Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

[MrkCrwly]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

What bargains? I am look for one!

Depends on what you are looking for? Newegg has been running some good prices on Polk. AV123 was selling a 5.0 ELT 525 setup a while back for $699. PE with its $25 6 1/2" two ways. Check out all of the AV or Audio forums and someone always has a "gloat", "deal", '"steal", "bargain", etc.
I haven't looked in a few months because I would rather make my own "bargains" through DIY, which means: Purchasing a few thousand worth of tools and buying multiple raw speakers to accumulate dust on shelving in my basement.

[donparsons]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

What I find amazing is on the other end of the spectrum. The recession has produced some bargains.

Unfortunatley, after the intial liquidations and company failures, we are likely to see very few good deals and a smaller variety of products. Get the deals now.

[lunchmoney]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I’m really torn on this issue… on the one hand, clearly there are a lot of rip-offs out there… expensive speakers that look fabulous from the outside, but opening them up reveals cheaply made drivers, poorly constructed cabinets, and minimal effort crossovers…

But on the other hand, I think of how I make speakers… people have asked me how much it would cost to make the speakers to the standards I make them… so let’s think about that, using my recent build on the Poor Mans as an example (pics below)

Drivers and crossover components: $400
Materials, paint, foam, spikes, etc: $100
Cost of using the shop at work for 50 hours: $0
Cost of jkim graciously providing the design and support along the way: $0
Hours spent designing: 10
Hours spent building, finishing, painting, etc: 40

So if we assume a very meager cost of $25/hour for my time, that’s $1250 in labor alone.

Let’s throw in another $800 for what it would normally cost for the use of the shop, jkim’s time, other overhead that a business assumes, etc.

Just like that we’re theoretically up to $2550 to build these.

Now factor in some economy of if you were building them in moderate quantities, so knock them down to $1800

Throw in some profit, and you’re at a minimum of $2500 for what are arguably VERY nice speakers… very solid well-damped cabinets, carefully constructed crossovers, decent paint job, etc... and yet they are still fairly small, simple TM’s.

If these were offered somewhere for $2500, a thread just like this might have been started, bitching about how expensive they are.

My conclusion? I'm really torn... it depends so much on how much attention was paid to the internals...

[brianp]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I remember some years ago when I was building some studio monitors for a studio in Dallas. They wanted Focal tweeters like were in Wilson WATT/Puppies and I set out to get some. I was quite suprised to find out that they REALLY were very special units that were not available to the public. So it wasn't ALL marketing BS about custom drive units.
My $.02.

Dave

Hiya Dave:

I think we have, in this example, a classic case of "economy of scale." If you or I were serious OEMs, looking at manufacturing a fairly large production run of speakers, we too could have custom drivers built to our specs by Focal, SEAS, ScanSpeak, or whoever. We'd just have to order a minimum run of like 1,000 pieces, and pay the premium. Custom drivers from such prestige manufacturers would certainly not come cheap -- probably a bit more than their standard models -- and would add significantly to the production cost of our speakers.

Cheaper custom drivers can be had from companies like Tymphany, Sinar Baja, HiVi, TangBand, etc., again if we order sufficient quantities. I'm not sure where Danny (GR Research) or George (North Creek) source their "proprietary" drivers, which are very good for their budget price, but again I think economy of scale comes into the equation. Those drivers would cost much more if ordered in smaller quantities.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, from grey rainy Oregon.

[ligs]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

Depends on what you are looking for? Newegg has been running some good prices on Polk. AV123 was selling a 5.0 ELT 525 setup a while back for $699. PE with its $25 6 1/2" two ways. Check out all of the AV or Audio forums and someone always has a "gloat", "deal", '"steal", "bargain", etc.
I haven't looked in a few months because I would rather make my own "bargains" through DIY, which means: Purchasing a few thousand worth of tools and buying multiple raw speakers to accumulate dust on shelving in my basement.

I found some bargains on eBay. One recent example is Infinity TSS 750 sat. Infinity was selling refurbished one by the dozen at $15 including free shipping. I bought 4 of them and I can not detect any signs of previous usage. If you need a lot of speakers for HT this would be quite useful. Very inert extruded aluminum enclosure, gold plated 5-way binding posts, 3.5-inch and 0.75-inch driver 24db/oct crossover, the whole works! They are quite listenable even without a subwoofer.

[donparsons]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I don't see the Reimer crossover that is a jumbled mess. It sounds to me like Reimer may have been a DIYer who sold to audio showrooms and he is now out of business.

As a retailer, you need to work in partnership with your suppliers if you hope to stay in business. While DIYers build great speakers, there is little or no brand recognition, and the service after the sale is a huge risk in dealing with an unknown entity especially with a high dollar transaction.

