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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

#261

Post by willis936 »

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…

The root is that at some point (late 20th century) the cheap wine became as good as the good wine. So the key differentiating metric for most of the space turned from performance to marketing. The high-end got pushed into the stratosphere (I'll never own a pair of electrostats) and everything else is good enough (hopefully, sometimes there is incompetence).

So if it's all good enough for the mass market then the audiophiles need to look in the mirror and ask what they're after. Some will say a mystical, ethereal experience. Some will say total control over the signal chain from outside the body to inside. These are orthogonal wants crammed into a single market.

The second path is harder, but it at least the end result is some form of truth. Very few engineers want to devote themselves to a pointless crusade for a tiny market of consumer goods. There's better things to do on the weekend. However, when they do it's special.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/

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

#262

Post by tradewinds »

saberience wrote: post #208
tradewinds wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure, I shouldn’t have called them advanced, they’re by definition broad enough to be industry agnostic and are typically taught in lower years. But if it were common sense it wouldn’t take a degree or years of experience to acquire that knowledge.

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

#263

Post by Bakary »

gambiting wrote: post #259
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a great example, https://youtu.be/f-QxLAxwxkM -- a CD trimmer that (paraphrasing) "improves your audio quality" and was lauded by audiophiles.

If you want a good laugh, have a look at this forum thread - it's like these people are from a different planet. So many posters saying that the NVMe drive has improved the clarity and "richness" of their sound. Fortunately it's a harmless kind of ignorance. https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...

It's actually beneficial ignorance. Money is transferred from those who don't know what to do with it into the broader economy.

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

#264

Post by urthor »

PinguTS wrote: post #238
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…

Actually, that is what I learned over 20 years ago at the university while studying electrical engineering. Basic business class (and law) was part of the courses to get the diploma. The general rule of thumb was, that a product in parts and production shall not be more 30% of the final price of the product. If its more, it will be a money looser. With that 30% you have 30% for marketing and distribution, and 30% for…

*loser.

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

#265

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

criddell wrote: post #254
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

I'd like thank you and the GP for posting these links. My daughter has a synthesizer that she would like some monitor speakers for and making them might be a fun project. These links are great.

Especially for monitors there are several very good plans, and sound quality can be reference class.

If you don't have a workshop to work on wood, you can buy pre-made speaker cases for some of the speaker plans, I only know german shops though:

- https://lautsprecherbau.info/de/

- https://www.speakercase.de/produkt-kategorie/gehausebausatze...

Very important: price and sound quality are at best very loosely related in the consumer market! I mean off-the-shelf products here. Never assume expensive stuff sounds great. This is counter-intuitive but true.

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

#266

Post by 323 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #245

Any time this comes up I wonder: isn’t the ideal setup aimed at giving you a flat frequency response curve? Why reviews? Why experts and subjective opinions of online reviewers? Sure other factors can be a part of it like longevity of the product, price for performance, power, but at the end of the day sound quality can be objectively measured, no?

With our current technology it's impossible to make a flat frequency response speaker. It's possible for amps, mics, DACs, but not for speakers, unless you talk about million dollar facilities.

So you need to pick from different non-flat speakers, which means listening test if you really care. You can't figure out which one you'll like just from looking at the frequency response graph.

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

#267

Post by chucksmash »

v-erne wrote: post #221
eru wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> Sure. But that's not in contradiction to individual parts of the system having individual (and different) purposes. But those purposes are only allowed because they serve greater purpose. On their own they are meaningless. >>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.) Maybe if You me…

> But those purposes are only allowed because they serve greater purpose. On their own they are meaningless.

This gets it backwards. In most places, we haven't arranged society as "everything is banned except for this list of allowed activities," more as "everything is allowed except for this list of banned activities."

We're not necessarily good at divining utility of actions when deciding what should be banned, either.

That any individual activity serves some greater good is a happy accident, there's no natural law that individuals will take actions that are net positive when you zoom out.

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

#268

Post by School-Cotton »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #169
brtkdotse wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shipping over the ocean from China to the US is very cheap.

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

#269

Post by gambiting »

suction wrote: post #167
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 s…

Well, maybe it wasn't the saving on this model, but if the design persists then the savings add up over several generations, right?

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

#270

Post by PaywallBuster »

I think the most interesting is that brands that claim to have the best R&D and most advanced technologies are simply picking supplies from 3rd parties.

The 3rd parties and universities are actually doing the research&development and manufacturing.

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