Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

audiosciencereview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 338 posts

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

#201

Post by jcronenberg »

idontwantthis wrote: post #109

> Most Chinese factories and engineers are perfectly capable of producing high-end equipment... but their customers don't ask for it You can also get cheap and really good Chinese gear now. I bought KZ-ZS10 Pro IEMs for $45 on Ali Express and they are fantastic. Very clear sound and isolation that beats my Sony XM4 around ears. Unfortunately the bluetooth adapter you can buy for them is static-y garbage.

I don't know if you are interested in this, but for anyone who wants the audio quality of wired headphones while also using bluetooth, I can highly recommend a bluetooth DAC, like the Qudelix 5k[1]. It has excellent audio quality and their app is quite nice and allows for some very in depth customization.

[1] https://www.qudelix.com/

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

#202

Post by brosinante »

KaiserPro wrote: post #197

The problem with audio in general is that its really difficult to find decent reviews of the product. I used to work as a tech in a recording studio (along with a theatre and TV studio) We have a set of nearfield speakers, and that was about it. However audio reviews are basically: "Its got punchy bass" and "sounds a bit woolly" or "has brilliant clarity in the upper regions" are about as descriptive as review get. N…

"personally, I have a second hand denon HDMI decoder thing, with airplay [..] dsp filtering [..] calibration stage [...] decent flat reproduction"

These are certainly words, and everything else being the same I absolutely would rather have the "bit wooly" kind of review to read.

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

#203

Post by iggldiggl »

Spooky23 wrote: post #50
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…

For consumer electronics? More like 15%. Less for competitive SKUs. Retailers make more money on cables and mounting brackets than a TV, for example.

I bought my current digital camera when one big-box electronics retailer had a special "we're paying your VAT" offer going on – over here, VAT is 19 %, and when the shop assistant entered the rebate, the POS system popped up a warning that the sale price was less than the shop's cost price.

I don't remember the exact price, but it does indeed mean that the margin must have been less than 16 %.

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

#204

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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 used to be a naive DIY hobbyist who was outraged by how much more expensive commercial products were compared to the parts cost.

But of course what you say is true. Electronic and software design, physical design, productisation, marketing, distribution, packaging, support, business premises, logistics, and backup business services (payroll, accounting) all cost money. Even a nominal markup of 40% may not be enough to cover those expenses.

Selling at scale - even at small scale - is completely different to buying a bag full of bits and assembling them with a soldering iron.

Having said that - audio and music are particularly susceptible to snake oil. Never mind all the cable nonsense, you can literally buy magic pebbles and boxes full of rocks to "improve" your audio.

The people in those markets are either delusional or knowingly scamming their customers.

At some point branding and market positioning become the biggest driver of perceived value, and spending $$$$$$ just to prove you can - under the pretext of "purer sound" - becomes an exercise in consumer narcissism. In the classic Veblen mode, the product being sold isn't the item, it's the consumer's perception of themselves. And some people will pay huge sums for that.

Which is you can buy magic hifi rocks, magic watches that don't tell the time very well, magic handbags, and all manner of other trinkets, for very silly prices.

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

#205

Post by mrob »

JohnBooty wrote: post #152
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…

they tune it so that you would not be able to distinguish a person talking behind you, from the recording of them being played with these speakers That's interesting! I'd love to know more about how your friend did it. It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP to compensate for the speaker's imperfections. In pro…

>It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP

Common digital room correction systems can improve the time-invariant linear components of an audio system's distortion (phase and frequency response) by convolving with an impulse response. The best results are obtained at a single point listening position, not a whole line. This technique cannot restore frequencies that were cancelled out by destructive interference, and may increase noise to unacceptable levels at frequencies where it has to apply gain. It supplements room treatment, not replaces it. It does nothing to improve non-linear distortion, e.g. harmonic and intermodulation distortion from soft clipping or asymmetries in the speaker motor, or time-dependent distortion, e.g. dynamic range compression from the coil overheating, or so-called "Doppler distortion" (better named phase modulation distortion[0]) from significant excursion of the cone.

How much distortion matters depends on personal taste and listening material. Moderate harmonic distortion can be very difficult to hear in some sounds. And as the popularity of vinyl and tube amps show, some people prefer more distortion.

[0] https://sound-au.com/doppler.htm

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

#206

Post by aembleton »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #184
pclmulqdq wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The store could sell it on for a 20% discount though. I would have thought there'd be enough of a market for that.

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

#207

Post by darkr »

KaiserPro wrote: post #197

The problem with audio in general is that its really difficult to find decent reviews of the product. I used to work as a tech in a recording studio (along with a theatre and TV studio) We have a set of nearfield speakers, and that was about it. However audio reviews are basically: "Its got punchy bass" and "sounds a bit woolly" or "has brilliant clarity in the upper regions" are about as descriptive as review get. N…

Yep - reviews of consumer electronics in general are awash with useless content-farm generated crap.

IMO the best audio review site currently is https://www.audioholics.com/

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

#208

Post by saberience »

tradewinds wrote: post #96
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not joking when I say this, I have no idea how business works. I get it in theory, hell I even sold one. But I still don't know. One of my space-cadet day dreams is trying to figure out just what someone could possibly learn in business school and I can't come up with anything.

Accounting (for example the poster in the link states marketing does not make up COGS, which to someone who studied accounting is obvious). Simple economics (poster reveals "secret" that Price*Quantity can equal higher total revenue when price/quantity change disproportionately). Consumer behaviour (Dr. Dre can lead people to believe crap from pile A is better than crap from pile B). This is apparent insider-knowledg…

Apparently I've absorbed this knowledge via osmosis working in management at Tech Companies. All of what you said just seems mostly common sense to me. Even stocks, bonds, cost of capital and other "advanced" topics don't really seem very advanced.

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

#209

Post by eru »

v-erne wrote: post #168
foldingmoney wrote: post #150

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. 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…

> The ultimate goal and purpose of any economic system is to serve whole society [...]

Sure. But that's not in contradiction to individual parts of the system having individual (and different) purposes.

Btw, not all companies have to make a profit. That's just a pretty common goal. (And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, you have to at least break even.)

> But this does not mean that they have some god given right to unlimited dividends from work of others.

Duh, obviously you only get dividends from businesses you own.

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

#210

Post by eru »

rowanG077 wrote: post #188
foldingmoney wrote: post #150

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. 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 mo…

Food prices would go up, as producers leave that market.
Post reply on HN