When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

@blisshifi well done on covering everything that matters.

Inexpensive drivers have relatively low distortion at low volume levels. It’s possible to make a relatively inexpensive speaker with good dispersion and somewhat flat response. Don't push it too hard and it can sound okay. Most expensive speakers do use better quality drivers that allows playing louder with low distortion. There is no guarantee it will have a flat response or good dispersion. Usually more expensive speakers control mechanical resonances better but no guarantee. No guarantee on a lot of things. Some of these companies seem to have seat of pants approaches to design.

@serjio can you make a knowledgeable statement wrt to volume mfg, markup and resale? How about the cost for a fancy product look but contributes nothing to sound? What about adding really expensive parts like ultra expensive caps and wire that provides limited or no improvement yet significantly increases cost.

@emrofsemanon I have never found a less capable system to make music more enjoyable. That's just some bizarre phile lore that gets bandied about.

My main speakers cost 20 times my digital source and 4 times my analog source. Jokes on you @juanmanuelfangioii .

@audiotroy , musicality is mainly frequency response and even the most accurate speakers need room treatment and/or equalization for good frequency response. Accuracy I would assign to distortion and I have never wanted more in a speaker.

Why would I ever want a warm DAC. Why not just equalize as needed.

I can't agree with you at all @fsonicsmith . Give me those Magicos and cheap but competent electronics with the room to match. I need a good turntable setup for some cherished recordings. The rest it's easy to find.

Large manufacturers often don’t have an industries best people. The best people don’t like bureaucracy. There is no need for hand made either. As well using contract MFG you often access better cost supply chains. Have you seen how much human touching is involved in high end B&W speaker MFG. With speakers you have independent driver companies so you may have as much tech access as anyone else. The worlds best speaker testing system is $100K only. The largest barriers are mainly marketing. Large volume will always drive costs down, but volume requires a beast on the sales and support end. Then we have that volume usually appeals to glitz not necessarily accuracy.

I love Google experts. So much fun. A Kippel system at 100K does what far more expensive systems used to do, but it does it far better. A big turntable can increase the price. No longer a need for multimillion dollar anechoic chambers any more. All an large acoustic camera gives you is speed. Much of the cost is the anechoic chamber they are often in. You can use smaller ones for wavefront studies

There was a time when Dolby did not exist. No Bose. Heck not even Magico. Fortunately they didn’t go in with loser attitude. Dolby of late has created far more fundamental IP around audio than Matsushita has. Heard of Sonos? They could gave said we are too small and gave up. They didn’t and know are one of the largest sellers of audio products in the world

You seemed to completely lacked the comprehension of what I said about leveraging others expertise, MFG, and cost structures. There is still much room for innovation. Look at Kii or Dutch and Dutch. How about the Purifi woofer from a small company with some of the lowest distortion in it’s class.

You are not an entrepreneur. It is okay. Not everyone is.

The video / audio comparison is flawed and similar. The similarity is just like audio, once you reach a certain resolution (assuming equal viewing distance), then there is no improvement. Where it breaks down is that increased video resolution means increased bandwidth. We often don't like increase bandwidth because we can see flaws, i.e. poor skin complexion, that may be hidden in a lower bandwidth image. For audio, we tend not to dislike full bandwidth, though in similar fashion, if there is excessive high frequency energy, i.e. cymbal crashes, we may prefer a subdued version to the real one. A cheap speaker versus an expensive one does not work that way. I can guy a cheap speaker that easily does 20KHz without dropoff.

Distortion? No one likes distortion in video, whether optical or at the signal level. Think of blocking artifacts from compression. That is distortion. We don't like it because it is unnatural. Unless we are listening to music that has inherent distortion, electric guitar and other things were we associate distortion as art, what evidence is there we like distortion??  I looked. I cannot find any. More phile lore. I may have to trademark that "Philelore".   No, a distorted speaker just sounds bad. It never makes a bad recording sound good. It usually makes it sound worse.  I cannot say I have ever enjoyed a bad recording more on a cheap speaker or system. I have enjoyed a bad recording more by using an equalizer. A more expensive speaker is not a gurantee of better frequency response once it is in your room.

Nope, I understood you and do not agree. Less revealing does not blunt anything. it will make it worse. That is called distortion. If there is a shelving in the frequency response that has nothing to do with cost, that is a design decision. Cheap speakers can have as much high frequency extension as an expensive one in audible frequencies.

What you describe is Philelore. Not real, but often repeated. You simply have a speaker with a shelved frequency response. It has nothing to do with more distortion (or less). A distorting speaker will make a distorted poor recording that much worse.

@audition__audio were you shocked by the number of parts or their love of non air core inductors?

@tmaker - A smaller speaker offer better placement flexibility. Often large speakers work just fine, unless they are relying on distance for integration of drivers (I am looking at your Wilson). If you are overpowering a room at low frequencies, that is what EQ is for.