Your advice to speakers designers

Speaker designers will always get it wrong because they can only afford to focus on what they think will sell, not on what is right. Speaker designers who focus on what is right feel they can only afford to ’educate’ their prospective buyers so much and still get people’s attention...they consider the number of audiophiles already educated and seasoned enough to be discerning enough to recognize a fully well-thought-out design when they’re confronted with one, may actually represent only a tiny fragment of the buying market. Well-thought-out in a particular technical regard or two are easy to find, but the comprehensive ones not so much (comprehensive does Not mean cost-no-object). Ergo, there are not that many examples of those types of speakers in the market. Furniture-oriented, crazy-looking, technically compromised bargains, absurdly expensive, boring but traditional, etc...pick your poison.

I would say that there might be any number of possible ways for a speaker manufacturer to kill an otherwise perfectly good design.

@trelja Amen!

Far too much of what goes on day to day in the speaker biz seems to me to be based on tradition in one way or another - they’re are accustomed to doing certain things a certain way because that’s the way everyone else has always done them...even at times when the design is in other ways an attempt to appear innovative. If speaker manufacturers would spend less time trying to cash in on the latest speaker-design or appearance trends and focus instead on the ceaseless parade of the same, classic, ordinary design blunders I see repeated over and over, maybe then (at least we audiophiles) might be just as well or better served.

Sometimes it seems to me that speaker design is generally seen by manufacturers as something that should be dallied at - to pick from, cafeteria style, the long list of possible design elements - and come away with something that will separate their line or product from everything else out there...you know, you gotta have something to give you an edge in a crowded market - you know, like a gimmick. The idea of just doing what it may take to get everything right in a given design has seemed to have pretty much gone out the window.

Part of what I’m going on about here may be rooted in how we traditionally approach manufacturing in this country.

We don’t necessarily approach wholly from the standpoint of how do we serve the customer’s need. We tend to approach from: I’ve got x amount of ingredient A, x amount of ingredient B and x amount of C. How many different widgets can I make from these ingredients?

IOW, it’s just as much a manufacturing concern as it is a market concern, perhaps more so with speakers because of the extra degree of difficulty and expense of cabinetry involved. That does not lend itself per se to design freedom.

But, OTOH, what difference does it make if you can make any number of widgets and nobody buys them?

But then again, if widgets of one form or another are all that’s available in the market, then what are people going to buy??