small companies making today's best products

Mrtennis, thanks for taking note of the sound quality of (at least some) small companies.

We trade off economies of scale for the economy of direct marketing, and hope that we can build a better-enough mousetrap to generate some word-of-mouth to make up for our relative lack of advertising. The internet makes this feasible; it was much harder yesteryear because word-of-mouth didn't reach nearly as far. The price of entry into the market has come down.

But, this still doesn't answer the question of "why" a small company can build a product that excels in sound quality. My guess would be, in a small audio company, product development gets a lot of free "off the clock" engineering hours from its owner that would have to be paid for in a big company if done by an engineering department. This is true of small companies both with and without dealer networks... and, may be true of some big companies as well (I bet Jim Winey put in his fair share of off-the-clock R&D before he hit it out of the ballpark).

Duke
small company

I'd like to comment on one thing Elizabeth said:

"[C]learly the small company is a risk for a 'small pockets' buyer. If one is spending money they cannot afford to just burn, then it behooves them to buy a product they can depend on."

Now I can't speak for all small companies, but obviously I share some of the same mentality. I use parts that have several times the power handling typically "needed" for the application. And in my home audio speakers, I use only off-the-shelf parts. So if I hit a moose on the way home from the bar the same night that you blow your tweeters, you can get on the internet and find replacements in five minutes. I don't "pot" my crossovers, so if a crossover component does fail, it's easy for your technician to find it and replace it.

In six years of building home audio speakers, I've had zero component failures. Well there was that pair of scortched crossover boards after a very heavy Pantera session (I use much bigger resistors now), and the time I failed to screw down a connection tightly (d'oh!), but neither was an actual component failure.

And if anyone were to have something fail, they'd get to talk to the company president/engineer/service department all at once... assuming he and the moose hadn't had their rendezvous with fate yet. Or worst-case scenario, there's nothing in there a local technician can't diagnose and replace.

A big company watching the bottom line may choose to specify parts that cut it a lot closer, as far as durability and longevity. I don't have the time & resources to figure out which part will be just barely adequate but allow me to save thousands in the long run. And since I don't have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, nor a controlling board of directors who can fire me for it, it's my call.

A big company can weather the storm of putting one or two unreliable products out there. We little guys cannot. And very few of us do.

Back to the small-pockets buyer. Actually, the hard-core audiophile who doesn't have the big bucks is the one most likely to put in the due diligence that can lead him to one of these small companies you've never heard of. Most of us are doing something better than the big guys, and if that something coincides with the person's priorities, the result can be more cost-effective.

Imho, ime, ymmv, and yes I have a dog in this fight!

Duke

I have learned that getting involved in custom work is a good way to waste a lot of time.

No one who has come to me with their own custom design in mind has ever gone through with placing an order after many hours of research and modelling and revision and phone consultation on my part.

On the other hand, most people who come to me with a specific problem, and let me come up with the solution, have gone through with it when my proposed solution was something custom.

I think many of those in the first category are DIYers posing as serious customers.

Duke