This is rarely a motivator for a small manufacturer to make more money because the infrastructure and tooling costs far outweigh the additional profit of the in house drivers. In house drivers are almost always used to design/build something that is beyond what is available OEM.
I think there’s a difference between unique and excellent. Having drivers no one else has makes them unique and impossible to evaluate the same way we can evaluate small shops with OTS parts. They may also take steps to give the "impression of modernity" (from a Focal marketing slide). For instance, adding a graphite coating, which may do NOTHING to the sound quality. Boom, instant markup, zero value.
Forgive me if I’m too cynical, but of course if I was running a big-brand I’d constantly be looking at ways of cutting costs while at the same time claiming my cost cutting methods were actually purely for the consumer’s benefit. I think both are possible but if I’m not increasing profit margins by vertically integrating I’m failing.
There’s also, of course, the dozens of far east driver makers who actually make decent, bespoke drivers for cheap. Having the time and experience to cultivate those relationships is another way in which big brands increase profit margin.
Regardless of your approach though, if you are a big brand you have to pay for that factory, warehouse, repair, packaging, product development, etc. and that takes money and the only way to get to afford that and actually make a profit is to decrease your cost per driver/increase your profit margin. The other way to say that is to decrease the percentage of cash you have to pay to put those drivers in those cabinets.
Regardless of the motivation, whether purely cost-cutting or purely to deliver drivers with audibly better performance, you can’t get to success if you pay 10% of your retail to driver costs. You have to drive that number down. And that’s fine, that’s business. My message to people who can barely plug a lamp into a wall but want to complain about small businesses using OTS driver because the drivers are "only" 30% of the speaker retail is that they have no idea what they are talking about.
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@fleschler - Not only is the topic of room treatments off-topic in this particular thread, but I can find absolutely nothing mentioning J. Gordon Holt and carbon wall panels.
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@tvrgeek Check out the Beyma AMT’s. Far cheaper and the opinion of builders I respect is they like Beyma as well or better than the Mundorfs.
However, further discussions about DIY speakers are probably best left for a place like diyaudio.com which has a very active speaker making community.
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Eric, a super smooth $50 clean tweeter is not that easy to find though they are out there. If you have any recommendations, I am all ears.
@tvrgeek
You just referenced the XT25, so I thought you had this covered. The dual magnet versions can help bridge the gap for use in 2-way speakers. Even so, if you can fit a 4" midrange you can really do yourself a favor in terms of dynamic range, distortion and dispersion. The Scanspeak 2604 is also a great bargain with very smooth output.
The GE AMT tweeters are not something I would use to judge the best AMTs today.
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It seems that lately no matter what topic I try to discuss it gets turned into a discussion about multi-channel audio.
I for one would appreciate it if those discussions found a home in their own threads.
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RAAL makes very good stuff, but if I put their tweets in my box and try to sell it, the snobs will sneer.
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@musikhead52 - I know. It was deliberately misspelled because of a funny thread a long time ago.
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The single most expensive part of speaker manufacture is the laber by a huge margin.
Which makes my point, that the driver cost is a tiny part of the value in a commercial speaker, and that cottage makers can put a lot more driver value into a speaker by virtue of being small operators with tiny labor costs.
As an example my subwoofers use about $1000 worth of parts, drivers, and materials. One subwoofer enclosure has 168 hours of labor start to finish. Shop time is now $200/hour.
Let me stop you right there, while I'm not saying labor isn't a big factor, that $200/hour only applies if you don't own the shop. That's equivalent of a $400,000 / year salary and I don't know a single cabinet maker who makes anywhere near that much.
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@jond
Erik this makes no sense to me why are in house or parts the company makes from scratch inferior
Which is exactly the problem. You are equating cheaper with inferior. I’m not saying in-house drivers are necessarily inferior. I’m saying they are less expensive for the manufacturer to put in. The moment a company can go to in-house drivers the profit margin jumps for the same speaker, and if it isn’t there’s something seriously wrong with your management.
