Thank you for your feedback and reflections. With regards to pricing: I think this is an old discussion on this forum (and any other forum), and it's ultimately fruitless. Just figuring out the parts of a speaker and adding that up doesn't begin to tell you the cost of bringing a commercial speaker to the market - so I won't even go into that discussion. But I can tell you that retail price on a typical speaker that has gone through distributor and retailer is typically 6-10x of cost price of components / build price of a speaker - and we are nowhere near that.
Right, but estimating the price of the drivers, cabinet manufacturing costs, shipping, engineering and a fair wage can give one a pretty good idea. Especially if they are in fabrication and manufacturing for 30 years or more. It also allows an idea what profit margins are at least competitive. Again, not knocking your design, your methods or anything else. I am just stating what "I", and others who know about speaker building and parts would likely consider. Is part of why I didn't vote.
That being said, it's also worth nothing that the job of the distributor/dealer is not meaningless. So when they are not there, some of that work must still be done by the manufacturer directly, including things like showroom, going to hifi shows, promotion / advertisment, etc, which is a bigger part of the cost of products today than most people realize. So the cost of the distributor/retailer doesn't go away completely in an internet direct setup.
Did not say the job of the distributor is meaningless, just that it is often monopolized and way overpriced. Here at least, if you want to get products on certain store shelves, you have to belong to that club. This adds a lot of parasitic costs to the consumer. In this country, it tends to pretty much eliminate startups from competing at all in the mainstream.
What I would also like to comment is this: "Gone are the heaps of prototype trials and failures since computers have taken so much of the guesswork out of such things" <- You can certainly simulate drivers and enclosures, that's been possible for a long time, but just dropping random drivers into a box after simulating crossovers is pretty far from building a good speaker.
I remember watching a rather well known builder where I grew up, who was well known in his later years for designing (not just speakers, but drivers too) speakers using a slide rule for all his electronic calculations. He had no computer software to tell him what was even feasible as a match to start with. Never said anything about dropping "random" drivers in a box. These days, driver manufacturers of any worth, are adding all of the drivers values online. One can almost instantaneously find (at least the starting point) possible matches in a matter of minutes.
We've spent months and months (and months) on both measurements and listening sessions for all our products. Development of our latest speaker, the Manta started November 2021. It's expected to be in stock and ready to ship in July 2023. That design specifically (being a cardioid speaker) mandates additional trial and error, because there's no way to effectively simulate the behaviour of a cardioid design, the effect of dampening material inside the cabinet and so on. And the speaker doesn't have one cardioid system, but two, which must be individually designed, tested and verified.
That seems like a long time, doesn't it? Especially when stated like that ("months and months and months" instead of just saying "two years"?). I would tend to instead think that's a rather trivial amount of time to design a full speaker system that is stated to be superior, among all the knowns of speaker designing, unless of course you have a salaried team of engineers working on it. Regardless, I still applaud your passion and going for a different design. I have nothing against it. I just would never need it.
I feel for you but, even designers of lesser speakers go thru this and I have followed enough designs as they occurred by now to see what trials people go thru with many designs, just getting the voicing right after the fact, even.
The prototyping I am speaking of is where I might perhaps see a room designated to cabinet prototypes that did not work (even aesthetically), or speaker drivers that did not make the cut, sometimes after two years of trying to make them work and uncovering some flaw that made them unusable in the particular design, if any. One such room, the engineer said there was roughly $60k worth of unrecoverable work contained within that stretched over a period of 5 years. In another room, 3 file cabinets of notes on the matter. All of which were either written by hand or typed on a typewriter.
My main point being (and not just with speakers), is that technological advancements were supposed to make our lives easier and more cost effective, but instead, things just keep costing more and more. I am never going to allow myself to fund such trends. I reckon you're more hoping those with the deepest pockets are willing to take the chance of this to them being, a trivial amount of money.
The other old standard of development often included starting out with lower introductory prices until the product eventually proved, and ultimately sold itself. Now, because someone decided on their own to take 2-3 years to design a product, it's worth full imagined profit margin right out of the gate? Perhaps it is, and at that price, you only need a few willing guinea pigs to make it at least break even until some word gets out. But alas, we also now have the internet to perpetuate this even quicker.
But here on an internet forum, you asked where a different collection of income brackets exist. While I could afford a $10k pair of speakers, I have not seen one stand mount or reasonable tower design actually 'worth' that. If people keep paying this, the prices will only go up and value even less for average consumers, at least.
Still by now, the most significant improvement to audio in my lifetime has been the CD. I have otherwise been pretty much underwhelmed by cost vs. improvement ever since. Excellent recordings sound flawless on a number of much less expensive designs already.
But again, if the price reflects the perceived value is ultimately up to the consumer.
That's true of everything, but does little to qualify things as such. I've built 9 pairs of speakers and 3 pairs of subwoofers over the last 6 years and 4 amps. I have drivers I have almost forgotten about and have studied this topic pretty much endlessly even well before that to even get to that point. That puts me in a slightly different consumer awareness category. Nothing unique about that now and obviously not your target market. We're everywhere though on the net and these forums.
Either way, I wish you luck.
