the great mystery always remains:
many well-known manufacturers, even today, are unable to guarantee the performance available with this speaker with much more renowned products.
This is yet another confirmation that you can design well even without having the study of a product added to the final price.
Thank you Amirm as always for your time and reviews!!!
For anyone that has worked in a large company, there won’t be much mystery. I imagine the speaker design process goes like this:
1. Marketing sets a target timeline, price and consumer segment.
2. Finance sets a target cost of goods.
3. Engineering sets a target R&D time and strict deadline.
4. Production sets limitations on what it can/cannot do.
5. A bright engineer or group of engineers develops a flat measuring speaker with great dispersion, and are super proud and excited to demonstrate it to senior management.
6. Upon demonstrating it, a senior management person with power states “Sounds good but not exciting enough. Can we make it more exciting so it grabs people when they hear it?”.
7. The engineers can barely contain their frustration but bite their lips (they have mouths to feed at home) and agree to dial in more “excitement”.
8. Product goes to market with a strong lift in 5kHz+ and some bass boost too.
9. Amir measures it which shows the speaker’s deviation from ideal.
10. ASR users jump in thinking the engineers are idiots because a DIY could have done a better job for 1/10th the price.
11. The speaker go on to sell hundreds of thousands of units and are loved by their owners (B&W comes to mind).
I don’t work in hifi but in my big company, this is often how things go down. What perfectionists like us want and what the consumer wants are often very different things. I do hope that consumers eventually come around and want a nice linear speaker but it takes time to appreciate that sound (look at all the people who complain that Dirac has ruined their bass and sound).