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.
Remember the Masking tape mod, as well as the duct tape speaker stabilizers help with the coat hanger cable holder trick all play into the magazine rack diffusor .
Every cable made is a DIY that works or does not. When they work the owners do the smart thing and purchase tooling and machines that make production faster and cheaper..
As for DIY speaker building. The problem with 99% of the group is they don’t build for high end goals and use high end amps and equipment as benchmarks.. they are in the belief Crown amps are the grail .. Quality caps and x over parts cost more than most of these thinkers complete system. Let alone Foil or Litz Inductors
I do think one can build a hell of a pair of DIY speakers but at a damn share more expensive cost than most DIY think. MDF is Garbage as is Baltic birch. Look to resin based products (panzerholz, Tankwood, ) 3/4 inch fiber re inforced . 16 layer Piano tuning board blanks.. All of these are extremely costly $900 a sheet but your cabinet is 50% of the sound . Shitty cabinet and you could use Rolex drivers and get bad sound !
If you use Crown amps you are not using that gear !
yep , a good friend built his Speaker cable to save $3 and they sound like it DIY speaker wire is great just never listen to a manufactured wire. let's get that right
Regarding Ascend: I've only found information about a custom build, but no actual prices.
There appear to be threads which misquote the tweeter price ($6,800/pair) as the speaker price. I think this caused a great deal of confusion.
It is unclear to me whether they were done for a client, or as a proof of concept to evaluate the quality of the performance vs. the Raal ribbons.
Raal makes amazing ribbons and transformers behind them, by the way, so at any price, they are tough to beat.
In any event, the idea that throwing a diamond tweeter in a speaker and therefore it will be better than those with less expensive parts is utter nonsense. Crossover, cabinet design and personal taste matter. I know lots of people who would take a thousand dollar tweeter and make it sound like crap. :)
Ha! Big +1 to Eric, and another +1 for starting this thread, which is doing a great service in exposing the wackos in this awesome hobby and also uncovering how ridiculously hard it is to actually develop and successfully market a speaker in today's uber-competitive market. I also eagerly await what speakers @kenjit listens to. His own design? I think not.
And here we have the majority of the lack of understanding : @Kenjit has no idea how to make a passive crossover and believes active are the only way to go. He has no idea how to make one that sounds good, or how those subtle choices can alter the entire speaker's character.
The truth is that the majority if DIY speakers and kits use passive crossovers. While active and DPS crossovers are fun, they have their own list of issues. Like, why bother buying a $2k DAC when you are going to AD/DA the signal again after? Not to mention noise and distortion that can be added in that chain.
Then there's the amplifier issue. You need at least 2x as many amps. So getting the same quality amp you became an audiophile for takes 2x as much.
Also, I've seen plenty of DIY active crossovers that were configured as absolute garbage, and the user used DSP eq to bang it into submission.
If that's good enough for Kenjit, that's just fine. Really, Kenjit enjoy what you have, but it is by no means the holy grail for all listeners.
@kenjit - That easy these days, is it? Be that as it may, I'm done with all of that (and my wife was done with all of the parts laying around). Besides that, I'm really very satisfied with the Pulsars that I have in my current listening space.
@woodrum you need to try active. To do a dozen passive crossovers would require dozens of parts and endless soldering. with active you can do it all from your armchair.
@kenjit - It was a long time ago. I've thrown out and/or given away my books on the topic and all of my notes, but from memory, I was building mainly LR-1, LR-2, and one or two LR-3-type designs. I experimented with Butterworth, too. Sloped cabinet faces, etc.
On the way to finding them, I was listening to speakers in the $10-20K range - that was my dream budget, and I liked Vandersteen Quattro speakers a lot, but not enough to spend that kind of money on them. Likewise with every other speaker I could find in the range. They just weren't right to *my* ears.
Oh, and by the way, years ago I used to try to build speakers. Here's what I learned about that: Drivers matter. Cabinets matter. Wiring matters. Components (resistors, capacitors) matter. Crossover design matters. Porting and port size matter vs. sealed box. How much 'stuffing' you put in the box matters.
