Drivers, this is how I roll and if it breaks, just send it back for a repair:
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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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 |
Brad, that was a clip on you tube from someone’s cell phone. The link below is a "sanctioned" video that is from a year ago. The reason I posted it is because I had damage to drivers in my Paradigm active speakers which are out of production. I called paradigm asking to buy new drivers and they told me because they have their own factory all I needed to do was send the damaged drivers in. I paid a repair fee and my drivers were repaired and I just reinstalled them. This was a HUGE relief and made me a fan. When I saw this thread I didn’t realize the advantage I had when I bought speakers that had their own driver factory. The other nice thing is the dealer network, you can drop it off or send it in. When I bought these speakers I wasn’t even thinking about the service side, I kind of lucked out.
The clip you posted is excellent, it looks like speaker surgery :). Check this out: |
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 |
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