What if there is a problem with a $8000 speaker in 1 years time and DIY guy has decided to not make speakers anymore because he can earn more money remodelling bathrooms? Audio retailer is stuck making good on $8000 worth of speaker that he can't fix or he can hose his customer.

Eating an $8000 transaction or hosing your customers is a formula for going out of business.

I agree that the R+D, Insurance, OSHA regulations, Staff, Rent, Trash removal, Heat, Gas, Marketing, a booth at CES and a whole bunch of other overhead costs make a $1000 worth of parts into a $6800 speaker.

However, the DIY'er can not get the time of day from an audiophile retailer, but having huge overhead gets you a pass on your nice looking piece of crap...

Case in point

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/roadtour10/roadtour10.html

There Reimer speakers (Now out of business) may look nice with their HiVi drivers, but take a look at the crossover and it is a jumbled mass of components glued to a scrap piece of plywood. At least the $11000 Xavian (http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/xavian/360.html) has some craftsmanship. It better for that price...

I think most DIY'ers get aggravated when they see this with the lowest quality drivers available on the internet. Many of todays high end manufacturers, were once cabinet builders who bought their drivers from another source. Now they have migrated to their own drivers. Thiel and Usher are two examples of that...

[joekraska]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

Bargains:

Boston Acoustics is selling CS 26's for $75ea out of their online store right now.

Only in black, mind. Ewe. But from all the review I've read, $75ea for this speaker is a deal.

Joe.

[fwater]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

It doesn't look like anybody has mentioned another enormous cost built into the cost of a commercially available set of speakers...shipping. A manufacturer is going to want to preserve the finish on his boutique speakers, so special and expensive cartons are often used. Heavy equals higher shipping rates. Insuring the product and paying someone to package them also figures in. Some in-depth investigation into a reasonably-priced, medium-performing speakers from a big box store will probably reveal a gigantic part of the price is in shipping alone.

[HuskerNation]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

As a retailer, you need to work in partnership with your suppliers if you hope to stay in business. While DIYers build great speakers, there is little or no brand recognition, and the service after the sale is a huge risk in dealing with an unknown entity especially with a high dollar transaction.

What if there is a problem with a $8000 speaker in 1 years time and DIY guy has decided to not make speakers anymore because he can earn more money remodelling bathrooms? Audio retailer is stuck making good on $8000 worth of speaker that he can't fix or he can hose his customer.

Eating an $8000 transaction or hosing your customers is a formula for going out of business.

Exactly.

But I wanted to add this as it IS the basic main factors; always has been.

DIY speakers/design for the customer or consumer who has a high interest level, even with a pocket full of cash, will buy recognized name brands or exclusive high end speakers over DIY, even if DIY is much, much, better because:

-They do not have the time. Time priority and management.

-They do not have the skills or knowledge necessary.

-When they realize that the majority of DIY speaker builds is mostly woodworking, its all over. (Percentage of speaker customers vrs skilled woodworkers with equipment with time and space).

-Lazy

-Hassles with combination of all those.

Here's a quote I read last summer from a recent NASA retiree:

"... Now that I've finally made it and am comfortable, why should I try and do my sound system myself when I can pay the experts to do it for me?..."

[mgrabow]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I made these for my father last christmas. I figured I had $128 in parts, $0 to Wolf for R & D, and $3100 in labor to get them lookng how I wanted them. That doesn't figure tools, or renting space in my garage for the project.

If I had a distributor that would put them up to about $5k wholesale, and they would need to retail for $7500 at 25% off cuz no one pays retail. They sound very nice, but not quite that nice.

Owning a business and making a profit is not as easy as many might think. These guys are probably setting retail price in a way that they think will make them successful and also building a product that they think the market, which is not the DIYers of the world will want.

Great veneer work... Nice speakers, you should be proud of them...

This brings up the marketability. Will someone want to pay $7500 for bookshelf speakers? Probably but that is a small slice of the pie... Thus the laws of supply and demand will lower the price because the demand is not as high...

your point about "Not that nice" also effects the price. at the end of the day, the customer needs to like what they get for their money. If they do not, then business suffers...

However, if you had mundorf terminals on the back and scan speak drivers, your price of $7500 is probably what they would go for in the audiophile world.

[mgrabow]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I’m really torn on this issue… on the one hand, clearly there are a lot of rip-offs out there… expensive speakers that look fabulous from the outside, but opening them up reveals cheaply made drivers, poorly constructed cabinets, and minimal effort crossovers…

But on the other hand, I think of how I make speakers… people have asked me how much it would cost to make the speakers to the standards I make them… so let’s think about that, using my recent build on the Poor Mans as an example (pics below)

Drivers and crossover components: $400
Materials, paint, foam, spikes, etc: $100
Cost of using the shop at work for 50 hours: $0
Cost of jkim graciously providing the design and support along the way: $0
Hours spent designing: 10
Hours spent building, finishing, painting, etc: 40

So if we assume a very meager cost of $25/hour for my time, that’s $1250 in labor alone.