But what really matters is how one puts all of those variables together. You can't figure it out with just crossover math and frequency response of individual drivers. It takes work. And time, lots and lots of time. I quit the hobby eventually, because though I'd come up with some *good* sealed box speakers (using Dynaudio woofers and Eton tweeters - and don't ask me how many tweeters I burned through to get there) that made me happy, I couldn't make them great. No matter what I tried, I couldn't make them even close to great. Yes, I experimented with Focal and ScanSpeak drivers (and I liked both), but I always came back to the Dynaudio / Eton combination for sealed box and Focal/ScanSpeak for a ported box. And they were good. But just good. Dammit.
Frustrating.
Years later, I happened to read the review of the Pulsars in Stereophile - now I take S-phile with a grain of salt - but I liked the look of what Jeff Joseph was doing with that tweeter (not dissimilar to the Eton) and the box shape and size and the unique woofer and thought - I'll find out about and maybe try these! I called and luckily managed to get hold of Jeff himself. He listened politely while I explained why I was calling and a little about why I was interested in his design. He told me a little about his own experiences and how he got started. Then he kindly offered me a set to audition in my home (no dealer near me). He needed to put them together and voice them and then test them, so it would be a couple of weeks. But I could return them if I didn't want them and he'd give me my money back. All of it.
When I heard them, brand new, I knew I was listening to art.
Yes. Art. No way were they going back.
Once they broke in, even more so. To me, they sound like I could never even imagine my designs should have sounded, so I can't say they were where I thought I was heading when I was building. (Actually, the tweeter performance is pretty much what I was expecting/hoping, but the overall combination is brilliant.) They're great speakers. I don't think I need better speakers.
And you know what else? I think they're way under-priced for what they do.
My advice to kenjit - stop wasting your time trying to get something for nothing. If you don't think (if you ever bother to actually listen to them) they are worth the price, don't buy them!
(I'll bet you haggle with artists trying to sell their own work on the street too. How much did that paint & canvas cost you?)
youre asking the wrong person. Running a business whether its selling steak or speakers is about profit however my goal is not profit its perfect sound.
I ask because I had a pair of Ryan Audio R610’s that were great...actually they were better than great and very well reviewed. Ryan Audio makes all of their own drivers in house and I believe they also make their cabinets and binding posts. Amazing build quality. I believe they retail for around 2k a pair.
But as much as I liked them I also have a pair of speakers that were designed with off the shelf drivers and cabinets. They retailed for about $2500 a pair and they are immensely better than the Ryans (to me) and cost a a bit more. I have compared them to many other 2-way speakers including one of my all time favorites Proac Response 2.5’s and they are better, especially the bass. They are the speakers I have always judged other speakers by within that price range. In fact I would spend twice as much on a pair if I had to. The secret sauce is the crossover. The question is am I a sucker? Am I getting ripped off because the designer spent less on parts?
I have become very good friends with the speaker designer through the years and he is now retired. I recall a conversation we had where he told me that even though he kept his costs low and sold his speakers at a relatively low price, the best year he ever had making speakers netted him a measly profit of around $30k.
The performance of a speaker depends on the parts. All things being equal, better drivers gives more power handling more dynamics less distortion and more detail. If youre paying 8000 bucks on a pair of speakers which uses drivers costing a couple hundred bucks then obviously most of the money is not going into the product youre buying. Youre getting less bang per buck.
All the excuses cited about the rent, running costs is hogwash. I want my money being used maximally on the product not on running costs, which doesnt benefit me. Its funny how nobody has mentioned greed and profit as if theyre not factors that determine the price. If I pay 8000 bucks then i want my moneys worth. if not, its overpriced simple as that.
Its a fallacy that buying a commercial speaker means its designed by an expert that knows what theyre doing. Hogwash. They dont know how much baffle step compensation is needed or preferred they dont know whether you prefer an infinity slope or linkwitz riley or bessel, theyre just guessing. Theyre just designing a product that appeals to as many audiophiles as possible to maximise sales. Diy is one way to avoid all that and design a speaker that is customised to YOUR preferences, room acoustics and music. Saving money is a byproduct.
Yeah, you’re right. From your completely uninformed and ignorant reading of a simple graph, you obviously have nailed it. You can now build your own Pulsar on the cheap. Oh, but then there’s this:
From Jeff Joseph as of today:
“The filters we use are asymmetrical, there is a very steep slope on the woofer and a gentler slope on the tweeter. This infinite slope topology differs from conventional filters in several ways. The implementation is not as steep as our earliest designs, because I found this to be the best sounding trade off of filter q and driver integration.
