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Cheap drivers in high end monitors / speakers

sigbergaudio

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(..)And this leads me to prefer companies that make the drivers in house.
What are your thoughts?

There are OEM / off-the-shelf drivers in all price ranges. An in-house manufacturer could build both expensive and cheap drivers, and a manufacturer that uses OEM drivers could purchase cheap drivers or expensive drivers. So I'm not sure I understand the correlation or conclusion. :)
 

CDMC

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I agree with most of the comments but...
I guess what I felt was like paying for a Mercedes and finding out the car has Kia parts in it and a Kia engine in it.
I was expecting the drivers to be more expensive and more special in a $10k pair of studio monitors than mass produced (maybe somewhat custom made) tweeters.

Welcome to the high end, where price v quality v cost have no relationship. As others have pointed out, stories and bs sell most high end products, not actual performance. High end is sold mostly as a luxury good, not a technology product. Imagine if someone came out with a computer chip that cost 10x as much as a similar AMD or Intel chip but performed 1/2 as well, but then said, we use a proprietary silicon that makes it work better and you can’t measure that improvement. Everyone would say you were nuts to buy it, not in high end.

For speakers, I look to Revel as a baseline. Their most expensive speaker, the best they say they can build runs $20,000 a pair and less than $15,000 street price. Jim Salks best speakers using fully custom cabinets and the best off the shelf drivers are $10,000 (the exoticas are discontinued because no more drivers). If that is the best they can build, I want to know what justifies a higher price. High end buyers don’t care about that, most want to impress by what they spent.
 

CDMC

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In fairness to those speakers it looks like a lot of money went into the enclosures, amps, and DSP with a lot of engineering time for the different modes.
 

Blumlein 88

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I agree with most of the comments but...
I guess what I felt was like paying for a Mercedes and finding out the car has Kia parts in it and a Kia engine in it.
I was expecting the drivers to be more expensive and more special in a $10k pair of studio monitors than mass produced (maybe somewhat custom made) tweeters.
Recent Kia engines are designed by a couple of ex-BMW engineers.
 

617

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paddycrow

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Companies are in business to make profit, not to provide you with goods at cost. Expecting them to behave otherwise is not realistic.

The markup is huge in this industry. Demand is not that great, however, so they need a high margin to survive.
 

hege

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Well no they don’t they buy them from Tymphany in China but they don’t advertise the fact, I don’t really understand their reticence because Tymphany make fine drivers.

Please stop spreading FUD. You make it sound like they "buy everything from Tymphany". It's no secret they use in-house, Seas, Peerless, PHL, whatever elements.

Don't even have to go further than this forum:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/active-speaker-oems.11089/post-314780
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/active-speaker-oems.11089/post-315189
 
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Pearljam5000

Pearljam5000

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It's good to know the Ones are purely made in house.
 
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Pearljam5000

Pearljam5000

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I guess I'm obsessed with in house parts because I'm also into watches, and it's impossible to imagine a Seiko or a Rolex using some Chinese made movements, but I guess it's different when it comes to audio.
 

Pluto

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Seiko or Rolex may not use Chinese-made movements but I wouldn't mind betting that they use Chinese-made cogs, bearings, screws, bolts etc. within their otherwise in-house movements.

SEAS make, IMHO, the best tweeters available on the planet; they are the supreme expert specialist at this particular kind of unit and the very best examples go for a couple of hundred bucks. What is so bizarre about these units getting incorporated into the most expensive speakers?
 
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Pearljam5000

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Well I guess I expected monitors costing $10-$20k to have drivers that cost more than 100€
 

Tom C

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I guess I'm obsessed with in house parts because I'm also into watches, and it's impossible to imagine a Seiko or a Rolex using some Chinese made movements, but I guess it's different when it comes to audio.
There are such things as off-the-shelf movements made in Switzerland. My Mont Blanc Timewalker uses one. So even in watch world...
 

andreasmaaan

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I know literally nothing about watches (I just googled "watch movement" lol), but I would imagine mechanical watches like those of Seiko and Rolex are inferior when it comes to keeping time compared with digital alternatives? Am I wrong?
 

andreasmaaan

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Well I guess I expected monitors costing $10-$20k to have drivers that cost more than 100€

$100 for a midrange is already a significant way down the path of diminishing returns. I'm not even sure I can think of a midrange driver that costs more than $100 that performs better than the best midrange drivers I know of that cost under $100. At least not when it comes to typical sizes/applications.

For top-performing drivers that will be asked to reproduce low bass at high SPLs, the costs tend to be a little higher.
 
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