did great things with his Type A's with the use of cheap drivers, but because of that it can't be denied they had their limitations in certain respects; there can be an incentive to cut the cost of parts for nothing but that, so just because there's a want for more expensive drivers (totally taken out of context of the overall design of a particular speaker it may be) doesn't necessarily mean it isn't warranted and can, ultimately, lead to better sound. Then of course it's likely a very different design, so no doubt a better idea would be to look elsewhere for other speakers. 

What you're paying for is the engineering required to make multiple imperfect drivers behave as a coherent transducer in a real room. Anyone can buy the same drivers. Far fewer can design a speaker that disappears and makes music.

Agreed, except "paying for [...] the engineering required" is a cousin to the chosen markup multiplier, which is - essentially - set by the rules of The Wild West and therefore makes it nigh on impossible to have price being a reliable bearing. 

Judging a speaker by its bill of materials is like judging a symphony by the cost of the instruments.

But is it really that simple - I mean, does it boil down to the claim that it's about judging a speaker solely on the basis of its bill of materials? I anything that's a convenient takeaway that fails to take into account how better/more expensive parts in conjunction with a carefully executed design can lead to a more complete sonic package. 

You know it is BS when you hear there is not "objective sonic difference" between $5K and $10K speakers. 

You could say that about any differentiated design regardless of cost, but since you refer to speakers where one is twice the price of the other, do you really mean to say the more expensive one is objectively better (and not just different)? If that's the case I don't see how you would. Markup multiplier + luxury finishing is dead weight and inversely proportional to value, so throwing that by the wayside in some measure leaves more room for better parts in addition to letting good engineering be more widely accessible to more people. 

@phusis 

There are almost always two variable when comparing audio components, sound family and sonic quality. It is important to be able to tell the difference. I've been listening to audio components for decades and often listen to a single company speaker like Sonus Faber, Wilson, DynAudiom or B&W. So my comment on difference between $5K and $10K is about performance within a category... or sound family.