Why Is Hi-Fi Gear So Darn Expensive?!

[HammerSandwich]

His £50K speaker example is ridiculous. 'So, let’s say it took a team of 10 people over the period of 2 years to do the design.' For a little two-way speaker? Ten people? Two years? Maybe if they all started not even knowing what a loudspeaker was. Even then it's a bit of a stretch.

On the very same day, TAS also published Harley's One in Ten Million essay, which ends with:

These individual qualities, temperaments, and skills often exist independently in different people, but rarely are they found together in a single person. That’s what makes the high-end designer who can conceptualize and then realize a boundary-pushing product such a rarity, and worthy of our veneration. So next time you look at a product in your equipment rack, take a moment to consider the odds against that product being brought into the world. I’d estimate that designers with the all the qualities required for that piece of gear to exist in your equipment rack are about one in ten million. They deserve our reverence.

Oh, I get it now! Iconoclastic product designers deserve our worship, and we should expect prices to reflect 10 peoples' effort at the same time.

 

[JJB70]

Most of everything is, by definition, average. And despite what some want to claim, average in audio performance terms is entirely sufficient. If you want an amplifier and passive speakers then you have to check that the amplifier rating is appropriate for the load, other than that it's harder to end up with something audibly degraded than with something that just works. And in terms of hero worship, engineers are like other professionals, they are educated and trained in a particular discipline and should be competent to work in their chosen field. The incompetent ones tend to be weeded out pretty quickly (though in audio that might well mean being kicked into the high end).

 

[Waxx]

At least with a Ferrari (provided it actually starts ) one can measure the performance being better than a VW. In Hi-Fi nowadays the VW performs like a Ferrari objectively.

Yeah maybe, but i still remember that i beat a Ferrari F40 with a Porche 911 Turbo (993 version) on the circuit of Zolder (Belgium) during track days long ago, and with a large margin. That Porche was then a quarter of the price of the ferrari (100k vs 400K) at that time, but it was way faster and when you know how to drive the 911 (with the engine in the back) also easier to handle... I've driven both (but owned none) btw, i know the difference.

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

You folks are just jealous that you can't afford a music server like this:

Wadax Atlantis Reference Music Server - The Absolute Sound

Wadax Atlantis Reference Music Server - This new music server features cutting-edge technologies never seen in an audio product—and delivers unprecedented sound quality. Robert Harley reports on a groundbreaking design.

www.theabsolutesound.com

Price: $59,000; $76,495 with Akasa optical cable and optical input module for Reference DAC

Reading about that thing just breaks my brain. Like, it includes knobs on the front panel to apply "speed corrections" for optimizing, presumably, the amplitude and shape of the digital waveform. Like what is that supposed to do and why is it needed? Is it intended to be located many miles away from the DAC and there needs to be some form of pre-emphasis to ensure the data can be correctly decoded at the receiver? Does it display data eye diagrams to aid in tuning?

Checking the users manual just assures that a "white paper" is forthcoming outlining all the "improvements" it can provide in ensuring the DAC sitting on top of it can manage the very difficult task of decoding the data sent through 2' of cable. In the meantime, we recommend randomly turning the knobs until it has the correct attack, PRaT, and clarity. Just seems like the world's most expensive adult fidget spinner...

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Yeah maybe, but i still remember that i beat a Ferrari F40 with a Porche 911 Turbo (993 version) on the circuit of Zolder (Belgium) during track days long ago, and with a large margin. That Porche was then a quarter of the price of the ferrari (100k vs 400K) at that time, but it was way faster and when you know how to drive the 911 (with the engine in the back) also easier to handle... I've driven both (but owned none) btw, i know the difference.

Oh yes. I take a Porsche anytime over a Ferrari. Reliable, quick and great as a daily driver too.

 

[Waxx]

Oh yes. I take a Porsche anytime over a Ferrari. Reliable, quick and great as a daily driver too.

Well, that porche was owned by my girlfriend at that time, so i know it quiet well and it's indeed a great and ultra-reliable driver, on circuit and as daily driver. And it doesn't use that much fuel for a car that powerfull at that time. That is probally because they get a lot of power with a relative small engine (450HP from a 3.6L Flat6 boxer motor) Modern Porches are even better they say, but i can't afford those. But if i could, it would probally be the only car i spend a lot of money on, certainly not on a Ferrari or a Lambo or the likes.

