There’s another thread going about Joseph Audio Pulsar speakers which I did not want to derail, but it is showing up some common logical fallacies and dead ends I wanted to talk about.
As anyone who has read my posts knows, I’m a huge proponent of DIY for speakers and cables especially. Not that I think you should only go with DIY but because the more audiophiles who can build their own we have in the community the less snake oil gets spread around as fact and there’s less worshipping of the price tag as the almighty determiner of speaker performance.
The myth I want to talk about is kind of related. It is the idea that we should value speakers based purely on driver cost. JA’s Pulsars suffer from this because they seem to use off the shelf components, in very nice cabinets, with perfectly executed crossovers. The thing that I don’t understand are buyers who look at driver cost, and say "well, these speakers should cost no more than x amount, so I’m not buying them... "
I call hogwash. Speakers are more than a collection of parts. They are curated components brought together by a designer and manufacturer. Those same people who are likely to engage in this behavior:
Can’t actually design a speaker themselves
Would NEVER build a DIY speaker even as a complete kit because it doesn’t have a brand, nor would they buy an assembled DIY speaker.
Would probably go with a speaker with in-house drivers which have an even higher markup
May not have very good ears anyway
My point is, knowing the price of the parts does not make you at all qualified to judge what the final price should be. That is, fairly, in the hands of the market, and it doesn’t actually make you a better listener or more informed buyer. I would argue you end up buying speakers for brands with even more of a markup and more likely to have questionable performance.
It’s perfectly reasonable for a manufacturer to charge for parts, and skill. So, yes, talking tech and drivers and crossover components is always fun, but please stop evaluating the price of finished goods until you’ve attempted at least designing one pair yourself.
And again, DIY is a lot of fun, and if you want to go that way, you should, but let’s not denigrate high value, high quality manufacturers and delers by reducing them to part assemblers any more than you'd judge a restaurant based on the cost per pound of chicken.
You won't just be allowed to critique until I've seen you demonstrate reasonable speaker acumen.
That is exactly the point I'm refuting. It does NOT require speaker acumen. There is no such thing. Every speaker designer has their own belief about the best way to do things. Sometimes diametrically opposed. Every speaker sounds different. Often vastly different.
If I was to do a diy speaker i would get somebody to do the box. It wouldnt cost thousands of dollars though. The crossover would be dsp. Passive is not only more difficult but the results are worse. Are you looking for the best performance with least effort and cost or do you enjoy spending more money than necessary?
(copied part of the post from the other pulsar thread) I just had to chime in after reading most of this nonsense/bs of people *assuming* they know more than Jeff Joseph. It’s actually quite embarrassing that people are jealous of success and pretend they have the knowledge to DIY. Heads up I do own the Pulsars for 4-5 years or so. I didn’t make the purchase after one stellar review but after a plethora of stellar reviews from all over the world and MOST IMPORTANTLY auditioning them first. Without question they have been rated and still one of the best sounding speakers in the world (yes very true) and now the first upgrade since 2012. Hmm odds are 100% that this upgrade / modification will significantly better the sound... to criticize about actually listening to something first hand is fine but to make crap up about nonsense is laughable!
Also, @kenjit : Those are my qualifications, so before you go critiquing, lets see your work.
You won't just be allowed to critique until I've seen you demonstrate reasonable speaker acumen. Criticizing the work of others without being able to make anything yourself is exactly the type of conceit I meant to point out in this thread.
@kenjit Read the article, it has links to full simulation files.
Why pay more when you can get better results for less?
Which is actually the point. The point is you should buy performance, not parts.
If you can get better for less, do so. That's what the market is about. Denigrating a particular brand solely on part cost is the opposite of buying performance.
I present to you all my SNR-1. My main daily speakers.
where are the measurements? its easy to make a nice looking box but thats not what matters.
I could buy similar drivers to the pulsars, stuff them in a box, tinker with the crossover at a fraction of the cost. Doing an active crossover would provide quicker and better results.I could save myself further time and money by doing without the high quality finish.
Where the extra money goes if you buy the commercial version is irrelevant. It either ends up as profit or rent or whatever but we know that most of the money you pay doesnt go into the speaker youre buying. Why pay more when you can get better results for less? Nobody has access to these companies financal records anyway so who knows where the money goes and how much they pay for parts?
