Hi-fi boss slams 'rip-off' industry: Article in Techradar

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It's only a challenge if you make a few of them.
We diy-ers pay $ 2 for an opamp that OEMs get for $ 0.05 - if you buy 100k.
We pay $ 100 for a good speaker driver; if you go to China for 10,000 pieces you can get them for $ 6.00 each.

So, high-end is partly so expensive because the series are so small. Then again, if they would be build by the 1000's for 1/10 the price they would no longer be considered high-end, no matter what the performance is.

Welcome to the real world ;)

jan
 
Jack Bybee does NOT make a living from his parts. I just spoke to him last night about purchase of one of his more expensive components, $2100, I am pretty sure. He can't afford to GIVE me a set of these, they cost too much in time and money.
Another engineer who works with both Jack Bybee and me on various projects is now lusting after a pair of Blowtorch boards, and we talked last night, as well. I don't want to build them, he is willing to build them, but I would still have to supervise him as to the construction at each stage. For example, I spent $100 in tech labor, last week, just to make a resistor matrix for this engineer to follow. My supervising labor came for free. That is just a bare beginning. For now I have to personally select and match the active parts so that the distortion will be low enough not to be embarrassing, since it runs open loop.
Check out an Aston Martin sometime. Do they give the reject parts to an employee to throw together, cheap? Same thing.
 
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Jan Didden, you have gotten my input wrong. Please listen up.

I do NOT have to know WHICH SOURCE I am listening to, in advance. ONLY, that when I listen, I know that one is X and the other is Y. Arbitrary assignments to two different sound sources. Then I can tell you which sounds best: X or Y
Please, do not continue to compromise me with your version of how you think I listen.

Noted. Although, if I would be so inclined I could probably find several versions of that statement on this forum. What you propose here is a single-blind test and knowing your aversion to anything that relies on listening only, I doubt that you ever have done it.
So for the time being this then remains a personal anecdote, sorry.


jan
 
What you propose here is a single-blind test...

It doesn't have to be. The issues are that one preference trial is completely insignificant (coin flip) and John won't actually back up his claims by doing a well-constructed multiple trial test in his suggested format.

There you have the fashion audio industry in a nutshell. Like you said, anecdote, like my continuing hot trysts with Scarlett Johanssen.
 
Male Jewellery and the question of value...

Another enduring perspective on audio system component pricing may be found in a comparison with the costs of jewellery materials versus finished products. Why is it that for more or less identical items, the retail price can range through a factor of 5 or more?

Precious metals such as Gold, Silver and even Platinum all find their way into audio products. Over time status and wealth have been gauged by metrics as diverse as; quantities of proudly unused bronze axe heads through the glittering sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, the illuminated icons of the church, the crowns and regalia of monarchy to the modern day metals market. Albeit for very different reasons it seems that in one way or another, everyone always knew that shiny is good and lustrous even better.

In their various formats and guises are some products from the audio industry simply not meeting this kind of age old need? If so, for that particular purchasing population what relevance does retail price have and what does this mean for the rest of us?
 
@ CopperTop:

Granted...in part.

Are we here talking of the 'designer handbag' equivalent in audio or we talking Chinese mass produced consumer products?

How about home produced equipment and the costs involved? Such as simple distribution costs, warranty insurance, wholesale and retail profits, employee wages and benefits, rent, insurances, cost of making statutory returns, amortisation of equipment, Tax, et al. along with the other costs I mentioned in my previous post? The fact that - at bulk quantities pricing, components cost little is only an nth of properly quantified production costs.

My view is that this whole arguement is sterile. It cannot get anywhere because the comparisons being made are between turnips and apples! The simple fact is that people have the right to choose; some choices are more expensive than others; that will never change.
 
Cynical, moi?

I don't doubt that some manufacturers do just this. The brand linked in the first post of this thread make no qualms about using the eval board from their dac chip supplier as the basis of their dac. Some brands do however invest thousands of man hours in designing their own pcb's and writing their own software for their dacs, and I applaud their effort. Examples of every type can be found if one is willing to look.
 
My view is that this whole arguement is sterile. It cannot get anywhere because the comparisons being made are between turnips and apples! The simple fact is that people have the right to choose; some choices are more expensive than others; that will never change.

I'm sure you're right, and what others choose to spend their money on is not really anything we should be bothered about.

What I do find a problem, however, is that the megabucks aspect means that the whole hobby becomes contaminated with spurious stuff, and the fundamental stuff goes out of the window. The fact that people are prepared to spend $5000 on a DAC (based on a $5 chip), say, feeds back via simplistic Econ101 thinking to make it seem as though a homebrew DAC costing $200 must have something wrong with it, and should therefore have its cost bumped up dramatically with the inclusion of some exotic parts and materials. With circular logic, the very fact these materials cost so much and are purchased is then taken to mean that they really do transform the sound. Basically, the hobby has just become an extension of commercial audio marketing, and the stuff designed and built on a shoestring budget is automatically assumed to be inferior.

