RAAL makes very good stuff, but if I put their tweets in my box and try to sell it, the snobs will sneer.
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.
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@mijostyn I disagree concerning the statement drivers are a dime a dozen. Sure ,a field coil driver is so cheap everyone can use them. NOT! I’ve been investigating boutique (but not small) speakers which have unique design and fabricated in the shop drivers, such as the Zellaton. Who else makes a foam core driver? Maybe you think their drivers aren’t any better than dime a dozen off the shelf drivers? How about ceramic drivers that are modified by boutique shops, such as Von Schweikert? You think these are off the shelf dime a dozen? Harbeth goes to extremes in his videos in indicating why the proper manufacture of basic drivers has to implemented perfectly or else inferior quality sound results.As @erik_squires pointed out, labor is not necessarily the highest cost. As to parts, the cabinet can often be the highest cost in design, material and labor but not for many run of the mill, mass production facilities (especially thin wall box speakers). How much of the cost is the box for a Harbeth or Devore speaker? Probably a lot less (price adjusted) than a Vivid, Rockport, Magico, Wilson, Estelon, Von Schweikert, Avante-Garde, etc. The most significant cost of an Acora Acoustics is the stone material and it’s manipulation into a cabinet, not the drivers which are quasi-off the shelf. |
Erik I understand vertical integration very well but you missed my main point if it made so much sense and so much more profit why do so few speaker makers make their own drivers? Because it's difficult and expensive to do, vertical integration makes sense as long as one of the parts/processes of your business isn't inordinately difficult or labor/capital intensive. The lack of speaker designers making their own drivers basically speaks for itself. |
The only reason I would need a center channel is if I was able to playback a R2R 3 channel recording The only reason you can say this is because YOU are sitting in the "sweet" spot, everyone else in the room is screwed to some degree. Absolutely backward thinking because this is from an "audiophiles" perspective. Here is the deal, if you use a dedicated center channel any where you stand in that room you can still tell what sound is coming from the center. Now on my desktop system I don’t have a center because there is one chair, granted. But for a listening room, no. See Robert Harley’s book "High End Audio", regarding Meridian’s Trifield playback algorithm for playing back 2-channel sources over more than two speakers. He writes "it fills the center of the soundstage, presents a wider sweet spot . . . profound ability to solidify the soundstage. “That’s just silly. I think. One of my favourite things is the centre speaker, because the nice thing is when you anchor stuff to speakers, especially the centre, you can walk around the room and it doesn’t move. If it’s just phantom, you walk over to the right and the phantom centre follows you to the right, just like it does in stereo — which is one of the drawbacks of stereo. I like actually walking around the room, I’ll stand over here on the side between the right side and right rear and the picture still stays the same. I mean, the balances are different, so I’ll be hearing more of whatever’s coming out of those speakers, but everything’s still in the same place, right? The vocal’s still coming from the centre, and I love that. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mixing-atmos-bob-clearmountain |
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