Let me make a very concrete example. I present to you all my SNR-1. My main daily speakers.
Tweeters alone will set you back a grand, $500 more in the woofers, and $300 or so to execute the crossover well. Tweeter similar to used by Gryphon, mid-woofer used by Gryphon, Wilson and others. A bargain compared to retail.
There are those who rationalize that they can purchase very similar or sometimes identical drivers for a fraction of the price of a speaker at retail and assemble a speaker of similar performance. There is much more to speaker design than the drivers themselves, and even when using advanced software to develop suitable cabinets and crossovers the best designers spend a significant amount of time and resources in listening and then tweaking their final designs which is commonly referred to as voicing. When using a crossover designed by the applicable formulas you will only get a glimpse of a speaker's true potential and it requires experience, technical skill and a bit of engineering 'art' to be able to fine tune a design to capture that last degree of magic that escapes many lesser designs. When purchasing a properly engineered speaker you are not only paying for the raw parts but for the engineering and expertise that has been put into the complete design. Building your own speakers can be a fun and even rewarding venture, but don't kid yourself into thinking that you're ending up with something identical to some of the best engineered speakers on the market by attempting to copy their design.
So why cant you take a mid priced speaker costing say $500 a pair and instead of using drivers that cost $50 a piece, use state of the art drivers costing $300 a piece? that would still only be $250 more per driver which means $1000 more than the basic cost of $500. It doesnt come to $10,000 does it? Many of these high end speakers are nothing more than basic mdf cabinets using higher quality drivers. Even the ones that dont use mdf, are not demonstrably vastly superior to mdf. A cheap speaker uses no brace whereas a more expensive speaker uses a single brace. So for a tiny bit of mdf youre paying thousands of dollars more. Every speaker should be braced. It costs nothing to add a piece of mdf inside the cabinet during assembling.
Spoken like a man. A man that is who has never built a single pair of speakers in his life.
My guess is, you have never even run so much as one piece of MDF through a table saw.
The same people think that a restaurant can stay in business by selling meals for the cost of the raw ingredients.
If you are a pure factory, you can run on a small markup, but no one is. You have salespeople, administrators, warehouses, package designers, shipping costs, and greasing reviewer’s palms to think about.
The basic calculus is that you must sell speakers for 10x the driver cost, at a minimum. If you can get higher you are more likely to stay in business. And again, this presumes all speakers are designed equally well, which let me tell you based on listening, they are not! :D
So why cant you take a mid priced speaker costing say $500 a pair and instead of using drivers that cost $50 a piece, use state of the art drivers costing $300 a piece? that would still only be $250 more per driver which means $1000 more than the basic cost of $500. Itdoesnt come to $10,000 does it?
Clearly we’re dealing with 10 megabytes of RAM here. I explained this to you in the prior thread to this one, but you apparently just can’t wrap your head around it. A manufacturer who sells through a dealer network needs to charge about 4x (or even more) the cost of the product to cover his fixed and variable costs and still make a decent profit. Your example makes no sense. If a speaker has two $50 drivers, he’d have to charge $400 just for those, which would leave him $25 for both the crossover and the cabinet if he’s setting a retail price of $500. And if he used drivers that cost $250 more each, that would raise the price by an additional $2000 just for the drivers alone. Add a much heavier, better braced, and more attractive cabinet and a better crossover with much more expensive parts, and sure, that speaker could easily and justifiably reach $10,000.
Many of these high end speakers are nothing more than basic mdf cabinets using higher quality drivers.
That’s just simply not true of high-end speakers. Any manufacturer who puts in the time, effort, and expense to design and build a high-end speaker is not just going to slap it into a simple MDF cabinet. They’re going to carefully custom design and build a cabinet that complements the other components, damps unwanted resonances, and helps achieve the overall sound he’s looking for. This is just something you’ve made up in your own mind to try to support your extremely flawed reasoning.
Even the ones that dont use mdf, are not demonstrably vastly superior to mdf. A cheap speaker uses no brace whereas a more expensive speaker uses a single brace. So for a tiny bit of mdf youre paying thousands of dollars more. Every speaker should be braced. It costs nothing to add a piece of mdf inside the cabinet during assembling.
