Speakers that are a great value!


I’ve been researching off the shelf speaker drivers quit a bit lately and smaller speaker companies as well.  I’ve been finding that companies like Fritz, Salk and Tekton offer incredibly well priced products.  I’m finding that with certain models, there really only appears to be small profit margin.  I understand that when you buy large quantities of drivers, you can get a small discount but still.

For instance, I’m seeing speakers that sell for $2000 might have $700 worth of drivers in them.  When you add in $100-$200 worth of crossovers, $100-$200 in cabinets, $50 for miscellaneous components like binding posts, damping material, wiring, solder or connectors you come up to around $1200 worth of raw components. Now add in labor to construct the boxes, possibly put veneer on them, solder and put together crossovers, install drivers and then ship the speakers, the value is really quite good.  I haven’t even talked about obtaining the woodworking tools to do such a product, rent on a building, utilities on that building and the labor costs if you have any employees. 

My point to all this is to open a discussion and to help people understand that there may only be a $400 profit margin on a $2000 pair of speakers.  I think that these are an exceptional value at full asking price and that should be taken into consideration when thinking about buying speakers from these manufacturers.  
I sometimes hear that these speakers are overpriced and that the value is not good and I would tend to strongly disagree!  
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Showing 1 response by tonyrox

When I got into this geeky hobby I built my first pair of quality speakers from a mail order (way pre-www), company Speakerlab (which apparently is still in business).  12" 3-way in a box I made from MDF sourced from the local lumber yard.  Those carried me through HS and beyond, until I eventually bought some Polk 7's and a few others.  FF to the early 2000's and I bought a 5.1 set of Tannoy Saturn 8's and PS350 sub.

Now my 'reference' system is in my office with a set of ELAC UB5's, a Pro-ject S2 DAC, VPI Scoutmaster, and an old Denon 3802 receiver setup in 2.2 configuration.  Point is that I've had Klipsch RP-500M's, Jamo Coronet IV's, Kef IQ10's, and the current choice the Elac Uni-fi UB5's, with the only constant being the dual 10" Klipsch RPW-10 subs, and they all sound good and all are really cheap.  So regardless of what a mentally unbalanced troll says, it's obvious they've all been tuned by their designers.

Hard to go wrong with an Andrew Jones product.