[Dick Pierce]

On May 10, 6:06=A0pm, Audio Empire wrote:
On Mon, 10 May 2010 12:01:48 -0700, jwvm wrote
(in article ):
Good speakers, especially, are quite expensive.

So are bad speakers, and some especially bad ones are
especially expensive.

For instance, there is little decent in the way of speakers
below about the $1K level

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.

To reduce the cost, two areas to go after are the cabinet
size and finish and the magnet structure. The end result
is a speaker which is inefficient, restricted bandwidth,
limited power handling or some tradeoff of these. But
within these limits, there are no intrinsic physical limits
that limit quality. Honestly, it costs just about the same
to make the diaphragm and voice coil of a $120 tweeter
as it does a $20 tweeter in the vast majority of cases.

Another area for cost reduction the profit and overhead.
The latter is essentially managed by going to commodity
scales and finding the cheapest labor pool, while the former
is managed by also going for commodity scales.

Unfortunately, this usually means moving to a manufacturing
base like China, which puts a severe disconnect between
the market and the maker. It's not that the Chinese, for
example, are incapable of making high-quality components
to spec, it's that they are simply unwilling. I have worked
with clients that required that sort of economics and I have
seen both prototypes and product runs of drivers that are
simply stunning in terms of performance, but the factory
reserves the right to, without any notice at all, to arbitrarily
modify a product for any reason they see fit, and, at their
sole discretion, use or sell your design to anyone that'll
buy it.

But, that being said, the ability to produce an under $1k
speaker of high quality is a function primarily of designer
competence and knowledge as well as marketing and
sales prowess, both of which are in increasing short
supply in the high-end or component audio market,
which itself is becoming a vanishingly small portion of
the total audio market.