The tightest are in the diaphragm, by far, which isn't a machined part but rather stamped. Variation means machining work though, cause it's the molds that are adjusted. I just kinda threw a number out there, I am way not an engineer. I guess the rejection threshold, for certain manufacturers, would actually be lower than what I'd said...
Necessary tolerances for the magnet assembly are pretty attainable with typical CNC systems. Stuff like the VC gap... I think there's more of a struggle with magnet materials purity to achieve exactly the same gauss and flux density, from unit to unit...
I've read a bit about it, cause I'm curious about the process of reverse engineering a diaphragm for obscure compression drivers that have little or no hope of ever finding their proper replacement. Hobbyists will stamp them out of pop cans for fixing old old phonographs... so why not try with a Racon driver or something like that?
With the western electric stuff, I believe they acquired original molds and reproduced them. This would be where they reject heaps of units. Keep trying until it's absolutely perfect, cause the one mold will produce thousands of diaphragms...
I am more interested in units where a mold cannot possibly be sourced. It would also be interesting to try different, more modern materials with antique drivers - for instance titanium with a field coil driver that used phenolic. Frankenspeaker stuff that purists would scoff at...
Necessary tolerances for the magnet assembly are pretty attainable with typical CNC systems. Stuff like the VC gap... I think there's more of a struggle with magnet materials purity to achieve exactly the same gauss and flux density, from unit to unit...
I've read a bit about it, cause I'm curious about the process of reverse engineering a diaphragm for obscure compression drivers that have little or no hope of ever finding their proper replacement. Hobbyists will stamp them out of pop cans for fixing old old phonographs... so why not try with a Racon driver or something like that?
With the western electric stuff, I believe they acquired original molds and reproduced them. This would be where they reject heaps of units. Keep trying until it's absolutely perfect, cause the one mold will produce thousands of diaphragms...
I am more interested in units where a mold cannot possibly be sourced. It would also be interesting to try different, more modern materials with antique drivers - for instance titanium with a field coil driver that used phenolic. Frankenspeaker stuff that purists would scoff at...
Last edited:
Supply and demand, the Peerless PLS830983 is a cheap loudspeaker driver unit made of state of the art beautifull and perfectly adjusted membran cold stamped in a lamiated Au foil with a demodulated neodium motor clipsed on the basket for only 18€.
It’s not entirely supply and demand, it costs something to make a product. Why are seemingly similar loudspeaker drivers priced so widely? I’m sure quality is a large part of the equation.
Regarding watches, I found this video interesting. Both watches and drivers are products of manufacturing and marketing that are sold at widely varying prices, yet both the expensive and cheap ones do basically the same thing. OTOH, I don't know of a driver equivalent to the quartz movement that brought good accuracy at low cost and thus disrupted the market.
First, who makes which watch is irrelevant to this thread, it was just an example of marketing and pricing tactics.
Second, Samsung owns / used to own Harman Kardon, will you pay a premium for a Samsung product?
But you will pay more than average for a Harman Kardon product.
Would you pay Mercedes price for a GM product (as an analogy)?
In fact Mercedes trucks do not command a much higher price than Volvo and others, they have to convince fleet buyers.
There is information on the web about the history of Scan-Speak, and also business sites have information about the share holding pattern.
I am not playing postman / PA, you can find it yourself, I also have posted the information earlier on this site, if there have been changes in the past year or so, I am not aware of that.
I find it amusing that Europeans cannot adjust to the fact that many industries in Europe are now owned by entities from the USA, Russia, Japan and China.
Lack of innovation, and economies of scale have caused disruptions in Europe, and the youngsters are too much into passive stuff like playing with cell phones.
You are at your most creative till about age 35, after that you get into a rut...
Another example is Wild (Heerbrugg, CH), which made land survey equipment like theodolites and laser distance measuring equipment, which has been owned by Sokkisha of Japan since about 1978.
If you want a wow! unit, Wild...if you want a standard slightly premium unit, Sokkisha.
BTW, Nikon was also in that business, I have not kept up with that industry.
Second, Samsung owns / used to own Harman Kardon, will you pay a premium for a Samsung product?
But you will pay more than average for a Harman Kardon product.
Would you pay Mercedes price for a GM product (as an analogy)?
In fact Mercedes trucks do not command a much higher price than Volvo and others, they have to convince fleet buyers.
There is information on the web about the history of Scan-Speak, and also business sites have information about the share holding pattern.
