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“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting
- xcambar 4y ago> Many companies don't even employ any engineers or design their own products. Many audio execs would be totally lost reading threads here, and have the critical listening skills of a shriveled potato. They're in the role for business, not functional reasons. As for most companies in most industries. It's still worth repeating over and over again.
- sireat 4y agoIf anything 30% is already high and the company will have problems staying in business as the article notes. The rule of thumb used to be 1/5 of retail should be COGS. Source: 25 years ago my father co-founded a pro audio company that later pivoted to prosumer/consumer space. 4 VC rounds later the company was sold to major manufacturer for 9 figures. My father had less than 1% left after dilution. PS The biggest source of growth for the company was a massive ad campaign by Apple that also featured device by the company. Another key factor was being next door to a major channel for distribution. Of course the hardware was nice too but for the first 10 years the company had less than million in sales.
- soared 4y agoArticles like these make me appreciate my business degree, because this list is the basics of any business. 30% COGS, high shipping costs, outsourced manufacturing, big box focusing on low end market, etc is all very normal for almost any industry.
- leephillips 4y agoI don’t have a business degree, but every point in the post was totally as expected...nothing particular to audio in there.
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoI don't mean to be rude, but you don't need a business degree to understand the very basic things that you mentioned. I am fairly sure that most people using Hacker News understand those simple concepts in business.
- wmf 4y agoI don't know; I've seen so many people (including my younger self) who have completely wrong intuitions about business. This often manifests as FUD and hating that can be hard to dispel.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bo1024 4y agoI don’t have a business degree and yeah, I think I comprehend what was written, but before reading it I wouldn’t have guessed at much of it, a lot of my intuition or assumptions would have been wrong. More generally, sure, you never “need” an X degree to understand X, but most people won’t have spent the time learning X on their own unless they have an X degree.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tdeck 4y agoI think OP is saying that they're gaining a new appreciation for the fundamentals they learned which aren't necessarily common knowledge. Not that those fundamentals are so sophisticated that you need a degree to grasp them.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoIf you are in IT, and you're not a fantastic engineer. Level up your business skills. ERP administrators are an untapped source of business knowledge, because they map all the crap business is up to and are forced to learn about all the weird metrics, acronyms, reports, and so forth a business uses to survive.
- crims0n 4y ago30% COGS surprised me… I always estimated it would have been around 50%. Learned something new.
- edrxty 4y agoYou can do better if you're selling the stuff yourself, but that follows a bathtub curve with totally bespoke on one end and Apple on the other. It seems it becomes a struggle to keep up sales unless you're on Amazon and stacked on big box retailer shelves.
- lmm 4y agoI already knew the rule of thumb that a retail store needs 50% markup, so 30% seems reasonable in that context (indeed I'd've guessed 25%).
- fruit2020 4y agoSo when I buy an Oled tv, does the store procure it for half the price from the distributor? Sounds like a huge margin. How about from an ecommerce store, which a lot of times have slightly less but close prices to regular stores, can the distributor force them to keep prices up not to upset the other resellers?
- junofan 4y agoIt’s a sheet of plastic glued to another piece of plastic. Yes.
- wmf 4y agoSo when I buy an OLED TV, does the store procure it for half the price from the distributor? Generally yes. can the distributor force them to keep prices up not to upset the other resellers? Retailers upsetting other retailers is called channel conflict and is often solved with minimum advertised price policies. High-end companies like Apple and Sony often have this policy which is why you see the same price everywhere.
- yewenjie 4y agoIs there some online course I can take to learn the crux of a business degree?
- MarcelOlsz 4y agoI'm not joking when I say this, I have no idea how business works. I get it in theory, hell I even sold one. But I still don't know. One of my space-cadet day dreams is trying to figure out just what someone could possibly learn in business school and I can't come up with anything.
- Spooky23 4y agoMostly how to make certain types of spreadsheets, some finance stuff and how to talk business crap with other business people. It’s not rocket science.
- organsnyder 4y agoA good business school teaches organizational dynamics, change management, and leadership skills. Not rocket science, but potentially just as hard.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tradewinds 4y agoAccounting (for example the poster in the link states marketing does not make up COGS, which to someone who studied accounting is obvious). Simple economics (poster reveals "secret" that Price*Quantity can equal higher total revenue when price/quantity change disproportionately). Consumer behaviour (Dr. Dre can lead people to believe crap from pile A is better than crap from pile B). This is apparent insider-knowledge from someone who spent several years in industry - or you can go to school for the first 1.5 years of a business undergrad program and learn it that way across many more industries. In the final years of business school once you've chosen a specialization, you may learn advanced corporate finance (stocks, bonds, weighted cost of capital, different types of break-even measurement like economic break-even vs accounting break-even). Or you may specialize in accounting, operations, marketing, yada yada. Then an MBA is apparently much of what is taught in a good business undergrad but perhaps faster-paced and you get a shit ton of networking value.
