[Dick Pierce]

On May 11, 6:56=A0pm, Audio Empire wrote:
On Tue, 11 May 2010 12:23:25 -0700, Dick Pierce wrote
(in article ):
There is no intrinsic reason fr this to be. The major
cost components in a speaker are magnet assemblies,
cabinets, profit and overhead (and the ordering is all
over the map). Everything else seldom adds up to be
equal to any of of these components.

=A0I agree, but most expensive speakers are made by
small companies and are the result of small-scale
economics. Plus a lot of high-end speakers use exotic
materials like carbon fiber and dense space-age resins
for drivers and cabinets.

well, given that I am actually in that business, the materials
you list are NOT expensive at all, not in the quantities found
in loudspeakers. And, frankly, materials like carbon fiber
and "dense space-age resins" are simply not exotic in the
rest of the world. They might well be in high-end audio
circles, but that's because the high-end audio biz is late
to the party. I was specing off-the-shelf OEM carbon fiber
drivers 20 years ago, and B&W was doing kevlar drivers
35 years ago.

Also, development costs get amortized over far fewer
units of any one model in small company as well.

Again, being in the business, the amortized development
costs are a small part of the total cost of pretty much
ANY speaker, be they from large or small companies.
And, by the way, those are sunken costs, not amortized
costs. You spent them up front and you don't get to pay
them over time. Now, maybe you get to use your current
cash flow to fund the next experiment, but you don't get
to travel back in time.

Plus the fact that most of these high end speaker
companies,despite what you might read, do NOT have
very large engineering budgets.

Like I said, the MAJOR cost elements of speakers are
magnet structure, cabinet, overhead and profit. When
I said "everything else seldom adds up to be equal to
any one of these components," that included what
you're talking about here.

And it's still my contention having been intimately
involved in the business for a long time, that there
is no intrinsic physical basis behind your assertion
that "there is little decent in the way of speakers
below about the $1K level." If there is truth to your
claim, it's due to grotesque incompetence, cultural
biases, add the fact that the market is so small
that no competent practitioner could afford to be in
this business, leaving the hucksters, cranks,
charlatans and loonies to run loose in the high-end
business, always encouraged by the rabid blitherings
of their high-end magazine groupies

If Fremer believes "stereo has become an object of
scorn," he has but himself and his ilk to blame. And
while we're at it, we can line up people Lumely, Pearson,
Cardas, Tice, mPingo, and the rest of the blithering
hordes against the proverbial wall.

MP3 ain't to blame for the decline of stereo, the high-end
yahoos are.