Where is your proof of this ridiculous statement? Talk to Wilson or Rockport and they’ll be able to explain to you in great detail why they don’t use MDF and why their complex cabinets are significantly better -- and they can likely give you measurements to back up their claims. You’ve once again greatly and incorrectly oversimplified speaker cabinetry to try to support extremely flawed thinking.
You seem to think this this is a commodity business. It is NOT. You can’t build a good high-end speaker and just slap on a 25% markup and stay in business. I doubt any of this will find it into your brain as it didn’t last time, so peace out.
You know, kenjit's entire theory is analogous to representing yourself in court, or performing a homemade appendectomy ... neither is a good idea, particularly if you either don't know what you're doing or are not inclined to learn. Jeff's speakers, like those of any designer, are not necessarily appropriate for every audiophile or every listening situation ... nobody here ever said they were. As a very satisfied owner of a pair of Pulsars, I suggest that anybody knocking them should hear them first before passing what is nothing more than an uninformed judgment
Kenjit, you clearly do not or choose not to understand the intent of my comments or this entire thread. Please take the time to tell us of your own DIY speakers. Or, failing that, tell us what cheap speakers that sound better than the over priced Pulsars do you own? No more platitudes. Put up or....... well you know.
Also they seem to never take into account things like returns, labor, equipment costs, rent, utility bills, and other costs that are more industry specific. In the case of a speaker company perhaps providing samples for reviewers.
It’s not just "drivers stuffed in a box" not matter how you slice it
plenty of hifi companies do cheap speakers. They too have to pay rent, utility bills, marketing and all the rest of it.
So why cant you take a mid priced speaker costing say $500 a pair and instead of using drivers that cost $50 a piece, use state of the art drivers costing $300 a piece? that would still only be $250 more per driver which means $1000 more than the basic cost of $500. It doesnt come to $10,000 does it? Many of these high end speakers are nothing more than basic mdf cabinets using higher quality drivers. Even the ones that dont use mdf, are not demonstrably vastly superior to mdf. A cheap speaker uses no brace whereas a more expensive speaker uses a single brace. So for a tiny bit of mdf youre paying thousands of dollars more. Every speaker should be braced. It costs nothing to add a piece of mdf inside the cabinet during assembling.
erik well said indeed great post. A lot of great commentary here as well great thread guys. kenjit assuming you're not a troll, a bit of a leap for now, I don't do DIY because I can't and am not really inclined at age 49 to learn. Jeff Joseph designs speakers for a living it's his life's work. He's been tremendously successful in a very tough competitive business. That success speaks for itself.
Not always, but often, people who complain about high prices have little actual idea of what it costs to make something. Also they seem to never take into account things like returns, labor, equipment costs, rent, utility bills, and other costs that are more industry specific. In the case of a speaker company perhaps providing samples for reviewers.
It's not just "drivers stuffed in a box" not matter how you slice it.
So the question for Kenjit remains, why are you not designing, building, marketing, and selling your own speakers that equal or out perform the Pulsars for far less money? It is a piece of cake, right? Have you ever heard the Pulsars?
So what you are saying is that speaker designers like Jeff do not have talent? Do not create speakers that can work in a lot of environments, with a lot of sources, amplification and lots of different music? At no point did I ever even come close to stating that "Commercial speakers satisfy every audiophile".
Guys like Jeff Joseph have a talent to create great sounding speakers that can work in a lot of environments, with a lot of sources, amplification and with a lot of different music.
