Chris A
Active Member
I think you give yourself too little credit here in being able to bound product costs. For most loudspeakers on the market, the drivers are also available from third parties retail, and these driver prices tend to be a lot less volatile looking from vendor to vendor (i.e., price competition is strong), so it is pretty straightforward to bound what the wholesale prices are.I sort of agree on your point if cost is the manufacturing cost, and not the consumers price, but we never know the manufacturing cost and it could be anywhere from 2% (audiophool cables) to 50% of the consumer price. And there are other factors involved in cost, economy of scale is huge, marketing, servicing, etc.
Manufacturing loudspeaker boxes is basically a time-and-motion exercise to estimate touch labor costs. MDF or plywood has a fairly uniform price, and prices are also available in larger quantities from suppliers. Veneer varies widely in pricing, but if you make one assumption, this can be bounded: manufacturers don't tend to use very expensive veneers in their products in order to either keep their prices down or to maximize their profit margins (and you can see this in the type of veneers that are made available), this, too is a bound-able cost. Passive crossovers are also basically time-and-motion, even if assembled robotically or manually by humans. DSP is always bought from suppliers by loudspeaker companies, and these same products are generally available in retail format (with pricing available).
So manufacturing cost really can be estimated or bounded. Then it can be used as a divisor on list price (MSRP) in order to see the total materials-based price ratio. For Klipsch (a large loudspeaker manufacturer), this markup is something like 3x (for lowest-priced models) to 10x (for their most expensive models), depending on market segments addressed.
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However, you took issue with the method that I posted above: the CAIV (cost as an independent variable) process. All real examples of using this process are of course proprietary, so that example given above is the only example that a quick Google search produced. It's the same process used for designing the JSF (now known as the F-35), and was originally a customer-championed process that was extensively expanded by the contractor.
Note that all measures of merit for all tradeable components and options must first be converted to a life cycle "utility" measure that can added together with other options on other parts of the product. That is a very interesting process--and quite extensive for the application cited, much more extensive than meets the eye. However, the very same process is easily tailored to almost any product size or complexity--even household products like loudspeakers and associated electronics.
Chris