Compared to slow slope filters, ours confines most of the overlap between the drivers to below the crossover point, where wavelengths are longer. This prevents the lobing effects of wave interference. The speakers balance through crossover remains intact along a broad vertical axis.
The other major benefit is that we can derive the full benefits of using metal cone woofers because the special filter effectively suppresses the high frequency ringing the stiff cones exhibit. A second order filter wouldn’t come close to doing that. ( the metal woofers are typically +13 dB at the hf breakup frequency relative to their usable output, and a 2nd order filter only rolls off at 12dB per octave)”
@kenjit — does that answer your question?
How you gonna replicate this without violating a patent? Best of luck with that buddy! Just go home and lick your ill-informed and ignorant wounds. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and no basis for your claims, and if you try to come back at this in any misinformed way, I will have Jeff come back and smack down any other uninformed and misguided crap u try to lay down. Live in ur own silly world dude.
@kenjit -- Ascend Acoustics sells direct, not through a dealer network.
@wildfoxinn -- I don’t even see a model like that on the Ascend Acoustics website, so not sure what speaker your referring to. But anyway, there absolutely is some voodoo magic in the Pulsar -- it’s the infinite slope crossover. It’s patented, so in fact other manufacturers can not duplicate it. And a lot of us think it is precisely the crossover that does indeed make the Pulsars, and all other JA speakers, uniquely special. The fact that they’ve piled up a bunch of very positive reviews, measure very well, and have tons of fans and owners all attest that there are lots of things special about them.
Pricing differences between the Pulsars and these mythical AA speakers is apples to oranges, and the AA speakers, if they even exist, would have to double in price to sell through dealers. And BTW, there are a ton of variables in how a speaker ultimately sounds, and drivers are only one.
So you can GUARANTEE the Pulsars would lose in a head-to-head against these mythical AA speakers can you? Did you hear both back to back in the same system? If not, your opinion is worth precisely zero here. And I highly doubt you did unless you owned both or brought the AA speakers to a JA dealer. And even if you did manage to hear them in the same system, which I HIGHLY doubt, we all hear differently and value different things. So don’t come riding in here on your high horse (and 26 posts) and think you can guarantee anything to anyone here. That is just ignorant and hugely arrogant.
I’m a fan of Ascend Acoustics too, so by all means please reveal which magic speakers you’re referring to here. Now back to my bolognese.
BTW, here’s a complete list of AA speakers from their website:
Stereo Pairs
Code Name Price 9HT20SBM2 HTM-200 SE pair $298.00 Add One To Basket 9CB17SBM2 ** Sale: CBM-170 SE pair $298.00 Add One To Basket 9CM34SBM2 CMT-340 SE mains $568.00 Add One To Basket 9SRM1PB2 ** Sale: Sierra-1 pair, piano black $763.30 Add One To Basket 9SRM1NT2 ** Sale: Sierra-1 pair, natural $720.80 Add One To Basket 9SRM1PPBS ** Sale: Sierra-1 pair B-Stock $678.40 Add One To Basket SRT2 Sierra Tower pair $1,998.00 Add One To Basket 9SRM1SE2 ** Sale: Sierra-1 pair, satin espresso $720.80 Add One To Basket 9SRM1SC2 ** Sale: Sierra-1 pair, satin dark cherry $720.80 Add One To Basket 9SRM2PP Sierra-2 pair $1,448.00 Add One To Basket 9SRLPP Sierra Luna pair $1,148.00 Add One To Basket
Hi Gang, The cost of the Seas Diamond is $6,800 for a matched pair (only sold in pairs), and I think people are misreading that as the price of the speakers. Can anyone point me to the price of the actual Ascend speakers?
JA at Stereophile did a _terrible_ job of reviewing the Crystal Cable Minissimo Diamonds which are $20k.
But again, we are weighing the cost of the steak, instead of thinking about the satisfaction of the meal. I’ve heard plenty of diamond and Be tweets I thought were crap sounding. No one is here talking about B&W and how much they overcharge for their drivers, because no one has any idea how much they cost. Same for Focal.
Measurably, and audibly, the quality of "custom" or in house drivers is an absolute crap shoot. But hey, the price is hidden. It’s like eating a rare dinosaur. Well, it’s $55,000, and I don’t know what the meat costs, but others say it’s good ...