No they dont. Commercial speakers do not satisfy every audiophile. Thats why there are dozens of choices
A few additional factors to consider. The DIY speaker guy is for the most part, designing a speaker to mate to his room, with his ancillary gear to please his ears with his music. I have had the pleasure of listening to several "life time of design" DIY speaker builds and they all sounded good, some sounded great. Now take those 4 box/open baffle/line array/wide band with a woofer et. al. designs out of the designer's room, haul them to another room or another house, hook them up with different amplification and sources. Play different music. Same results as the designer's system? Bollocks! The real trick for the commercial speaker designer is to come up with a design that sounds good to great in a ton of different rooms, with a ton of different amps, sources and on a lot of different music. Guys like Jeff Joseph have a talent to create great sounding speakers that can work in a lot of environments, with a lot of sources, amplification and with a lot of different music. Oh and they have to be able to replicate the design in some version of "mass production". Create shipping cartons, design literature, market their designs, ship them, warrant them and the list goes on and on and on. What if there was a way to leverage the DIY results ( your room, your, ancillary gear, your music) within the context of a commercial design? There are a lot of examples of exactly that. Legacy Speakers, the new Bryston Active models, Gayle Sanders new designs, Siegfried Linkwitz speakers all have at least some user adjustable parameters to allow them to perform in a variety of set ups and locations. Full Disclosure, I am an audio retailer. Only one of the above manufacturers do I represent. Joseph Audio is not it. DIY is a great avenue for the listener who wants to participate in their own system's design. The knowledge gained can be invaluable. It is also a lot of fun. DIY builds are not generally intended to be sold to a wide swath of the audio community and therefore are not constrained by the myriad of concerns faced by a commercial design.
DIY is absolutely one very real means to great sound at astounding savings. Been there, doing that and so loving it!
It does take some skill and experience to get to the point of making gear as good or better than big dollar brands. That experience does cost money, but learning is part of the fun for many DIYers.
I used to know this audiophile, he was the classic case of the guy always whining about overpriced snake-oil interconnects, especially the overpriced part. Tried telling him yeah sure, they're overpriced based on the cost of the wire, insulation, and connectors, but what about the massive time and trial and error and everything they put into it? Oh its not that hard, he assured me, over and over again telling me how many of these things he'd reverse engineered or even torn down and copied.
Strange though, every one of his supposedly just as good DIY cables sounded to me like crap.
One time he calls me up all excited, cracked the DaVinci Code, had one DIY cable just absolutely indistinguishingly as good as this kilobuck interconnect he'd copied.
Well, you want it to be true now, don't you? I mean, who wouldn't? Even if you were the proud owner of the $3k interconnect, if you could build a few more for $300 wouldn't you want to do that? Course you would.
So I was really hoping for it to not be just another piece of crap. Which it was. Total POC. Which even he had to admit.
Problem was, it turns out, his whole system was full of so much DIY POC it had everything distorted to the point he couldn't even hear any difference between these two interconnects. Until he put them in my system. Which made the differences obvious even to him.
Now to put in perspective, this guy had been working on this almost nonstop for like 30 years. By which I don't mean a long time. By which I mean THIRTY YEARS! To say he was crestfallen does not even begin to cover it.
Speakers, btw, same thing. Audiophile club here had a $100 speaker contest- parts budget $100. Per pair. Only they got a break- cabinet costs not included. That's a huge break! Even so, there were at the time several $100 retail speakers on the market that sounded better than the contest winner.
Not saying DIY is a waste of time. Not saying all professional products are better. Saying the good stuff isn't overpriced at all, and the best is really good value. Saying more often than not you're better off trying to find the best than build it.
@erik_squires -- Yup, that may be the biggest problem with the direct-sale business model. It's a real uphill battle for them.
Never heard of Taylor. Did you mean Tyler? Heard nothing but good things about Fritz speakers. Thought I remember reading he uses a series crossover? Or am I just making that up? Why are series crossovers so infrequently used BTW?
I agree that custom/ bespoke makers, including my buddy Fritz and Taylor, have amazing value and performance.
They’re struggling. Why? Brand recognition.
At a recent audio Show, myself and a pair of musicians from Blue Coast rated Fritz’ speakers best of show. Few people have the internal discernment to say "yes, these are great, and a bargain, I’ll buy them"
Instead, they revert to part price comparisons, and end up buying branded speakers which are no better values.
This is why I call BS on all these arm-chair builders.
Big +1 @erik_squires and well said. You could give me and Mario Battali the same ingredients to make a bolognese sauce, but does anyone think they'd prefer mine? Ha! Would you pay more for Mario's sauce? I know I would if I really want to enjoy my dinner at a high level.