Perhaps a great example that is in the public domain is JM Lab buying Focal (or perhaps it was the other way around). One made speakers, the other drivers. As soon as they purchased the driver maker the cost per driver dropped using the exact same drivers from the same factory built by the same driver technicians.
So when we happen to know off the shelf costs we get our panties in a wad because a manufacturer "only" spent 20% on drivers (which is high and boutique cottage industry size) vs. a mega brand which may have spent 7% and no one says a thing.
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Let’s take the example of excellent $10,000 speakers with in-house custom drivers. Most people have no idea how much the drivers cost, so you never read about it in reviews and you don’t have hens showing up to nit pick them on part cost.
There’s no way those retail store speakers have more than $1,000 in drivers. You can’t maintain a speaker company for more than that. In addition, even with brands I really really like, I posit they are closer to 5-7% of cost in drivers. So they may spend $750 in the drivers, while selling you a $10,000 speaker.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but I am saying that your opinion of the speaker brand and quality will be altered just by knowing the cost of the drivers. That Class-A rating and glowing show reports will absolutely have you reaching for your wallet, and calling them giant-killers so long as you have no idea of the driver cost.
The exact same speaker, with the same review, and performance is suddenly not worth a listen when you know the actual driver cost. And this is where the small cottage builder is at a complete disadvantage. They may in fact use more expensive parts than the mega-brands but you don't know the mega-brand part cost so you can't look down on them the same way.
So please for heaven’s sake stop doing that to little brands with off the shelf components when they are great products and amazing deals. We need more cottage-industry builders, not fewer.
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@magnuman
I’m a big fan of Monitor Audio and think that they are a brand that has done an exceptional job in engineering for cost and performance at the same time. Really amazing stuff.
Going out to 1 MHz doesn’t make a tweeter audibly better, but in the past was kind of a proxy for stored energy, and lack of inductance but now we can measure that directly. Mundorfs are absolutely exceptional drivers, and the Monitor Audio can be as well. :) Sure does give you bragging rights, however!!
Besides FR there is also compression and distortion, and in this case as well, Mundorf tweets are absolutely world class. They are not hte only world class AMTs though. Beyma for instance are incredibly well regarded.
I haven’t heard every tweeter on earth, especially since the covid pandemic, but I will say that I’ve never heard better performing tweeters. There may be some that sound better, and some that measure better, and I am sad I haven’t experienced that.
I’ve experienced the ScanSpeak AirCirc motors and they are also very very good, but have yet to measure one to the extent I have measured the Mundorf. Part of why I was measuring the Mundorfs was I was talking to the folks at Raal and doing it as a cooperative investigation. :) They know their stuff really well also, but sadly never heard them.
Best,
Erik
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I'm not sure who you're talking about but I had bad luck with using Mundorf Supreme Caps in a design.
No where in this thread do I speak about their caps.
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@phusis I don't think everything JBL ever did was outstanding, but rather that they always take power handling into consideration.
There are "furniture grade" Altec Voice of the Theater speakers for sale on A'gon and I so wish I had the space for them!
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Worth noting that while there are a lot of inexpensive drivers that perform very well in terms of frequency response and distortion the big money goes to power handling.
It's easy to find a tweeter < $50 that's super smooth and clean sounding when it only has to handle 10 W or less, but an entirely different thing when you apply power to it. That's where, IMHO, the adults are separated from the boys.
For this reason alone, though I may not use them, JBL professional products get a knod of respect from me always.
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PS - Many of you making comments about cheap off the shelf tweeters would absolutely die if you know how good some of the inexpensive Vifa tweets were in terms of smoothness, low distortion and frequency extension.
The ring radiators especially, which have been used in everything from cheap Polks to Magicos, Krell and other ultra expensive speakers were very good within the low to mid power handling area and cost peanuts.