I am not playing postman / PA, you can find it yourself, I also have posted the information earlier on this site, if there have been changes in the past year or so, I am not aware of that.
I find it amusing that Europeans cannot adjust to the fact that many industries in Europe are now owned by entities from the USA, Russia, Japan and China.
Lack of innovation, and economies of scale have caused disruptions in Europe, and the youngsters are too much into passive stuff like playing with cell phones.
You are at your most creative till about age 35, after that you get into a rut...
Another example is Wild (Heerbrugg, CH), which made land survey equipment like theodolites and laser distance measuring equipment, which has been owned by Sokkisha of Japan since about 1978.
If you want a wow! unit, Wild...if you want a standard slightly premium unit, Sokkisha.
BTW, Nikon was also in that business, I have not kept up with that industry.
Sorry, Wild is part of Hexagon (Sweden) now, along with Leica Geosystems.
And it seems Sokkia is the right name for the Japanese company, I remember seeing their literature mentioning they owned Wild, in the 1980s, but there is no mention on the web about that.
And it seems Sokkia is the right name for the Japanese company, I remember seeing their literature mentioning they owned Wild, in the 1980s, but there is no mention on the web about that.
And this is genuinely the crux of the matter. It's the same with the TC/TG9 drivers. Both very inexpensive with all the modern design required for excellent performance.Supply and demand, the Peerless PLS830983 is a cheap loudspeaker driver unit made of state of the art beautifull and perfectly adjusted membran cold stamped in a lamiated Au foil with a demodulated neodium motor clipsed on the basket for only 18€.
One can say small design alterations and modifications are all that's needed for a whole range of world class drivers. And by small I mean inexpensive. Yet the market has obscenely priced drivers out there.
Some of them are obscenely priced with amazing performance. But where is the cheap one with 90% of the performance? They tend not to exist.
Unfortunately it's all turned into a boutique industry with all the major players charging boutique prices. The only time you see the opposite is when a company like Peerless, have available, some drivers expected to sell by the truck load to parts of the industry supplying the cheap mass market.
"it costs something to make a product"...the supply curve is literally the marginal cost curve in (p,q) space.
It is ENTIRELY supply and demand. The equilibrium price and quantity of a good in an economic model is determined by supply and demand. However, there are LOTS of things that effect supply and demand. Everything of relevance in this thread fits into the supply/demand model. There is NOTHING unique about the speaker market.
Quantity Supplied = S ( price; costs [labor, quality control, engineering, materials, etc.], prices of complimentary goods, current level of technology, expectations, subsidies/tariffs, number of suppliers, barriers to entry, etc...)
Quantity Demanded = D ( price; tastes & preferences, levels of income, prices of related goods, expectations, quality attributes, etc...)
Feel free to post anything that you think matters to the equilibrium price in the market for speaker drivers and I'll try to tell you how it fits into the supply/demand model.
But...
I think the thread has already answered the question. Costs (materials, engineering, quality control) explain the main difference between budget manufacturers and premium manufacturers, but there are still large differences. Below is a list of drivers. We could come up with some exceptions...the old (no longer available Dayton Audio RS28A comes to mind) but the drivers below are listed in order from lowest price to highest price AND this matches up to (as far as I know) the order for lowest sound quality to highest sound quality. So, it would seem that the demand for subjective sound quality is the main determinant in the price differences.
So...let me turn the question on its head....these drivers are more expensive because they sound better, but why do these more expensive drivers SOUND BETTER than the less expensive ones? All of these drivers are soft dome tweeters. Is it a better, proprietary soft dome material, more copper, higher BL?...my guess is that this is the "secret sauce" and we just don't know why. Just like McDonald's French fries are the best, and they are really just fried potatoes, Wendy's and Burger King just can't figure out how to make as good of a French fry. Why does the Morel tweeter sound so good? I don't think we know... Morel isn't going to tell us... But Morel is perfectly happy keeping it a secret and collecting $800 per matched pair.
(Note, nit-picking the list below doesn't change the argument, so no need for 30 posts about how one of these actually sounds better or worse than another.)
Dayton Audio DC28F-8 $23
Dayton Audio RST28F-4 $38
SB26STAC-C000-4 $49
Morel CAT308 $100
Satori TW29D $141
Satori TW29RN $171
ScanSpeak Revelator D2905/9900-00 $286
Morel TSCT1044 Supreme $404
That is fading into politics...alarm!
