The mistake armchair speaker snobs make too often

I am going to disagree with Erik on this one.

Manufacturers may use a wide array of strategies to find/develop something that will sell. OEM is attractive because building drivers is expensive and slow. It also requires a significant investment in labor and infrastructure to maintain over time. Building your own (in house drivers) enables you to design something different and special and you can build it exactly as you like. 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.

OEM tends to focus on very large runs of the same driver to make the tooling cost less per driver. This is why a speaker maker attempting to build a system and does not have in house driver capability has two advantages using OEM: a large assortment to pick from (lots of companies offer drivers) and a low cost per unit to buy (especially if you can buy in any kind of quantity). They also have two negatives: 1)to get something special made for you you have to commit to large investment and/or large quantity orders that require massive money and 2) you can only buy what is offered, not what you might ideally might want otherwise you are paying for tooling and design etc (just like in house). So there are limits to OEM in what is available and limits to what you can have custom made for you based on your product development budget.

OEM solves a huge headache in manufacturing and enables a manufacture to focus on other things that might be more impactful to their product (sales). Maybe it’s a feature like Sonos with their wi fi audio where the feature is more important than the absolute ultimate driver performance. ( I do have to add that Sonos ERA 300 is absolutely state of the art speaker designed by one of the best transducer designers on the planet). Or maybe its price or size like JBL’s little flip speakers- extraordinary value there- a pair of those and bluetooth turntable and you have a $300 home system that sounds amazing! Way beyond what we could buy in the 60s and 70s. But its worth noting that the cost of design and prototyping a driver is insane- its takes years to develop and then once you have the design the cost of tooling is beyond what 99% of smaller volume manufacturers can afford. An audiophile speaker company would likely NEVER recoup that investment unless they are at the absolute top of the market. Witness companies like Magico, KEF, ATC and several others do exactly that.

Today, OEM is really the only way unless you happen to have these driver manufacturing capabilities already in hand. It’s no mistake that several OEM driver makers (JBL, Focal, ATC) now build speakers as they have the unique ability to make their own. Many OEM driver makers/speaker builders have moved to a location like India and China where making drivers is much cheaper and can actually make sense as the labor is so low and their aren’t environmental restrictions like in the west. So that leaves us with the truth that the only people left doing in house drivers have a clear and compelling reason for it, usually performance or some specific feature they need for differentiation. Additionally, most manufacturers that build their own do not add a profit to the driver separately like OEM does; its just one cost like all the others that get added together into "cost of goods" and then margin is added based on their overhead (cost of operations, facilities, inventory of parts, labor, marketing etc) . 

So in house is no magic formula to money, it’s just one strategy of many to be different.

Brad

Kota1-Now I get it! Sorry I didn’t understand the post.

Yes having a repairable driver is a great thing especially when you realize so many factors say just toss it in the bin and by a new one.

And YES, that newer post looks much better! A lot of folks don’t know what hand making a driver looks like or they think these things can be made on machine the same as by hand- which is NOT possible.  SO that newer link does credit to Paradigm, THAT looks like proper speaker factory.

Brad

KOTA1  Was that really Paradigms OEM supplier?  Sure that wasn't someone else? I find that hard to believe.  I would take that down if I were them.  

Whoever that was, it was NOT a clean assembly line- it was filthy!  The only part of the line that can be messy is the coil winding.....Once you assemble a coil and start gluing parts to it cleanliness becomes critical.  There is a huge issue with tiny little particles getting caught in the gap.  These tiny nearly invisible particles that don't belong will reduce performance or cause failure modes; your work area has to be spotless.  It has to be maintained and clean enough you can see anything that doesn't belong near your work. A skilled QC person would have a fit if a line that looked like that.   [Stuff will stick to you hands, your clothes, fall on the driver, get where they aren't supposed to be and affect that driver later].   

That glue bead machine applied a very irregular glue bead and this is not okay with a high performance driver.  It needs to be perfectly consistent.   Small areas where there is more glue and less glue will change the moving dynamics of the cone and will impact performance especially at higher levels. Any kind of mass irregularity in a moving part is not okay.  

That line is typical of inexpensive drivers (maybe even a "better" drivers) but not a high performance line.  You have to run an extremely clean facility to make high performance drive units and deliver consistent repeatable behavior at all levels.     

Here is a clip of a clean assembly line https://youtu.be/dF-Ux7h1Auk  Go a minute in or so.  Hopefully the difference is obvious.  This would be typical of a high performance (hand made) drive unit facility.  Not many like this left.  

Brad