How about these?
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/research/virtual-acoustics
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/resea...arch/acoustic-measurement-and-analysis/82-sdm
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/resea...aluation-of-concert-hall-acoustics/81-paper-4
The Mediatech Virtual Acoustics guys are working on 3D sound measuring and analysis. Both live and reproduced sound. This is basics and perhaps it will lead to better understanding of the subject of this thread too.
Other big names in this field are eg.
USA CNMAT | The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
UK About - Architecture - University of Liverpool
CH Audio Processing and Digital Acoustics | LCAV
D Spatial Audio Research at Quality and Usability Lab
USA https://ccrma.stanford.edu/
USA Virtual Acoustic Technology Lab
UK Virtual Acoustics and Audio Engineering
DK Acoustics - Research - Aalborg University
AES papers etc. AES Publications
JBL collection of classic publications and papers http://www.jblpro.com/catalog/general/technicallibrary.aspx?CatID=1&Run=1
Harman collection of papers http://www.harman.com/EN-US/OurCompany/Innovation/Pages/WhitePapers.aspx
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/research/virtual-acoustics
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/resea...arch/acoustic-measurement-and-analysis/82-sdm
https://mediatech.aalto.fi/en/resea...aluation-of-concert-hall-acoustics/81-paper-4
The Mediatech Virtual Acoustics guys are working on 3D sound measuring and analysis. Both live and reproduced sound. This is basics and perhaps it will lead to better understanding of the subject of this thread too.
Other big names in this field are eg.
USA CNMAT | The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
UK About - Architecture - University of Liverpool
CH Audio Processing and Digital Acoustics | LCAV
D Spatial Audio Research at Quality and Usability Lab
USA https://ccrma.stanford.edu/
USA Virtual Acoustic Technology Lab
UK Virtual Acoustics and Audio Engineering
DK Acoustics - Research - Aalborg University
AES papers etc. AES Publications
JBL collection of classic publications and papers http://www.jblpro.com/catalog/general/technicallibrary.aspx?CatID=1&Run=1
Harman collection of papers http://www.harman.com/EN-US/OurCompany/Innovation/Pages/WhitePapers.aspx
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When I was at Snell we called that the "Italian couch" syndrome. The owner would stand there and proudly tell you that their Italian leather sofa cost over $10,000 and then turn around and whine about your ceiling speakers costing over $200.
Certain items are seen as prestige luxury goods and others are seen as merely appliances. They only want to spend money on those items that reflect on their good taste.
David
John
I know this story all too well. I once had a guy who did not want to buy my speakers because "He wanted to spend more." I avoided the obvious response because I thought that he might be insulted. I'm pretty sure he bought Magico. With a name and price tag like that how can I compete.
I know this story all too well. I once had a guy who did not want to buy my speakers because "He wanted to spend more." I avoided the obvious response because I thought that he might be insulted. I'm pretty sure he bought Magico. With a name and price tag like that how can I compete.
Maybe I am sexist, but it seems like those things that wives buy have a sky is the limit budget, but speakers aren't a woman's thing. I have seen a faucet cost more than my speakers.
IMHO, the trick is to hire someone to make them pretty, hire someone to do the marketing, and then charge $50,000 a pair.
Vandersteen ran into the exact same problem. Twenty five years ago Vandersteen sold hundreds of speakers like this, for about $2000 a pop:
Nowadays, this is their reference. It's $45,000.
In twenty five years, what's changed?
1) They've gone from 90 dealers to 60, a drop of one third
2) Their top of the line has gone from about $2000* to $45K, an increase of over twenty fold
3) Despite all that, the two speakers are surprisingly similar. Similar footprint, similar xover points. Instead of using Vifa they use Scan Speak drivers that are modified in-house.
Now I'm not saying that the $2K speaker is as good as the $45K speaker. But is the $45K speaker twenty times better?
Of course not.
Vandersteens figured out that the 'trick' to staying alive in the audio business is to sell a fraction of the product at a much much much much higher markup.
I'm a huge fan of statistics, and when considering where to live, I actually crunched the numbers on various places. Would you believe that one in six people in San Francisco are millionaires?
I don't think that's a coincidence. It's really hard to appreciate how many millionaires have been minted in the software business until you spend some time in San Francisco or Seattle. These cities are just dripping cash, and when you're a software millionaire, dropping $50K on a set of Vandersteens isn't a big deal. And this isn't some isolated phenomenon. I think that people get this idea that Facebook millionaires are one in a million, but there are actually thousands or possibly even TENS OF THOUSANDS of people that get rich over night. (I am not a millionaire, but I *did* buy my Summas after the software company I worked for had a successful IPO. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have been able to afford them.)
