Calling kenjit…
The mistake armchair speaker snobs make too often
Recently read the comments, briefly, on the Stereophile review of a very interesting speaker. I say it’s interesting because the designers put together two brands I really like together: Mundorf and Scanspeak. I use the same brands in my living room and love the results.
Unfortunately, using off-the-shelf drivers, no matter how well performing, immediately gets arm chair speaker critics, who can’t actually build speakers themselves, and wouldn’t like it if they could, trying to evaluate the speaker based on parts.
First, these critics are 100% never actually going to make a pair of speakers. They only buy name brands. Next, they don’t get how expensive it is to run a retail business.
A speaker maker has to sell a pair of speakers for at least 10x what the drivers cost. I’m sorry but the math of getting a speaker out the door, and getting a retailer to make space for it, plus service overhead, yada yada, means you simply cannot sell a speaker for parts cost. Same for everything on earth.
The last mistake, and this is a doozy, is that the same critics who insist on only custom, in-house drivers, are paying for even cheaper drivers!
I hope you are all sitting down, but big speaker brand names who make their drivers 100% in house sell the speakers for 20x or more of the actual driver cost.
Why do these same speaker snobs keep their mouth shut about name brands but try to take apart small time, efficient builders? Because they can. The biggest advantage that in-house drivers gives you is that the riff raft ( this is a joke on an old A'gon post which misspelled riff raff) stays silent. If you are sitting there pricing speakers out on parts cost, shut up and build something, then go sell it.
Showing 4 responses by soix
Amen, and let’s hope and pray he doesn’t find this thread. Anyway, and more importantly, I’m curious if you’ve compared similarly-priced drivers from both Scanspeak and Seas in any of your projects and if so what you found especially with the mids and tweets. I don’t recall ever seeing a direct comparison between the two so would be very interesting. Even if you haven’t done a direct comparison your general thoughts/experience with both would still be very meaningful. |
I tend to agree with @simonmoon here although I’ve no experience like him or Eric building speakers to back it up. Companies like Scanspeak, Seas, Vifa, RAAL, Dynaudio, etc. have been manufacturing drivers for decades, and if I was building speakers I’d have to have one big set of cajones to think I could meaningfully improve on their drivers’ performance. I’d think optimizing and using better parts in the crossover along with improving the cabinet structure/design would be higher on my list than trying to design/manufacture my own driver and reinvent a pretty damn good wheel that’s already been refined to a high level. I think those who think speakers that use excellent but off-the-shelf (or modified versions thereof) are somehow sub standard are kidding themselves or maybe just have a lot of $$$ to burn. Not saying in-house drivers don’t or can’t have significant advantages as they clearly can, but in terms of the overall speaker design it’s not tops on my list of concerns given the quality of good drivers today — or at least not until we get high enough up the price scale where the other critical speaker components have already been largely addressed. But that’s me. Good/interesting post BTW. |
@fleschler I’d suggest adding the Joseph Audio Pearl, Usher TD20, Verity Audio Arindal, Vandersteen Kento, and Boenicke W13 SE to your list given what you’re looking for. FWIW, and happy hunting! |