I tentatively suggest an example from another discussion. You might have thought that the world of DSP (e.g. active crossover) software was one area immune from fanciful marketing: basically, once it's been designed, the most marvellous processing filters etc. can be reproduced at literally zero cost. PCs are massively powerful and cheap, and high quality sound cards used in professional recording studios don't cost much, either. PCs are complete music sources in themselves (CD, SACD, DVD audio, FLAC downloads etc. etc.) with no issues to do with jitter* and sample rates. The ingredients are there, in other words, for the only area of interest to be the actual filtering itself - the interesting bit. But in a masochistic move, the DIY fraternity has decided that:

(a) PCs and sound cards are cheap and therefore inferior to dedicated DSP boards
(b) The mathematical equivalence between convolution in the time domain and multiplication in the frequency domain is somehow not true.

The result is that convolution must be carried out using brute force methods, which needs mega-processing power. A PC could still do it, but they are forbidden in the 'high end'. The only solution is to buy racks of high-powered DSP cards with elaborate solutions to the problems of differing sample clocks and so on. Suddenly what was an interesting technical and mathematical discussion turns into the fetishisation of ever-more expensive hardware. Where there were almost literally no limits on what could be done, in terms of filter size, and so on, using a standard PC, the mathematical aspect turns into one of how to optimise and compromise the filtering in order to fit it into whatever DSP processing power is available. The really fundamental discussions are lost in the noise.

* The PC, audio stream, and DACs are slave to the sound card's sample clock which becomes the only source of jitter. If the card's measurements show it to be truly ultra-low noise, then it unambiguously is.
 
Let me again explain my listening techniques that work (for me) so that people will not be too confused:
IF you take two (or more sometimes) sources, each amplitude and frequency response matched to each other, and randomly label them X, Y, Z or A, B, C or L, M, N etc. Randomize them somehow, with a live tester or computer, whatever.
Then you give the listener a choice. A or B, X or Y or Z or whatever.
Then they chose which they prefer in some listening test, next best, and finally the least acceptable.
I once did this very test in Japan for HK, with 3 unknown (to me) sources. I had NO CONTROL over the test. I gave the order of my preference. They were stunned: 'He can hear differences!' 'OF COURSE I can hear differences', I replied, 'It's my job.'
Now this was 35 years ago, I would be a little easier on myself in a challenge like this, today. Now I am 70 years old, and I still hear differences, but not as easily, so I often let others chose for me.
I do have an advantage over many new designers:
I have accumulated enough experience in 'what works' that I don't have to reinvent a new listening test, every time I make something. I use what worked before, with perhaps a few changes. Works for me.
 
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Not everyone deals in subtleties, Jan. And few have your depth of knowledge or experience. The less you know, the easier it is to have an opinion. ;) That's life.

I don't see it as being any different to "high end" handbags... Why would a woman spend $3000 on a hand bag...
And you can tell her until you're blue in the face that the $300 handbag is not better than the cheap one, does not make her look better, does not transform her. You'll be wasting your breath. As Jan said, some people already "know" - and there is simply no telling them otherwise. Hi-Fi, like handbags, can be a fetish item.
 
wintermute said:
I don't see it as being any different to "high end" handbags.
The big difference is that the woman with an expensive handbag, and its designer, are unlikely to claim that it reduces the mass of the contents thus making them easier to carry and it brings out the true colour of the lipstick (which remain masked by 'ordinary' handbags).

At least we know that the purpose of an expensive handbag is to show that the bearer can afford to buy it, or have it bought for her. It may be beautiful or ugly or just plain peculiar, but it will carry the designer's name or logo so that rich people (and people who think they are rich, and people who would like to be rich) will know they are supposed to praise it for it's 'elegant' design. Of course, next year they will praise something completely different because this year's design will then be "so last year!".
 
The only way to REALLY save money is TRUE DIY.

By that I mean don't buy anything ready made.

For example:-

If you were trying to DIY an amplifier, the expensive parts are the transformer, the heatsinks, the capacitors and the chassis.

OK.Not much you can do about 1,2 or 3 unless you buy second hand, but TRUE DIYers build their own chassis.

PCBs. Make your own for a fraction of the cost of buying them.

Nelson Pass has opened up a whole DIY industry of STUNNING amplifiers that can be built fairly cheaply at home.

There is a good industry in Gain Clone amplifiers that can easilly be built DIY.

As soon as you vector in anything that is unique or custom made the cost starts to rocket.
 
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The big difference is that the woman with an expensive handbag, and its designer, are unlikely to claim that it reduces the mass of the contents thus making them easier to carry and it brings out the true colour of the lipstick (which remain masked by 'ordinary' handbags).
Really? Are you sure? You can't be talking about any women I know.
The more expensive the handbag, the thinner and prettier it makes you look.
(Men have similar reactions to leather jackets)
 
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