Let’s throw in another $800 for what it would normally cost for the use of the shop, jkim’s time, other overhead that a business assumes, etc.

Just like that we’re theoretically up to $2550 to build these.

Now factor in some economy of if you were building them in moderate quantities, so knock them down to $1800

Throw in some profit, and you’re at a minimum of $2500 for what are arguably VERY nice speakers… very solid well-damped cabinets, carefully constructed crossovers, decent paint job, etc... and yet they are still fairly small, simple TM’s.

If these were offered somewhere for $2500, a thread just like this might have been started, bitching about how expensive they are.

My conclusion? I'm really torn... it depends so much on how much attention was paid to the internals...

Your finished product looks great and your crossovers look will thought out.


If the overall curb apeal is high and they sound great the average person will never know what is inside.

Take BOSE for instance. Cheap drivers in plastic transmission line enclosures... Sound great in small rooms so they demo them in small rooms. People buy them up like crazy. The curb apeal and sound to the average listener is high so with good marketing they sell...

Since they have a huge mass production, their costs are down and their profit is high.

Now lets look at the classic thiel 3.6. Built like a brick sh*t house. massive crossover that is all PCB based (some would argue over engineered but thats another thread) and drivers that over the years have ranged from Vifa, and seas to scan speak (at the end they started making their own drivers). Retail for about $3500. They are not hugely mass produced (at that time) and the average consumer has never heard of them so the profit is much lower percentage wise than the BOSE...

Supply and demand, marketing, consumor ignorance and name recognition jack up the costs...


Oh by the way, we all forgot about packaging. Just producing a pair of double shipping boxes with your company logo on them costs about $200 if you onlu buy 1 pair. Buy 100 pairs and the price drops fown to about $20.

[dwigle]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

I think a lot of us recognize that the costs to deliver a commercial product to market are considerable and typically justify high margins.

We tend to respect commericial offerings that sound good and represent good value based on our understanding of the efforts needed to yield those results.

What I suspect many of us have a problem with is the "wanna be" commericial guys that glom on to others success with look-a-like products - products that don't offer good value compared to DIY options (plus a reasonable margin) OR even other commercial offerings.

An interesting thread would be to list our views of the best and worst commercial speakers based on value. They would need to be new speakers at street prices. Used pricing would add too many variables.

That having been said, my view of the AT tower model with a single 4" TB driver, no crossover in a marginal cabinet is an exceedingly poor value compared to its commercial competition maybe even a scam.

On the other hand, a small two way with quality drivers, well engineered crossover and a well implemented professional quality enclosure priced at $2600 could easily be justified in the commercial world.

Most of us here would never pay it because we have the talent, knowledge and initiative to easily beat that level of cost/performance standard. But the vast majority of audio buyers don't fit this mold.

Who are DIYers? There are many different motivations as others have said. For me it's a matter of priorities - I DIY some things like speakers and furniture because I can. And the cost savings I reap are spent on things I can't effectively DIY like boat electronics and fishing tackle.

[Operandi]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

An interesting thread would be to list our views of the best and worst commercial speakers based on value. They would need to be new speakers at street prices. Used pricing would add too many variables.

That having been said, my view of the AT tower model with a single 4" TB driver, no crossover in a marginal cabinet is an exceedingly poor value compared to its commercial competition maybe even a scam.

On the other hand, a small two way with quality drivers, well engineered crossover and a well implemented professional quality enclosure priced at $2600 could easily be justified in the commercial world.

Right, not all commercial is a scam and completely without merit but some of it is and a lot of it is somewhere in between. The Polk RTi28 looks like a well designed and priced speaker for example.

[fwater]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

Oh by the way, we all forgot about packaging.

We all forgot (post #23).

[ryan24]

Re: Long live DIY/what is wrong with audio...

hmmm...Just had to chime in on this one.

I am very familiar with the cost of bringing a product to the market as I am currently trying to get a prototype out of China that I designed for a client and to the 2010 CES show on time. And this is not going to be my first appearance with a product I designed for CES.

It is not a speaker though it shares similar aesthetics and in the same family and I just have to say that there is NO way that should cost that much!

First manufacturing cost are cheep in under developed countries-I know the factory I am using pays employees about 50 cents an hour. And I know companies I design for don't include my fees into each piece of product, it is simply amortized over time-because the goal here is to sell a lot, not just one.

This is not a fare comparison to what we do guys, we build one offs-they have production run and still cant get the price lower?

Plus this is not really that well known of a company to warrant a price tag like that.

Just my 2 cents