 

[Mart68]

On the very same day, TAS also published Harley's One in Ten Million essay, which ends with:

Oh, I get it now! Iconoclastic product designers deserve our worship, and we should expect prices to reflect 10 peoples' effort at the same time.

The way they have created the 'cult of the designer' is a bit sickening. All part of the mystique as to why you should buy the twenty grand amp over the two grand amp, when in reality they do the exact same thing. And people fall for it, big time.

I wonder if the bloke really thinks it takes ten people two years to design a simple speaker? He's either very naïve about loudspeaker design (which he shouldn't be given hi-fi is his job) or just plain dishonest.

 

[sifi36]

It’s pretty simple to my mind, the target market (middle-aged and older men) have plenty of disposable income. Combine that with the shunning of any sort of objective assessments for decades and you end up with a complete disconnect between price and performance.

 

[Ilkless]

You can blame Harry Pearson for this. Around 1980 he changed The Absolute Sound from a quirky journal wherein the reviewers listed their zodiac signs while reviewing expensive but hardly stratospherically priced audio gear and manifesting a strong preference for tubed gear over solid state. Given the state of solid state in 1980, it was IMHO a defensible position. But around the time Pearson reviewed the first iteration of the Infinity IRS (which cost an unprecedented for the day $20,000), things took a turn toward pushing Veblen priced gear. He suddenly began reviewing dozens of products like the Conrad Johnson Premier One, a $6000 300WPC tube amp, Audio Research Sp 11 for over $7000, and a host of Levinson and Krell gear none of which was priced below $5000. Eventually, a Swiss company called Goldmund produced a $25k turntable with matching radial tracking tonearm. And Infinity and Wilson pushed the price of their designs over $100k. All of it praised to the sky by Pearson and his crew of reviewers as groundbreaking stuff. By no small coincidence, TAS started simultaneously taking advertising from these self same companies. Given this was the 1980's, an era of resurgent conspicuous consumption fueled by Wall Street types with money to burn, TAS did very, very well.

It was also around this time that audio stores like Lyric HiFi in Manhatten emerged to cater to the need for high priced audio gear among the emergent new status symbol seeking audiophile class.

The aftermath has been the creation of a High End Audio establishment which pimps the idea that there exists a direct and linear relationship between the amount spent on a component and the audio quality it delivers. I don't know how many times I've walked into an audio store and said I was looking to buy, say, a power amplifier only to be asked by the sales lizard "how much was I willing to spend" which assured me he would try to sell me the maximum item fitting withing my "budget" while assuring me that anything less expensive merely "sounds pretty good for the money." Talk about damning with faint praise!

Only now, with the advent of publications like ASR, Archimago, Audio Critic, EAC, and Audioholics are these exhorbitantly priced products being subjected to rigorous analysis and it's become clear that they in no way produce magical, transcendent audio experiences. In point of fact, these analysis are revealing poor design, shoddy materials, and substandard performance with prices that bear no rational correlation with their production and development costs.

So, yeah, when it comes to audio it's both the best and worst of times. Your $10k budget can buy you a USB cable, a box'o'dirt grounding box, or a Wilson Tune Tot speaker system that grades out at 2.7 on the Harman Scale-- or it can buy you a state of the art speaker from Revel, Kef, Genelec, Neuman, Dutch & Dutch, or Kii. Your choice, so be aware and informed.

That's the thing about megabuck equipment - sloppy solutions sold as mystic and artisanal. I bear no grudge against the Raidhos, Magicos, Vivids, TADs, Accuphase etc. They are engineering art with cutting edge, cost and labour intensive fabrication techniques. I can appreciate them and why they cost that much. What I take issue is with the cult of personality around stuff like Audio Note or Lampizator or LFD.

 

[sergeauckland]

The way they have created the 'cult of the designer' is a bit sickening. All part of the mystique as to why you should buy the twenty grand amp over the two grand amp, when in reality they do the exact same thing. And people fall for it, big time.

I wonder if the bloke really thinks it takes ten people two years to design a simple speaker? He's either very naïve about loudspeaker design (which he shouldn't be given hi-fi is his job) or just plain dishonest.

I keep harking back to 'The Good Old Days', but when you've been around audio as long as I have, it's somewhat inevitable.