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@waytoomuchstuff
You are reminding me of the Snell A/IIIs, which used inexpensive (but not bad) mids and tweets, along with modified woofers. What made them special however was the incredible detail to the crossover and the hemispherical baffle the tweeter and mids wer eplaced on.
Not too different from the Sonus Faber Stradivari IMHO. The drivers are good, not exotic, but the wide, curved baffle is everything.
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I do want to stop talking about ATC, because I'm sure they are a fine brand and I was only using them as a hypothetical but it seems like we are bruising them for no good reason.
Perhaps the real issue is that we keep equating parts cost with value of the finished object. If brand X could make the same speakers for half as much money, would we object?
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@dekay That is a great chair, the color matches several wine stains in the carpet...
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To look at my point another way, those speaker snobs would have ZERO argument to make if they didn't know the price of the small maker's product. It could be the exact same speaker, but take away their knowledge of where the driver's came from and their ability to hen-peck the product vanishes.
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How could you possibly know that?
Because the alternative makes no financial sense. Mind you, I am 100% not saying they did not also improve quality, nor am I saying ATC isn’t a good value. They may be, I make no judgement.
What I am saying is that all vertically integrated speaker makers enjoy financial benefits over those which are not.
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@phusis
ATC btw. seems to be one of the exceptions to any general observation about custom, in-house drivers that are considered el cheapo,
TBC, I never said that in-house speaker drivers were necessarily low quality, but rather that the speaker makers ALWAYS increase their profit margins by going to in house parts.
That is to say, using ATC as a hypothetical example, even if we just assume (for argument’s sake) that they have excellent drivers, by making their own they definitely decrease the amount of money they pay per unit and therefore increase margins.
The calculus changes once you make in-house drivers. Instead of spending 10% of your sales price on the drivers now perhaps you can spend 5-7%. If you can also use cheap MDF manufacturing techniques for the cabinet you pretty much have a license to print money.
Of course, this gets us to another issue about audio gear which few want to face: Cost to make or buy does not equal performance, at all.
And this is where the ill informed speaker snob fails miserably. He won’t buy small maker speaker X for $5,000 because it has $500 worth of drivers, but he’ll absolutely buy name brand speaker Y for $8,000 which, by using only in house parts, only paid $250 for the drivers. Of course, now the driver costs are hidden from him, but it matters not. He's hot to buy!
Money is a very poor indicator of speaker performance in our industry, and I know that, I just want to point out that the idea you are getting MORE driver value by going to an in-house only brand that costs the same or more is weird.
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And as if on queue, one appears to illustrate the madness.
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@soix What I love about the top end SS tweets, like the Mundorf AMTs, is they absolutely vanish and have a glass-smooth presentation. They don’t call attention to themselves. They don’t say "I’m a Be tweeter!"
I’ve not measured the SS tweets, but the Mundorf AMTs have vanishing low distortion, energy storage and amazing dynamic range and much more forgiving of accidental overload than the average tweet.
If I'm not mistaken, the late, great Siegfried Linkwitz did a lot of testing with Seas and loved them.
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Hey @soix
I know there are a lot of Seas fans out there, and if you like Joseph speakers you are definitely one of them. I’ve not had that memorable a listening experience with them (all at shows) so don’t really know.
I’m about to do a center, possible L and R as well using the Scanspeak Illuminator midrange so I’ll have a better update for you later.
The 7" Scanspeak mid-woofers have excellent high frequency response (the spec sheet is wrong) and just amazing bass output for the size. That combination has made them ideal for my 2-way projects.
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I hope they sell a lot of speakers despite the arm chair dorks.
Me too, the price is reasonable and the cabinet execution top notch. I heard that tweeter with a ceramic mid-woofer, an attempt to build a kit with all German parts, and I really did not like the mid-woofer. I adore the Scanspeak sliced paper cones though. I have yet to hear anything significantly better.
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@soix
The high priest of chasing his own tail couldn't hold a thought long enough to do the math.
@tomcy6 It's getting harder and harder.
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