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

I own TAD CR1 speakers (at least until they get shipped to their new owner) but the CST driver using vapor deposited beryllium, cost Pioneer millions of dollars to develop.  I doubt they ever got that R&D back.  
 

The driver in my new speaker, the Prodigio Audio WR1 is just a thin sheet of Mylar with some Metallic particles, and wires up the front and rear.  
 

I’m oversimplifying, but looking at the BOM doesn’t tell the story of the cost of creating these speakers. 

https://youtu.be/hRQymIxonAk

The level of markups has been well known for the last 50 years.  What never stops surprising me is how many still happily pay them.  The DIY crowd has long side-stepped this buy building their own loudspeakers and electronics.  Even the good kit systems are a bargain.

Bingo. The only speakers I have experienced that come close to offering DIY sort of performance for reasonable money come from the factory-direct brands like Spatial, Ascend and Philharmonic. I have a pair of $4K Philharmonic BMR HT Towers that on balance, will outperform or go toe-to-toe with any retail models I’ve encountered under $20K/pair. As they do so while being about half the size in many cases. 

I would think that most of the high end audio speaker manufacturers do it for profit and not for practice, of course you can match or exceed their performance in a diy design, but try doing it for profit.

@audioman58 …having owned a audio store…

This is not the same as running an engineering R&D+manufacturing company including equipment and maintenance, overhead, and payroll costs.

+1 @ghdprentice 

Always worth remembering that the Speaker designed in one environment, and especially that of an anechoic chamber is not the same Speaker performance when brought into a domestic space.

Software designed for interfacing speakers into a space will not create an environment for siting the speaker that resembles an anechoic chamber.

The off-the-shelf speaker purchase method and the assistance that can be used to create the best room interface for a speaker are not the cheapest way to achieve a speaker set-up in a room that is suitably interfaced.