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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.

erik_squires
kota1
2,706 posts
 

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:

https://youtu.be/AvC4v2klsUQ

Ag insider logo xs@2x
lonemountain
415 posts
 

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

bikeboy52
187 posts
 

I,ve heard it said that once your bass has been charcoal filtered, users would rather fight than switch, is this so?

fleschler
1,922 posts
 

@kota1  and @lonemountain  Wow, that first video looks like a cheapy build in a bad factory.   The second video looks like the typical high end, high quality build, this from Paradigm.  So glad about the second video.  I saw a video of Cardas cable manufacturing and the first video reminded me of that with no quality control that I could tell and no testing after the cables were manufactured. 

markalarsen's avatar
markalarsen
631 posts
 

I love DEQX.  You need to use and pay for professional installation.  With goo equipment and speakers, this results in a reference level system. 
 

I have an impossible room with slate floors and 7’ ceilings.   System now sounds great. It is the only way to incorporate subwoofers seamlessly. 

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