So again, as a DIYer, and audiophile, I think these are nonsense ways to evaluate speakers.
If this is you, then go eat at Burger King every day, and stand outside a nice steak restaurant and tell the diners they are being overcharged.
Ascend Acoustics sells a 2-way monitor with the Seas flagship diamond tweeter and Excel woofer and sells it for less than the retail price of the Pulsars
That seems to contradict what was said earlier by @soix
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.
I wish someone would start a speaker co. invest in the tech to develope their own drivers, build quality custom cabinets and then design and bring to market a speaker that sounds better than the Pulsars and sell them for the cost of materials. I’d jump at such a bargain. It would be a good run for audiophiles while it lasted! Which wouldn’t be very long.
I don’t see anyone suggesting the equivalent voodoo with the JA speakers. But the fact you are referring strictly to parts comparisons is I think to miss the point many are making in this thread.
Speaker designers end up voicing speakers in their own way - whatever parts they use. Given this, we may find ourselves really liking or preferring the way one speaker is voiced over another.
I’ve heard and auditioned a great number of speakers, many of which use proprietary drivers, or more expensive drivers than the JA speakers.But for whatever reason I just preferred the sound of the JA speakers. I did not hear that particular nature of "quietness/black background/complete lack of grain" in any of the other speakers that I hear every time I listen to the JA speakers. Their voicing seem to capture a wonderful combination of clarity, lack of etch along with a warmth voiced in to the sound so it still retains a really human, organic quality. If I heard those qualities to the same degree in some other speaker, it would be on my list. But I didn’t hear it, no matter how much more expensive the other speaker parts were.
Not saying the JA speakers are objectively better of course, just that they had a distinct sound to my ears that I preferred.
Because so much of the secret sauce of speaker design is in the crossover and other choices that create the voice of the speaker, pointing to the mere fact that another company - Ascend Acoustics - makes a box using more expensive drivers in no way guarantees those who like the JA sound would like the sound of the AA speakers "better."Parts quality alone doesn’t guarantee this. The speaker designer may use similar drivers, but the sound will end up reflecting the specific goals/taste of the designer.
I don’t personally want to wade into the DIY vs Pulsars camp, but I do object to some people in some of the older Pulsar threads who having been hyping the Pulsars as if no other company can do the same thing with off-the shelf drivers as if JA had used actual voodoo or magic on these speakers. These aren’t even the top of the line Seas drivers, and yet some think the Pulsars are uniquely special. For those that believe that, Ascend Acoustics sells a 2-way monitor with the Seas flagship diamond tweeter and Excel woofer and sells it for less than the retail price of the Pulsars. I guarantee you the Pulsars aren’t going to win a head-to-head between these two speakers as I’ve heard both.
The best analogy I could come up with this type of reasoning is people believing their company had created something so amazing with Seas Prestige drivers that another company couldn’t do better even with Seas Excel drivers.
Soix thats why I said “one could” vs “anyone can”. That was assuming no formal culinary training but had a basic grasp on how to cook a steak you “could” pull off a meal you would get at a “decent” steakhouse I didnt say the best. Not sure what happened in your situation but it sounds like you made a huge mistake somewhere along the way. Hopefully you fair better with your Bolognese which is much more difficult :)
kenjits proposal is similar....if one had a basic grasp of using tools....they could buy everything they needed from Madisound including cabinet and crossovers and with no skills at designing a speaker whatsoever, build one. Not the best but decent.
But that really wasn’t the crux of my point, I was making a statement about determining the value of a product based solely on the cost of the raw materials alone while ignoring the hidden costs and the skill involved to make something better than decent which has to be priced accordingly.
For instance, one could go to a butcher shop and buy a prime grade cut of steak, go home and fire up the grill,
I’ll just stop you there. I went to a respected butcher and bought some beautiful prime rib eyes, fired up the grill and still ended up with mediocre steaks. In the end, no matter whether it’s food or cars or anything else, it’s all about knowing what the hell what you’re doing in the end -- and the all-important final result. If I want a transcendant cuilinary experience, I’m paying a premium because I am NOT going to create that myself. Some things are just worth paying for!