Not coincidentally, both Vandersteen and Magico are within an hour's drive from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and HP.
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Well sure- and there are speakers that make a typical refrigerator seem cheap and cars that make houses seem cheap and and and.....
Reducto ad absurdum. I would add that spending that sort of money on a bauble like a fancy faucet implies very low character.
Which ever parameters anyone cares to, if the name "Bose" ends up on the product
I disagree. I think the speaker market is splitting into two arenas.
One arena is very low price. A good example of this are the 'Control Now' speakers I have. They're from JBL, I paid $100 for them at Costco, and there as good as anything I've heard for under $500 each.
The next arena is very high price. We're talking $25,000 a speaker.
These speakers are for the one-percenters. The people who can spend $25K on a speaker without losing sleep over it.
IIRC, you need to make about half a million a year to make it into the 1%. So a $50K set of speakers is only 10% of their yearly income.
By comparison's sake, a $200 set of speakers is one half of one percent of the yearly income for someone making $40K a year.
This gets into all kinds of off topic stuff, like fiat money, globalism and the hollowing out of the middle class. I could bore everyone to death with tons of data on this. Basically debt is a tax on future earnings. So when the average American has student loan debt, car debt, and mortgage debt, their money is spent before they even get their paycheck. The proliferation of loans has made people 'feel' poor in a way that they did not feel in the 80s or even the 90s.
In a nutshell, there are two kinds of people in the United States now:
1) those who can drop $50K on a set of speakers like it's nothing, the 1%
2) everyone else, who can't afford anything, because they're in debt up to their eyeballs, and even a $200 investment might be the difference between keeping the electricity on or not
My main point, is that there's no market in the middle.
Either you're making widgets that have mass appeal. And if that's your goal, you better be making those widgets better faster and cheaper. (Just ask Microsoft as they keep trying to make a tablet that can exceed the iPad.)
If you're not able to make the cheapest fastest widget, then the alternative is to make the widget with the most perceived value.
A good example of this is a Tesla. When I worked in Bellevue the Tesla was the "it" car to have. It wasn't any faster than a BMW, had a habit of bursting into flames. But it was the "it" car, and due to that, all the software millionaires I knew had to have one.
I think that explains why even Bose-like companies like B&O are closing shops:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...91053/Bang-and-Olufsen-to-shut-125-shops.html
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John
I think that your analysis is dead on and exactly the same that I went through recently when deciding what to do business wise. My conclusion was that the only speaker that I will make moving forward is the very top. Nothing else is worth doing, for me, at least.
I said recently on another thread that there is room for only two types of speakers, Mega-Bucks and Best Buy. I can't (won't) do Best Buy. (I saw what they did to my good friend Steve Eberbach at DCM.)
I think that your analysis is dead on and exactly the same that I went through recently when deciding what to do business wise. My conclusion was that the only speaker that I will make moving forward is the very top. Nothing else is worth doing, for me, at least.
I said recently on another thread that there is room for only two types of speakers, Mega-Bucks and Best Buy. I can't (won't) do Best Buy. (I saw what they did to my good friend Steve Eberbach at DCM.)
I think the hollowing out of the middle class is only part of the issue. As much as the middle class seems to be under assault, the US wealth bell curve is only flattening, it isn't really a double humped distribution yet even though it feels like that some times.
The bigger factor is that the general population has no great interest in audio beyond as a comodity product. They want a docking station to pop their cool smart phone into. Anything that plays a little music in the kitchen is fine. They want a big screen TV with enough sound to be reasonable, but no more.
Those of us who are 50 something remember that the highest priority of a college grad was to buy a first rate stereo. Discretionary bucks went to speakers, amplifiers, and turntables. The bigger the better. There was a mass market for that with a lot of volume over a wide range of prices. You didn't have to be into the music to a huge degree, it was just the thing to buy.
Only a few people are real enthusiasts for the gear now, and they buy boutique audio, the more expensive the better. It sits in their living room like an unplayed grand piano.
Everybody else has moved on to personal portable gadgets, smart phones, headphones, earbuds, docking stations. The money is around for those devices because they have currently captured the buyers imagination.
David S.
It's tricky though. If one takes the existing model, and simply increases the price, it tends to alienate customers.
What Vandersteen did was simple; they took the existing formula, and moved it upmarket. Instead of using a $25 tweeter they use a $150 tweeter, but multiplied the retail price by twenty, not six.
Here's a rough guess at the Vandersteen model:
1) front tweeter $150
2) rear tweeter $50
3) midrange $150
4) midbass $200
5) bass drivers $300
6) bass amp $300
7) cabinet $300
8) crossover $200
9) labor $500
That's $2150. Speaker retails for $22,500. I have no idea what the dealer markup is. Let's say it's 25%. If this is anywhere in the ballpark, then it means that there's $29,450 in profit per speaker pair, and the markup is 87% over his parts cost.
