3 ms·

I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on

I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on craigslist at any given moment in my city. But either way you can’t deny they’re choosing to go high end. They could have scaled down the software features of this by 10-20%, put it in a less “jony ive” case and sold it for $300-600 - but then they would’ve had more competition.

duped 5y ago
The TAM for pro audio equipment was around $10 billion and growing when I left working in it a few years ago. One of the reasons the market is so terrible for manufacturers is that their own products on the secondary market cannibalize future sales, which puts a damper on demand. It's great for professionals that can afford the high prices and buy stuff that last decades, but not great for an industry that needs to make new sales each year and develop future products. There's always cool stuff to build and develop, don't get me wrong, it's just not worth a ton of money which means that development times are long, prices stay pretty high for the good stuff, and talent is constantly siphoned by other markets (for example: consumer loudspeakers and AR/VR products: Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon have been on hiring sprees for audio hardware/software developers for the last decade) Over the last decade there was a growth in new products, but there's a lot of crap. There was also a lot of consolidation and acquisition because audio hardware manufacturing is such an expensive thing to do for a small market, particularly on the high end.