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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

#181

Post by ehnto »

orangetuba wrote: post #177

There is a lot of talk about DIY here, which sounds cool, but I'm also pretty lazy and I have started way too many projects. What are some really underestimated systems that you can buy?

I think part of the discussion is that there are no 'hidden gems' at fair prices. You have cheap products sold for cheap, and cheap products sold for a lot, and then you have expensive products sold for much much more. There is no good products sold for a fair amount, just bargains on commodity gear. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the 'middle market' is only such in price, not product quality.

I would say though that Audio Technica, while still commodity products, do seem to get better the more you pay up into the middle market. I think you get diminishing returns in their higher end range though.

I've had the same Audio-Technica ATH-500's for perhaps 14 years now. I drop them all the time too, like daily. I had to buy some replacement earpads as the pleather wore out, but that's it. Still perfect audio. I'd wager they'd have 10,000+ hours of use easily.

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

#182

Post by robocat »

mc32 wrote: post #87
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…

Definitely agree. People who rail against this don't understand economics much further than my mom sold yard bird eggs for less than the corner store --corner stores are opportunist capitalists with no heart who take advantage of people. If they had to sustain a business I'm afraid they could not. Every wannabe post-capital economist should try to run a restaurant (profitably).

> Every wannabe post-capital economist should try to run a restaurant (profitably)

I would guess most people don’t start a restaurant to be financially profitable, instead they start it for ego and status. A failed restaurant is both an example of capitalism, but also some very uncapitalist incentives.

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

#183

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

JohnBooty wrote: post #160
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/ is the main online forum. There's a fair bit of discussion over at parts-express.com's forums as well. There's a variety of books out there. Sound Reproduction by Dr Toole is a very comprehensive reference to the big picture, but doesn't really get into speaker and crossover design specifically. There's other books you can find for that, but I'm unaware of the most recent good ones…

For those who want the ultimate TL;DR on Dr. Toole's book, it's something like this: Listeners prefer objectively accurate (ie, the input matches the output) audio reproduction, with some added emphasis on the bass frequencies. Because most of the sound we hear indoors is actually reflected, it is crucial that frequency response of the speakers remains constant as we move off axis. This might seem blindingly obvious,…

Yeah, I should have elaborated more.

What I love about Toole's book is it's basically the whole big picture of audio, completely sourced and grounded in real deal empirical research, but research that also worked to correlate objective measurements to subjective preferences.

All those internet arguments over the years about what matters and what doesn't, tubes vs transistors, class A vs class AB amps, you name it... Toole's book is the cliff notes of what's actually real. It's such a huge advantage vs when I first started reading this stuff in the 90s and it was a lot harder to find information that wasn't just someone's "golden ear" opinion imagined out of thin air.

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

#184

Post by justsomehnguy »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #114
GuB-42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at the prices on AliExpress. They are a fraction of the prices at retail stores, and it includes the sellers margins. And AliExpress products are not always counterfeits and can be acceptable in quality. A COGS of 30% is, as they say, on the upper end. For brands that have to offer a certain amount of quality in order to sell instead of going purely for ads and brand recognition. 50% is the retail store mar…

I thought the retail margin was related to (essentially) how much floor space your product takes and how often it is stolen. High-end electronics should be less than 50%. I certainly doubt that a flagship smartphone has 50% retail margin, for example.

> and how often it is stolen

And how often it is returned to the store because buyer didn't like it. Some things can be resold, but most of the time the seller eats up the costs. It is always amusing for me to see people being outraged by the costs and seeing nothing wrong with returning something to the store just because they can.

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

#185

Post by anhner »

bigfudge wrote: post #161
anhner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. I don't know how to delete it so I'll edit it. I genuinely didn't understand what they were trying to say.

However at some point we WILL need a way to differentiate between real humans and AI generated content for farming.

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

#186

Post by jensgk »

lagadu wrote: post #173
JohnBooty wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Be aware that measuring FR and THD is just that: measuring FR and THD: it's not a measurement of how good or bad something sounds. It's the equivalent of measuring a car's quality by looking at 0-100km times: it doesn't even tell us how fast a car will be.

If FR and THD measurements are bad, at least the sound is not neutral.

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

#187

Post by archi42 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #160
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/ is the main online forum. There's a fair bit of discussion over at parts-express.com's forums as well. There's a variety of books out there. Sound Reproduction by Dr Toole is a very comprehensive reference to the big picture, but doesn't really get into speaker and crossover design specifically. There's other books you can find for that, but I'm unaware of the most recent good ones…

For those who want the ultimate TL;DR on Dr. Toole's book, it's something like this: Listeners prefer objectively accurate (ie, the input matches the output) audio reproduction, with some added emphasis on the bass frequencies. Because most of the sound we hear indoors is actually reflected, it is crucial that frequency response of the speakers remains constant as we move off axis. This might seem blindingly obvious,…

The alternative (or an engineering trade off!) can be doing the opposite: Only care for on-axis sound, and while at it put most of the energy on the axis to reduce energy of reflections. Drawback: Works best with one or at most two listeners, plus speakers and listener are constrained in their relative positions. Bad for the living room, not an issue in a study.

The bundling is a matter of membrane diameter and frequency. Bigger diameter result in stronger beam forming, however lower frequencies have less beam forming. You can see the effect very well in the directivity pattern of this 8" wide band speaker: https://www.visaton.de/sites/default/files/dd_product/B%2020...

I've a FAST/WAW with a 4" wideband (250Hz XO). As personal monitor speakers these work great with an amazing stage and "resolution" (the illusion of being able to pinpoint the exact spatial location of a single instrument).

//woah: Thanks you two (you&GP) for triggering me on this (not /s)! While grabbing a coffee I spent a few minutes thinking about beam forming in audio applications; and came up with the line array. Not so novel, I know, but I'm happy to have gotten there on my own.

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

#188

Post by rowanG077 »

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…

> 2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to produce goods or services - producing goods or services is just a means through which to pay the owners.

This is true only in the simplest of world views. Let's take this idea to the real world. Let's say all food producer would say today to stop and instead start producing toilet wipes(or insert anything here) or whatever because the can make more money that way. Now suddenly we won't have any food producers tomorrow and billions will starve. Clearly food productions companies only purpose wasn't to make money for owners, it was also shockingly to keep people from starving.

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

#189

Post by schroeding »

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

Which Sony Headphones did you buy?

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

#190

Post by mrweasel »

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…

> There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret.

Standard, absolutely, but I think many are surprised by how much of that is profit for the company that sells the product to the consumers. I worked for a company that had 40-45% margins on most consumer electronics. Less than 40% and the buyers didn't really want to deal with it.

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