Now let's look at the Summa:
1) tweeter $110
2) woofer $295
3) cabinet $300
4) crossover $50
5) labor $1500
That's $2255. Speaker retails for $10K(?) There are no dealers, and no dealer markup. At the same markup as the Vandersteen, the Summa would sell for $47,197 a pair. So my 'guesstimate' from earlier today was fairly close I think. About $50,000 a pair.
The big line item on the Summa is labor. When I calculated Vandersteen's labor cost, I assumed that he's farming it out. And since the labor intensive part doesn't require a college degree, Vandersteen's labor cost is fairly low.
OTOH, the Summa's labor cost is very high, because you have a PhD, and you could be spending the same time doing consulting. So either you build the speakers because you love building speakers, or else it's taking valuable time away from the more lucrative consulting option.
The trick, unfortunately, is getting customers to pay $48,000 for a pair of speakers that used to retail for $10,000. That would be a bitter pill for customers to swallow, particularly if it's little different than the former model!
Here's some random options that might be worth consideration:
1) Option one would be to make a Summa and aim it right at the JBL M2. Basically figure out a way to get the volume UP and the labor cost DOWN so that the Summa could compete head-to-head with the JBL M2.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
2) Option two would be to embrace the hifi crowd, stop selling the Summa direct, and find some dealers. Then sell the Summa for $40K.
In order to court the HiFi crowd, the Summa would need to look a lot more outrageous, like this:
or this:
The hardest thing about these two options is convincing potential customers that a speaker that used to retail for $10K now retails for $20K-$40K. Perhaps the solution to that challenge is to figure out how to reduce the cost by half. By doing that, one could retain the same markup, but aim for a price point of $10K-$20K.
Now I'll admit that dropping the cost of the Summa by half runs against your philosophy. You built the Summa for your own theater, and you opted for parts that were very good.
But this is one of those situations where you have to figure out if you're in the speaker business to make a profit, or if it's simply a labor of love. If you're in the business to make a profit, then it would certainly be possible to reduce the cost of the Summa by half. First you figure out how to get the volume UP so that you can justify hiring someone to build the speakers for you. (That gets your labor cost down, which is your largest line item.) Once the labor cost is down, you figure out how to get the parts cost down. This is fairly straightforward. Use lower powered drivers, and a less expensive cabinet.
When one looks at the numbers, what I am suggesting may seem cynical.
I am basically suggesting that you figure out how to halve the parts cost of the Summa, while *doubling* the retail price.
But this actually isn't unheard of. For instance, the new Macbook Pros actually perform *worse* in certain benchmarks than last years model, while costing more. In Apple's case, they realized that customers are willing to pay a premium for one thing (battery life) while sacrificing another (graphics performance.)
Your potential customers are probably in a similar situation as Apple's customers. I own a set of Summas, and I don't need even 25% of they're output capability. But I *do* have a vested interest in owning something smaller and something that is more wife-friendly. If the Summas cost twice as much but looked a lot better, I certainly would lose any sleep over reduced power handling.
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How fortunate that EU is only suffering, not in bankrupcy like USA. British, German, Danish and Finnish speaker companies are continuing to make reasonable "real" and mid-price hifi loudspeakers. Even Sony and Yamaha are waking up again.
The high-end gear is mostly sold in Russia and China now I guess - USA, Europe, China and Australia are hibernating. Web shops sell most of hifi audio gear, special stores are suffering.
The high-end gear is mostly sold in Russia and China now I guess - USA, Europe, China and Australia are hibernating. Web shops sell most of hifi audio gear, special stores are suffering.
One thing that offers real hope speakers like the Summa is the Asian market.
Earlier in the thread, I mentioned that one in six people in San Francisco are millionaires. And I've met plenty of these people, they're the dudes dropping $100K on Magicos.
One thing that surprised me was the ubiquity of millionaires in China. There are 88,800 millionaires in San Jose CA, but there are 370,000 in Shanghai(!!!)
As I see it, the Summa has the potential to be a fifty thousand dollar speaker. But to succeed, it needs to be the kind of speaker that a millionaire would proudly feature in their home, similar to the Avant Garde speakers, or the Jadis speakers.
But that hurdle is overcome, there are literally millions of millionaires all over the world who are potential customers.
Well as was stated here, I am looking to stop making speakers. I will not make anymore Subs, Harpers or Nathans once the parts that I have in stock run out. I have not decide on the Abbey, but most likely that will go away as well. I was going to just stop altogether, but then a customer from Switzerland asked me if I would make him a pair of Summas before I stopped. (I have not made Summas for several years.) He has had Abbeys for several years and want to get upgraded before he couldn't any more. I told him that the price would have to be steep, but he agreed.