You're paying for knowledge, expertise, development time and costs, manufacturing labor, shipping, warranty, and the final results of all of this. Like Erik said, the market will be the the fair and final arbiter of price and the success of the product. As far the Pulsars, given their popularity and positive reviews, I think it's hard to make the case it's overpriced. Also, Silverline's newest version of the SR17 is a similar product in that it uses premium drivers, a well-designed crossover, and a nice cabinet. And guess what? It's priced right in the same range as the Pulsars. That, to me, is indicative of a competitive market at work and fair pricing. Also, you have to factor in that companies like these are small, boutique manufactures and sell in much smaller numbers than the big guys, so their costs per unit are naturally going to be higher. But they still have to compete with the big guys so they're still limited at how much they can charge.
The only caveat I'd say is the direct-sale model where the dealer markup can be avoided. Yes you could potentially get more value buying this way -- assuming you can find a speaker you really like -- which is tough because there's nowhere to hear them. But that's a different business model and has downsides of its own.
Some of you seem to be implying some of these speaker manufacturers price their products agregiously and at whatever they want like they're monopolists. The competitive market would weed this behavior out rather quickly. And I highly doubt Jeff Joseph and Alan Yun are driving around in Ferraris -- that'd be the cable manufacturers. Save your ire for them.
@erik_squires I think some people who are more price conscious might do some internal calculus and decide to go with speakers from say selah audio or salk or GR or some other speaker builder that would be happy to build you a speaker with the same drivers at a fraction of the cost, and nobody would question Dennis Murphy or RIck Craig's bonafides.
I agree about the Tektons. I've written at length here defending their technical execution (mostly) but no way would I allow one in my home! It's just too ugly.
When Art Dudley comments upon the quality of parts in a piece of electronics, I take notice. Herb Reichert who evidently had a history of repairing electronics does this too. I understand your point with loudspeakers and cables. I particularly shake my head at people who buy loudspeakers with their eyeyballs-looking for futuristic driver materials and cabinet shapes. But at the other extreme-call me what you will-but I reject certain speakers with my eyeballs too-Tektons in particular. Even if they sound as great as reported, I don't want those ugly things in my house. We all make value judgments. A Rolex and an IWC may have the same cost and virtually every horology enthusiast will tell you that the IWC has the more costly movement contained inside, and yet the Rolex has more cache' and some take more joy out of having a well-known status symbol whereas the IWC is not going to be noticed for what it is except by watch enthusiasts. As a Garrard 301 owner, let's talk about plinths. That is a DIY type of thing. But even a pretty handy guy like Art Dudley's can't build a plinth for his Thorens and Garrard that looks nearly as nice as some specialists. Does it sound just as good? That is an open question. Plinths need to be tuned (IMHO) to the motor unit. A Thorens TD124 will sound best in an open plinth-again IMHO-whereas a Garrard 301 needs a very dense-but not too dense-plinth, preferably of cherry wood. You can spend $4000 with an Artisan Fidelity plinth, 3200 on a plinth by Steve Dobbins, and $400 on a nice looking plinth from Hungary. The cost of the wood is not much. It is the labor and expertise you pay for-and you pretty much get what you pay for.
Based on kenjit’s argument, homes, cars, restaurant food, and most every other item should be valued solely on the cost of component parts. That scenario is unrealistic since most folks do not have the skills to roll their own.
Some people find overpriced restaurant meals or expensive clothing objectionable. Why should overpriced high end speakers be any different?
It isn’t, totally different argument.
Judging the price of the meal by the cost of chicken at the store is a horrible way to judge a restaurant. Judging a shirt by the cost of a bale of cotton is a terrible way to judge the value of clothing.
Most commercial speakers are actually worse than diy since they use passive crossovers that have no advantages over active.
Most DIY speakers are passive, so this statement makes no sense.
In addition, I disagree with the statement I think I can discern, which is : "Active crossovers are universally better than passive." Dear lord do I disagree with that for home use.
Some people find overpriced restaurant meals or expensive clothing objectionable. Why should overpriced high end speakers be any different?
Speaker design is not magical. All you need is a very rigid sturdy mdf box. Mdf is a very cheap material. Buy the best drivers you can afford and stick them in the box. As for the crossover, that is much easier to do now than it used to be due to the availability of dsp crossovers like hypex.
Most commercial speakers are actually worse than diy since they use passive crossovers that have no advantages over active.
The only advantage you get from commercial ones is the glossy finish which has no effect on the sound but is used to justify the cost.
if we dont stop buying these overpriced toys, the manufacturers will happily continue raising their prices.
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