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“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

audiosciencereview.com

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Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#161

Post by bigfudge »

anhner wrote: post #151
aljgz wrote: post #147

Years ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names a…

Quoted post unavailable.

This sort of comment just isn’t necessary, doesn’t add anything to the discussion and I’d be happy to see it deleted. English is likely not the gp’s first language but we should be grateful that smart people from all over the world want to talk to us in English.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#162

Post by [deleted] »

legohead wrote: post #53

I bought some cheap "chinese" (very odd named brand) bluetooth headphones on Amazon, and they sounded great. Eventually they died, so I went with Sony which was twice the price, and the sound is quite noticeably worse. Unsurprisingly my previous headphones aren't for sale any longer [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T25NRLZ

[deleted]

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#163

Post by JohnBooty »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #52

As the owner of a pair of high-end Audeze, this article makes me wonder how much of the cost is marketing, as opposed to going towards "quality", for whatever definition of it. It's nicely built, sounds great, very neutral for production work, but.. $1000 great? Could I have gotten comparable performance for 1/10th the price? Is there an objective way of measuring "quality" in this space for premium products?

Yeah, absolutely. Equipment's not cheap, but there are folks out there doing including the guy who runs AudioScienceReview:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Hea...

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#164

Post by brtkdotse »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

I’m actually surprised it’s as high as 30%. Would’ve expected 10% tops.

Reminds me of that Planet Money special where they made their own tshirts from scratch, as “finding a cotton farmer to buy cotton” from scratch. The thing that added the most cost was the transport from the dock in NYC to the store.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#165

Post by JohnBooty »

SpaceLawnmower wrote: post #68

Major consumer speaker vendors don't make it easy to compare speakers. When I was looking for a portable speaker to play outside I was surprised to see that for most of the speakers you'll find at big box stores, there are no statistics for loudness or how it sounds. The best we get is size and rarely amperage, which I found through trial and error are dubious measures at best. I ended up returning two overpriced sof…

You're absolutely right.

Power ratings are like, useless^2

There's no great way to measure power output for an amp, surprisingly. The old FTC rating system was something like continuous wattage at a fixed voltage at all audible frequencies. This was decent, although actual music isn't anything like white noise. =)

So manufacturers give absolute BS "power ratings" like "40W" which usually means the amplifier can produce that much output, at a single frequency, for a zillionth of a second at 10% distortion which doesn't much resemble real music either.

But even if they were truthful about the rest of that, it wouldn't matter because knowing the power output of the onboard amp is useless without taking into account the efficiency of the speaker drivers themselves.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#166

Post by RHSman2 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #122
Razengan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowwhere in the GP comment is the word “outraged”. That’s your word. So, what, you wanted to be aghast or something and misrepresented the tone of the original comment with a selective quote and addition of the word “outrage”? Shit HN says. Sheesh. (This comment was a copy of the one above before it was edited)

> Shit HN says. Sheesh Indeed. I read the article, then I read these three comments. The first one reiterates points that the article made but seemingly doesn’t recognize the article made them. The second does recognize that but with a combative tone. The third is just combative. Y’all can carry on as usual but none of that conflict was actually warranted.

HN is so Tone Deaf

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#167

Post by suction »

aljgz wrote: post #147

Years ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names a…

I've witnessed some hard negotiating in the car industry about the price of a cable lug for a 6-figure luxury car. The car maker wanted to bring down the price for one lug from 0.05 Euro to 0.03 Euro at a order volume of about 100.000 pieces.

This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...

It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#168

Post by v-erne »

foldingmoney wrote: post #150
Ma8ee wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing any other expense will be detrimental to the business, that is, make it work less well. Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends.

>Removing any other expense will be detrimental to the business, that is, make it work less well. Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends. I'd say two things. 1. A listed business wouldn't exist in the first place (or in its present form) if owners hadn't been enticed to put up capital in the hope of getting dividends. 2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to…

The ultimate goal and purpose of any economic system is to serve whole society - those people own anything because we as a society recognize that we are not able at present moment to build better system without their rent seeking behaviour. But this does not mean that they have some god given right to unlimited dividends from work of others. It all seems backwards (as in tail wagging the dog).

And don't get me wrong - I know that their behaviour is just part of human nature, that our culture tries somehow to tame and this behaviour is no different from monarchs and aristocrats of old days, but it does not mean that this is the ultimate system and there is no metaphorical guillotine waiting for them all somewhere in the future.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#169

Post by Cthulhu_ »

brtkdotse wrote: post #164
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

I’m actually surprised it’s as high as 30%. Would’ve expected 10% tops. Reminds me of that Planet Money special where they made their own tshirts from scratch, as “finding a cotton farmer to buy cotton” from scratch. The thing that added the most cost was the transport from the dock in NYC to the store.

I'm sure manufacturing costs is like 10% or even less, but between the factories in e.g. China and the US or Europe, there's container transport overseas, import taxes and fees, and other such transportation and logistics overhead.

I freqently find myself in a supermarket and think that the packaging for the products there was more expensive than the product itself. Plus the logistics.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#170

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #75
jonhohle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were there any guides or tutorials you followed? 20 years ago or so, I knew someone who built their own speaker cabinets and I couldn’t believe DIY speakers could match companies that spent hundreds millions on audio engineering. I’ve heard enough anecdotes that I would be interested in learning more.

If you're in the US, this is a great first kit ($160 shipped for a pair): https://www.parts-express.com/Overnight-Sensations-MT-Speake... These are a good step up for a living room, although $240/ea: https://www.parts-express.com/Amiga-MT-Tower-Speaker-Kit-Wit... There are a few other sites that sell kits, either just the electronics or including pre-cut cabinets, i.e. https://meniscusaudio.com/product-category/speak…

Some suggestions from the german DIY scene:

A step up from the overnight sensations, the Twiggy BR: http://www.hifi-forum.de/index.php?action=browseT&forum_id=2... Built them myself, hard to improve on price-performance ratio. They have no right to sound this great given their size & budget.

The Bantams are supposed to be very good as well, suitable for eg desktop use, haven't heard or built them myself yet: https://techtalk.parts-express.com/forum/speaker-project-gal...

There is also a more fancy version called Bantam Onyx, for when looks matter: http://www.hifi-forum.de/viewthread-205-1154.html

Reference class monitors DXT-MON 182, 36-20000Hz, completely flat frequency response: https://heissmann-acoustics.de/dxt-mon-182/

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