Then it dawned on me that the higher the model the more interesting it was for me. The smaller stuff is just not worth the effort, but a premium speaker is another thing. I had wanted to make a great speaker at a value price. I think that I did, but in the end, it wasn't a value to me.
Hence, I will be making an all-new Summa, and in all likelihood, that is all I will make once the parts for the others are gone.
The Summa is hard for me because its dimensions are all greater than my tools allow, which makes it a real pain. I can only make one at a time in my small shop, whereas I could do two Abbeys at a time. So it's pushing my limits. The company that did the old Summa went out of business in the downturn and anyways, the old techniques were outrageous in price and not as good as my newer techniques.
The Summa will be all new, except for maybe the drivers. I haven't decided on drivers yet. My target price is $15,000.
It is a labor of love, that's all. I have no interest in being a volume seller.
To "hire help", I would need a shop because mine is too small for two people. I did have help at one time, but it did not go well as training was a big hump to get over. Getting a shop is a big commitment that isn't warranted by the sales. I could farm out the construction, but remember that my baffles are cast and that is not something that any speaker cabinet shops that I know will do. And then there is the cost - $300 for one of my cabinets is extremely low. The raw materials alone exceed $300. Remember they are not wood or a wood product. It's not like I can just send out a drawing and get back a perfect speaker cabinet. Not at a reasonable price that is.
I have thought through all that you say and lined that up against my future plans (to retire) and none of it makes sense for me. Making a pair of Summas every other month or so makes sense, but nothing else does.
And I have said that I will transfer my technology to anyone who wants to give it a try, but it has to be worth my while as well as theirs. I am not going to just send out a set of drawings with a request for a couple of dollars down the road. I'd rather just let the speakers die than give them away. Makes all the ones out there more valuable so you should like that!
Sales in the US are all but gone. The B&O report of sales dropping by 42% was interesting. I saw a big drop in sales as well over this same period. From what I gather it is a common thing.
How about four speakers?
An Abbey, Abbey Signature, Summa, and Summa Signature.
Entry level would be the Abbey with an Eminence woofer and a Celestion compression driver. By replacing B&C with Eminence and Celestion, you get the price down by about 1/3rd.
Summa would be the same, but with a bigger waveguide. (12" vs 15")
The 'signature' variants would replace the Eminence woofer with a woofer from Acoustic Elegance or TAD. Yeah I know the B&C is 90% as good, but John Janowitz has done a great job of differentiating his products.
The compression driver on the 'signature' variants would be BMS or TAD. Maybe Radian with the beryllium drivers.
Obviously, this goes against all of your research and studies, but people don't buy speakers based on research and studies, they buy based on how the speakers look and what they read on the internet
Las Vegas is a great example of this mindset. You can go to Vegas with $40 in your pocket, spend the day wandering the strip, and head back home.
You can also go to Vegas, gamble away $10,000, and spend $2000 on bottle service at a club.
Both experiences are completely valid. But the millionaire probably opts for the latter.
Caesar's Palace hired a Harvard professor to figure out why people spend money in Vegas, and gist of it is that people will pay for exclusivity. It's not necessarily about what's the best, it's about having something that other people do not.
From Harvard Economist To Casino CEO : Planet Money : NPR
An Abbey, Abbey Signature, Summa, and Summa Signature.
Entry level would be the Abbey with an Eminence woofer and a Celestion compression driver. By replacing B&C with Eminence and Celestion, you get the price down by about 1/3rd.
Summa would be the same, but with a bigger waveguide. (12" vs 15")
The 'signature' variants would replace the Eminence woofer with a woofer from Acoustic Elegance or TAD. Yeah I know the B&C is 90% as good, but John Janowitz has done a great job of differentiating his products.
The compression driver on the 'signature' variants would be BMS or TAD. Maybe Radian with the beryllium drivers.
Obviously, this goes against all of your research and studies, but people don't buy speakers based on research and studies, they buy based on how the speakers look and what they read on the internet
Las Vegas is a great example of this mindset. You can go to Vegas with $40 in your pocket, spend the day wandering the strip, and head back home.
You can also go to Vegas, gamble away $10,000, and spend $2000 on bottle service at a club.
Both experiences are completely valid. But the millionaire probably opts for the latter.
Caesar's Palace hired a Harvard professor to figure out why people spend money in Vegas, and gist of it is that people will pay for exclusivity. It's not necessarily about what's the best, it's about having something that other people do not.
From Harvard Economist To Casino CEO : Planet Money : NPR