2. misc-audio
  3. 1051797283

How Many???

I realize that Bose must sell hundreds of thousands of speaker systems per year. But in the high end market, how many Avalons, Meadowlarks, Silverlines, Coincidents are sold each year? 100? 1000? I am sure Magnepan , Vandersteen,
are such great values, then that number must jump up to the
10,000 mark ( or am I way off???). I have not been to a best buy or circuit city or tweeter in years, but their house brands must sell in the tens of thousands of units
for them to stay in business. I am including home theater systems. So I guess the two channel companies must have a very low output. Does anybody has some hard numbers on the high end speaker companies sales?
shubertmaniac
8 responses Add your response
agonanon
70 posts
 
If the Q'n is just motivated by curiosity, hopefully an industry insider will be able to post something directly helpful.

Don't giggle, but if the Q and especially the A is "mission-critical", you can put a price on it at google A's. Some of the researchers have been known to go to extraordinary lengths (telephoning countrywide etc) to scoop the bounty. (No disclosures nec'y here since no affiliation.)
shubertmaniac OP
350 posts
 
Just curious, in the sense, how many companies even if they
have a good speaker, just go out of business. It is lack
of sales, lack of sales distribution, or lousy business model? Can a speaker company sustain itself if sales in the 100s or even 10s rather than thousands or tens of thousands.
pbb
1,140 posts
 
I asked the same question at AA, I think, a while back, as an aside to some other question. Nobody picked up on it. I would love to know also. High-end audiophiles are a rare group in that they love to spend way, way more for any product believing it has to be better. The fundamental equation $$$$ = great sound. I, being a cheapskate of sorts, prefer to find the best product for the price and believe that in that department economies of scale can't hurt.
bob_bundus
1,834 posts
 
Whether you're talking speakers or electronics, these handmade upscale rarities that we buy I would guess only sell from several hundred to a few thousand units at most per year. I'm not sure exactly where I got that impression though; read something someday, somwehere....
rontube
44 posts
 
Bob,

At the high end Bob is correct, a hundred or less to more than 1000. A certain very well known large company from Japan purportedly sold just over two thousand of their flagship new two channel format disk player worldwide. This is a luxury hobby at the high end.

Ron-C
agonanon
70 posts
 
For countries requiring filing of annual financial reports I imagine one could make decent educated guesses about unit turnover well within one order of magnitude, so then one would know whether it was 10-100, 100-1000 etc. OTOH that only goes for public companies whereas in the high end, the privately held are probably in predominance. Of course if curiosity is killing the cat, we could just pool resources for some enterprising googly bounty-hunter - unless some industry cognescenti begin spelling-out some beans ;)
gregm
3,405 posts
 
Financial reports, unfortunately, wouldn't yield much info as it would be impossible to compute a weighted average price per unit w/out knowing the number of units sold for each model. Especially given the price differential b/ween different models.
However, if there's anyone close enough to ONE manufacturer to give us some info, we could possibly extrapolate from THAT manufacturer...
shubertmaniac OP
350 posts
 
I do not know whether serial nos. mean anything. But my
Spectral DMA200 was s/n 234 and that was year
2/3 into production. My Avalon Radians were the 76th pair, in their 1st production run. So I could surmise, the numbers are low. One note is the basis of sales is: $200,000 in sales per employee. So if you were to know the number of employees, that could give you total sales; divide that by the average cost of each unit,should give you a ballpark number of units. But of course, I have not a clue to the number of employees at any high end company.
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