Here’s another apt analogy. If you’re going skydiving and some guy offers you a half-price deal because he’s only charging you for parts plus a small premium but has never gone skydiving before, would you do that or would you pay more and go with an outfit that’s experienced and has done hundreds of successful drops with no fatalities? Yeah, I know I bowed out of this thread, but I had some downtime as my bolognese sauce is now simmering for a couple hours.
@chrshanl37 As someone who makes a living selling wine to restaurants I know exactly what you mean. The overall cost of doing business is lost on people who just focus on one thing as kenjit is doing.
Another interesting thread Erik. As a Chef I can certainly appreciate the food analogy here.
For instance, one could go to a butcher shop and buy a prime grade cut of steak, go home and fire up the grill, throw in a baked potato, steam some broccoli or grill some asparagus and couple that with a nice bottle of wine and essentially re-create what you could get at a decent steak house for a fraction of the cost. This is a very easy thing to do and requires very little culinary skill or knowledge. Which seems to be the premise of kenjits argument.
However if you are looking for a true gastronomic experience where ingredients are being paired or cooked in a very technical manner requires a true craftsman who has invested years into honing their skills and expanding their knowledge. It is much harder for the layman to re-create that.
Throw on top of that entire dining experience from the impeccable service to the ambiance and you then begin to see what you are truly paying for.
The problem with the argument is scalability. You cannot just stuff speakers into a box and say they are only worth x amount because thats what you paid for them any more than you can say a meal is only worth the price of the ingredients. In order to scale it into a business you have to take on the ancillary costs.
Many who have never run a business have no idea that there are costs involved that the consumer cannot even conceive of. Restaurants are among the worst with average margins of about 4-5 percent. It’s quite common for people who have enjoyed big successes in typical business get in to the restaurant game and lose everything.
I suspect audio, especially speaker building is very similar in that regard in so much as the hidden costs to scale it would probably come as a shock to most people.
This could go on forever. I’ve decided to not continue banging my head against this ignorant, uninformed, and irrational brick wall. In fact, we’d probably have an easier time explaining these simple concepts to an actual brick wall. Me, I’m gonna take the time I would’ve wasted here and do something productive like learn how to make a good bolognese sauce.
Ill just end with this...@kenjit, do you even realize that between this and the prior thread there's not one audiophile here who agrees with your point of view? Doesn't that say anything to you at all?
"after all, it’s not easy banging your bleeding heart against some mad bugger’s wall." - Pink Floyd
If you don't know the effort it takes to build something you have little business critiquing based on part cost. It's like, you value parts, but not skill or labor. Imagine being a plumber, and only being allowed to charge for the pipes. What a ridiculous setup.
Thanks Kenjit for demonstrating every single fallacy I meant to point out at the top of the thread.
Are you looking for the best performance with least effort and cost or do you enjoy spending more money than necessary?
You really just can’t grok this issue, can you?
If I go to a local restaurant with a great chef and enjoy some fine dining am I "spending more money than necessary?" Of course not. I could potentially spend the time learning to cook at that level myself, shop all over for the ingredients, and keep trying until I cook a good meal.
But....
Since I DON’T WANT to spend my time that way, and also can’t be even guaranteed I’d match the talent of the chef in any case, I make the totally rational decision to spend extra money having a professional chef cook for me.
Similarly, yes speakers sound different of course. And if it’s the case that a Jeff Joseph design stands out to me as just what I want, the alternative you seem to imagine is that I become a DIY speaker designer. So I’d have to spend significant time and resources taking up a craft that I don’t want to do in the first place, and then hope to hell that I somehow match the results of someone with years of experience and whose designs have been vetted as outstanding by reviewers and listeners, which measure really well etc.
But I don’t want to! We all make the rational decisions on how to spend our time on this earth, and most of us don’t want to learn a craft instead of make a purchase. That’s why people pay for services and products made by other people!!! When you have other people do things for you...it costs MORE than if you do it because you are paying for THEIR labor, knowledge, and business overhead.
Why you keep ignoring this fundamental principle of an economy to keep implying one is "needlessly spending too much" just because ’you could do it yourself’ is bizarre.
What a stupid, and utterly naive dichotomy you have going there. And saying things like this:
It does NOT require speaker acumen. There is no such thing.
Immediately removes you from any rational consideration. You don't know what you are talking about.
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