Back in the 1950s, through the 1960s, onto the 1980s, Audio Engineering was hard, and some designers, like Quad's Peter Walker, KEF's Laurie Fincham, Arthur Radford, Willi Studer, Rupert Neve and Dudley Harwood (BBC) were rightly revered as innovators and raising the 'State of the Art' of audio performance. However, by the 1980s, all the difficult work in electronics was done, and by the mid 1980s, audio electronics were pretty much commoditised, one being as good as any other technically, there remained of course the ergonomics and facilities, but the hard work of getting noise and distortion down to vanishing levels was done. Loudspeakers were by the 1980s pretty good, and arguably are no better today, in fact possibly worse except for power handling. I think Active 'speakers with DSP-based crossovers are the only genuine advance since the '80s.

So what was an audio manufacturer to do? They couldn't very well try selling their amps as 'Just another transparent amp, like all the others' so the cult of the Artisanal Designer started, buoyed up by the Magazines that needed to keep the advertising revenue flowing. To support that, prices were commensurately rising well in advance of any genuine inflation, especially given that manufacturing became more efficient and hence less costly anyway.

S.

 

[Ilkless]

I keep harking back to 'The Good Old Days', but when you've been around audio as long as I have, it's somewhat inevitable.

Back in the 1950s, through the 1960s, onto the 1980s, Audio Engineering was hard, and some designers, like Quad's Peter Walker, KEF's Laurie Fincham, Arthur Radford, Willi Studer, Rupert Neve and Dudley Harwood (BBC) were rightly revered as innovators and raising the 'State of the Art' of audio performance. However, by the 1980s, all the difficult work in electronics was done, and by the mid 1980s, audio electronics were pretty much commoditised, one being as good as any other technically, there remained of course the ergonomics and facilities, but the hard work of getting noise and distortion down to vanishing levels was done. Loudspeakers were by the 1980s pretty good, and arguably are no better today, in fact possibly worse except for power handling. I think Active 'speakers with DSP-based crossovers are the only genuine advance since the '80s.

So what was an audio manufacturer to do? They couldn't very well try selling their amps as 'Just another transparent amp, like all the others' so the cult of the Artisanal Designer started, buoyed up by the Magazines that needed to keep the advertising revenue flowing. To support that, prices were commensurately rising well in advance of any genuine inflation, especially given that manufacturing became more efficient and hence less costly anyway.

S.

I agree regarding power handling. Even sub-optimally engineered 10-inch wide baffle 2-ways like the Devore O/96 seem to capture the imagination of enthusiasts and listeners - and I suspect it is partly because of power handling in the midbass, how dynamic peaks and compression are handled. It would sound so different from the 6.5-inchers that are prevalent now. And baffle step is lowered toward the transition frequency of most domestic rooms - making for a vastly different room interaction.

The narrow baffle designs nowadays are terrifically inefficient designs - especially with high baffle step.

 

[Digby]

Two things:

1. Whenever you are looking for more performance, you are going to get less value for money as you seek more performance beyond a certain point (diminishing returns). You can buy speakers that are 65% of the very best for 500 of x currency, if you want something 10-15% better then you need to spend four figures, if you want 90% then low five figures, and the best of the best will cost a lot.

2. Is something of a response to this

It’s pretty simple to my mind, the target market (middle-aged and older men) have plenty of disposable income.

Without wishing to throw stones, I think the boomer generation are the first generation to believe they have disposable income in a way previous generations would not. The amount of times I have heard boomers say "you can't take it with you"...well, no, you can't, but perhaps you'd like to leave a bit more for your children and grandchildren after you're done with cruises, hi-fi, watches, cars and *insert luxury item here*.

I don't think boomers can be blamed entirely, they were the first generation to receive advertising proper (propaganda) and to be told that they were all free spirits and they deserve it, but I think the idea of indulging themselves in quite the same way would be antithetical to the parents of the boomer generation, whether they had the money to or not.

The boomers were also the first generation to really start divorcing and remarrying, further splitting and reducing any share of inheritance, so why not spend what they have, when it would have to be spread rather thin anyway (not forgetting potential battles over the will).

Just a general observation. There are always exceptions, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if boomers generally leave a smaller percent of their wealth to their children than their parents did to them.

The luxury market has sprung up to fill a niche ("disposable income") that didn't previously exist to anything like the same extent.

