New speakers unveiled from Clayton Shaw - Caladan

What do you mean by “loss leader”?

Conmoto,

It refers to selling a product at little or no profit, or even at a loss to attract customers to a new product or company.....often times to get a good public response and "buzz" for the company. Not really a derogatory term, unless intended that way.

The Gaia feet alone are $50 each retail, or $300 for all six, the WBT binding posts are $45 each or $180 for four.....that's just about $500 just for the feet and binding posts per pair. It appears the caps, resistors, air core inductors, and wiring are also rather high grade....though I can't recall exactly what they are off of memory. Not sure about the driver costs.

Overall he seems to be selling a very high quality product for an extremely fair price, Having no middle man (dealer network) also helps greatly.

Conmoto,

It refers to selling a product at little or no profit, or even at a loss to attract customers to a new product or company.....often times to get a good public response and "buzz" for the company. Not really a derogatory term, unless intended that way.

The Gaia feet alone are $50 each retail, or $300 for all six, the WBT binding posts are $45 each or $180 for four.....that's just about $500 just for the feet and binding posts per pair. It appears the caps, resistors, air core inductors, and wiring are also rather high grade....though I can't recall exactly what they are off of memory. Not sure about the driver costs. Overall he seems to be selling a very high quality product for an extremely fair price, Having no middle man (dealer network) also helps greatly.

Yes, also the drivers (no incidental expense in a loudspeaker), wood baffle, hardware, finish, labor, packaging, cost of doing business and a little thing called profit margin which keeps  the doors open.

This might have been borderline doable in 2019 (although I doubt it) but in 2023, no way. 

As a side note regarding my bonafides, I was in wood products manufacturing for 40 years. Which isn’t to say I’m am right, this is just my opinion based on some rough calculations. And, unless I missed it somewhere, there are no images of the rear of the speaker so hard to factor in the base, rear support, how many footers per speaker etc. so I can’t really accurately calculate all costs. 

 

@woodsage So, what’s your point here cause I don’t see one.  A guy with more speaker design “bonafides” than you’ll ever know in your lifetime puts out what looks to be a potentially very high value product and you have to crawl outta your hole and call it a “loss leader” with no evidence to support such other than being a woodworker???  Gimme a break. 

He is making plenty of money. He would not sell it, if he were not.

4 woofs.....$700, 2 tweeters $150, 6 caps $80, 4 inductors...$50.....4 binding posts $200, wire $100, 6 footers $300. All prices above retail....wholesale 50% less so = $800 max. Two pieces of wood machined....$200.....four brackets.....$150.....shipping boxes $200....so $1500 max plus his labor. He can assemble one pair easily in a day and pack and ship it. The speaker is super simple. The baffles are all cut on a cnc machine and then he just finishes them 20 at a time with paint or varnish. The wire already comes twisted together. He just runs it in the channels the cnc machine makes. He can assmeble 5 pairs at once....if he has enough tables. Not bad.....maybe? $1500 a day more than cost parts.....working 6 days a week that is $468K a year over parts.......That is NOT a loss leader!!!!!!!! Of course, he has expenses and a partner and it costs a few thousand $ to go to the show. I know what it cost to run a business. However, when the business is small like his.....you can make seriously good money if you have steady business. This is what he is counting on.....and he is getting a very powerful promo from Ron.  Free advertising is best!

The above costs are what I know about the speaker from seeing the review and knowing what those parts costs. This is just a quesstimate (the actual cost of parts and labor may be much more).

Selling direct has many advantages. The speaker is very smart.....he is very smart. I am sure he will sell a ton as this is a massively great speaker for the money.

However, you have probably seen my post about making your own bi-amped fully eqed time aligned fully dipole speaker for the same money that uses the same woofs but uses 4 planars from 400hz on up.......mucho better....but you have to build it.......and if you bi-amped using 2 modded GaN 1 digital amps.....OMG!