You find it amusing, eh? How's that called? Generalization, first, then some understatement for saying that the ol continent is condemned because the young people are inepts and the older are halfway to the grave if not very near
Well, I think sales volume matters as well. Something that is guaranteed to sell a few million pieces could definitely be sold at a lower unit price, right from its launch. This is primarily because the fundamental things that lead to a product like design, research, iteration, development etc. are required to be done only once.
To be honest, hi-end audio is not a big market and like someone said above, there're more takers for cellphones than there're for loudspeakers, which clearly makes cellphones much cheaper, even with all those (mostly unused) high-tech features not seen in speakers.
To be honest, hi-end audio is not a big market and like someone said above, there're more takers for cellphones than there're for loudspeakers, which clearly makes cellphones much cheaper, even with all those (mostly unused) high-tech features not seen in speakers.
It goes to say that for a pair of matched speaker - the whole speaker cabinet and assembly of speakers and crossovers (for those 'ol people that cannot withstand aberrations in the last golden ears statistically approved and forum checked time) that is guaranteed to be 1% matched, the price skyrockets.
I say 1% because I simplify, but thinking of it... If the end result will be microphonized and the scrutiny is lead by SPL ...well, that's all we got.
I mean, sonority is what we seek, f**k the old adagios about audiophiles and bla bla, the magazines, the good ol days.
Harmon Kardon is currently an independent subsidiary of Samsung Electronics.
Yes, I would pay a premium for Harmon Kardon. No, I would not pay a premium for (most) Samsung Products. Do you not understand why this is the case?
I don't understand how this is an analogy to Harmon Kardon/Samsung. By the way, the GM produced Cadillac CELESTIQ is $300,00. But, no, I won't be buying one.
Industries are not owned, but companies are. I think you might have meant "dominated" though.
Can you name ANY global product/industry DOMINATED by a Russian entity?
Can you name FIVE global products/industries dominated by Chinese entities?
Can you name 10 global products/industries (excluding electronics and automobiles) dominated by Japanese entities?
Agreed. It's the young peoples fault. Said the older generation in the 1950's. And the 1970's. And the 1990's. And the 2000's. Get off my lawn. And turn that Rock-and-Roll music down!
There is a Tribe in Africa where you are not supposed to speak aloud in public until you turn 50. Because it generally accepted that you don't really know much in your immature years, i.e., before you are 50 years old.
Sometimes the quality is hidden in the enginering and the production process, the percieved quality is not necessarly a matter, the loudspeaker unit is designed to be cost effective without any performance degradations.
We do not see much of that. It seems to escape attention that most speaker building is putting together building blocks from -nowadays mostly Chinese- component manufacturers. The only distinguishing elements are polepiece shape optimization inc. shortening rings (FEMM optimization), voicecoil design (XBL2 and Purify only, others bog standard) surrounds- (Purify, KEF, Focal, others off the shelf) and cones. Even the latter in the past mostly came from Dr. Kurt Muller and now some unknown Chinese vendor. The engineering is done behind the PC, using FEMM, FineCone and Pafsys/Comsol (or similar for the advanced), often by independant designers like our own Mark Kravchenko.
Just as a provocative statement: I do not see much advanced engineering in e.g. the Satori or Morel stuff. Our own Dcbel recently also demonstrated how well a relatively cheap Chinese tweeter performs.
There is no correlation between perceived quality and real performance for a average guy IMHO, and i've never heard a good tweeter in my all life, i don't listen them anymore. There still is people to buy these things and it is great for the manufacturer margins and great for the economy, It is also very mature technology that don't need any further more research and the challenge now is to made them the cheapest as possible.
Eh, expensive digital Pro gear from Harmon seems to just want to return to a brick state. The web and ebay is full of folks trying to offload. I have been burnt a few times too
Never had a problem with Samsung, though. I hope the Korean company totally absorbs Harmon's pro brands and make them reliable
Anyone want to buy a few Lexicon Omegas with missing PSU for really cheap?!!! 😛 No? How about a 16 channel premium mixer with multitrack USB interface, fried ones?
Let’s agree to disagree on that one. I see most markets following the S-Curve model. While the market may reach maturity, it always leads to more innovations and market disruptors, such as Purifi. Companies like this focus on innovation that will yield new growth, hence tapping into the OEM markets and making their technology available to speaker builders. As for why transducers are so expensive, let’s include @lrisbo in this discussion to gather some perspectives, not just perceptions. My 2 cents anyway!
yes... This... the theory of supply and demand is very much like the first and second laws of thermo, or Newton's laws of motion. Any theory which goes against them has a very long, hard road to climb before it can be taken seriously.