 

[Mart68]

The luxury market has sprung up to fill a niche ("disposable income") that didn't previously exist to anything like the same extent.

That's true of course but seems to me that wealthy boomer's children will now be in their fifties and sixties and probably have professional jobs, paid off their mortgages and so have a fair chunk of disposable income themselves. Anything they get left by their parents will be a bonus, they won't actually need it for anything critical.

I wonder who does spend fifty grand on small, two-way passive speakers? It would be interesting to see what demographic they are from. Maybe they are all boomers with more money than sense but somehow I doubt it.

 

[Cote Dazur]

Oh yes. I take a Porsche anytime over a Ferrari. Reliable, quick and great as a daily driver too.

This comment is wrong on so many levels. If you can afford just one car they both are the wrong choice as daily driver. If you can afford a Ferrari you can also afford a daily driver that will be as quick as a Porsche, more reliable and much greater, more practical as a daily driver.

A product exist because some one can afford it and fulfil what the buyer expect, high end audio is no different.
Does anyone ever need high end in any activity/market? No. Majority buy something rational, with good value.

The “value” of high end audio, is not just how it sound, many other factors will enter in the equation and fulfil the buyer expectations, if he buys it for the right reasons.

Most here not getting the audio high end concept already own something that has disproportionate ratio of value vs what that thing can achieve, cars/watch/house/motorcycle/clothe/jewelry, etc... and it may also be their more cherished possession.
Life is short, enjoy the journey.

 

[Ilkless]

I wonder who does spend fifty grand on small, two-way passive speakers? It would be interesting to see what demographic they are from. Maybe they are all boomers with more money than sense but somehow I doubt it.

The Asian market, particularly Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore - affluent countries scarce in space - would likely drive a lot of the demand.

 

[DanielT]

I do not even understand the question said any of ....

Real Time Billionaires

Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires rankings tracks the daily ups and downs of the world’s richest people. The wealth-tracking platform provides ongoing updates on the net worth and ranking of each individual confirmed by Forbes to be a billionaire.

www.forbes.com

 

[Mart68]

The Asian market, particularly Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore - affluent countries scarce in space - would likely drive a lot of the demand.

That would make sense.

 

[Digby]

That's true of course but seems to me that wealthy boomer's children will now be in their fifties and sixties and probably have professional jobs, paid off their mortgages and so have a fair chunk of disposable income themselves. Anything they get left by their parents will be a bonus, they won't actually need it for anything critical.

True enough, but the generation spans from 1946-1964, so later boomers could have children as young as mid to late twenties, some (of the males) younger still if they've divorced and remarried.

The Asian market, particularly Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore - affluent countries scarce in space - would likely drive a lot of the demand.

This is definitely a big factor, perhaps more so than boomers. There are a lot of Asians who are very recently wealthy and want luxury products.

The is a youtube channel, Kentaro sound or something (I'm sure someone will know the right name) and it always make me smile seeing them installing huge JBL speakers in tiny Japanese homes, sometimes they even end up blocking the corner of a doorway or something. It is all a bit ungainly.

 

[BlackTalon]

That's true of course but seems to me that wealthy boomer's children will now be in their fifties and sixties and probably have professional jobs, paid off their mortgages and so have a fair chunk of disposable income themselves. Anything they get left by their parents will be a bonus, they won't actually need it for anything critical.

Hey, that's me! ...except for the wealthy parents part. Nothing expected (or needed) from either; in fact the cash flow is in the other direction. But mortgage paid off last month and no car payment for the last ~20 years.

I've spent money on audio ever since I was in HS. Thankfully as I've assembled systems for my wife and son over the last 2 years I had discovered ASR and been able to keep total costs for each down to less than I paid for my amp 25 years ago. My system is likely going to be refreshed a bit next year, and the 25+ year old Von Schweikerts and Bryston amp will be replaced with new pieces that will likely cost less combined then I can sell my old equipment for. I could spend more, but there seriously doesn't appear to be any real reason to do so. Especially since I am not a 'stylish' person and I have no desire to spend thousands of dollars extra just for subjectively better 'looks'.

 

[JJB70]

The Asian market, particularly Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore - affluent countries scarce in space - would likely drive a lot of the demand.

I think it is hard for many to appreciate the luxury of space.