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

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. 

@phusis re: 'The Joseph Audio Perspective 2, which retails for something around $14k or so today, is almost identical to the SEAS Thor kit," 

Except they are completely different designs, TL vs, vented, the Thor is a d'Appolito MTM  2-Way design and the Perspective a 2.5 way. The woofers are different: the Thor using SEAS Excel W18E-001 (E0018) that cost $361.70 ea and the Perspective 2 uses the SEAS Excel W18EX-003 (E0074) costing  $579 ea, both Madisound prices. The crossovers are completely different topologies, slopes, frequencies and components.

They do appear to share the SEAS Excel W18EX-003 (E0074) tweeter, $569 also from Madisound. Perhaps that's what you meant by "almost identical".