- tradewinds 4y agoExactly. I too majored in business and I read through to the end waiting to see where the "secrets" were. This is super, super basic stuff that has more to do with really simple microeconomics driving firms' investment decisions. Most frivolous consumer-oriented sectors of the economy are all the same.
- caned 4y agoNormal don't make it right!!
- edrxty 4y agoThis seems to apply across the entire Small Plastic-covered Electronics sector. I worked for an instrumentation/sporting goods manufacturer among others and this reads like I wrote it myself. The CEO, even of a small operation, likely has no idea what the performance characteristics of their devices are. They exist to raise capital and deal with paperwork. We operated at about a 25% bom cost which was muuuuch higher than it needed to be but we were the aforementioned $50 components assembled by baboons case. The products were very high end meters and sensors with the electrical sophistication of a McDonalds toy, just using whatever the highest end parts Arrow et al would sell us. Like they aluded to, ultimately it's all the little stuff that gets you. Packaging, whatever voodoo the S&M team is up to, random IT bullshit, heath insurance, random FCC compliance stuff, etc.
- mschuster91 4y ago> random FCC compliance stuff Nothing better than designing a product and actually producing a batch of it... and then finding out you have some EMI problem requiring a redesign. If you're lucky, you can remedy it by manually adding some shielding tape, if not... you might as well file for bankruptcy in the worst case.
- edrxty 4y agoHa! I've seen this. We had one screw that was close enough to a trace on the board that it would lock up the device and fail ESD testing. Ended up plugging the top of that one screw hole with RTV on the whole batch.
- buescher 4y agoPrecompliance EMI test is cheaper than ever to put together, but a proper ESD setup is still going to be impossible to justify on a shoestring. I’ve seen other people use leak detectors and record zappers and I won’t even get into the things that won’t credibly work. I feel your pain.
- nomel 4y agoI worked in a semi anechoic test chamber for measuring radiated emissions. We had a few cases like this that one of the engineers was especially good at solving. In one, we had a cheaper network switch that was failing one of the limits. One of our engineers walked in with a can of metalized spray paint, applied a single squirt to the inside of the plastic case, and fixed the issue. If you bought one and opened it, you would see a single squirt of silver looking paint on the inside, right where he put his. I've seen a few of these squirts in the devices I've taken apart, so I guess it's not a secret.
- yalogin 4y agoThis post answered the one question that I couldn’t find answer for many years, that is why he did Dr.Dre get into the beats business or the other way why would the founders include Dr.Dre Now I understand that the equipment manufacturing is already commoditized and so the onus is fully on marketing and so he provides a great value.
- Nition 4y agoReminds me of Intel hiring will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas as Director Of Creative Innovation.
- christoph 4y agoWhile we're here, let's not forget Alicia Keys having the role of Global Creative Director at BlackBerry. https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/company/newsroom/press-releases/2013/alicia-keys-joins-blackberry-as-global-creative-director https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/company/newsroom/press-rele...
- jccalhoun 4y agoLady Gaga creative director of specialty products at Polaroid in 2010 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lady-gaga-named-creative_b_415164 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lady-gaga-named-creative_b_41...
- willhinsa 4y agoObligatory Kanye interview clip (NSFW, explicit language): https://youtu.be/uYUCUrzrF5E https://youtu.be/uYUCUrzrF5E
- distantsounds 4y agoWatch the documentary "The Defiant Ones" it goes into great detail about the story between Dre and Apple.
- rr808 4y ago
- m463 4y agoWhat I'd like as a consumer is the antidote to this. I saw something like this trying to get a replacement plumbing fitting at my parent's house a few years back. The local hardware store with the high-quality stuff had been closed down by the big-box stores. Perusing the possibilities at lowes and home depot showed plastic and fake chrome when I would have paid extra for high quality brass or even metal. It was just gone. In consumer audio, I fear that same - maybe we need some way to navigate away from the 7-eleven iphone headphones, from the bose/beats continuum, and to maybe find something like the moondrop blessing2. is it possible? EDIT: I do like schiit audio https://schiit.com https://schiit.com
- sidpatil 4y ago> Perusing the possibilities at lowes and home depot showed plastic and fake chrome when I would have paid extra for high quality brass or even metal. It was just gone. Both Lowe's and Home Depot sell metal faucets, taps, knobs, etc., in a variety of styles.
- abcc8 4y agoThey could be referring to a toilet paper roller. Just had to replace one of mine and realized while shopping that I haven't seen a proper metal one of those in in years.
- xani_ 4y agoThat's an unfortunate name for a company...
- killion 4y agoThis is why I like Monoprice, they have a limited selection of high-quality products at reasonable prices. I just wish they would make an AV receiver – that seems like a space where they could bring the price down but still have good room correction and Atmos. The Monolith is a good start, but something for the average consumer is what I'm thinking of.
- twobitshifter 4y agoI recently purchased a bluetooth speaker from “ultimate ears” which is a logitech brand. It’s great and seems to sound better than what you can get from marshall or beats.
- NoPicklez 4y agoLogitech make good products, their speakers have always been quite good IMO. I'll never forget in high school a buddy and I had two of the same Logitech X-540 speakers. We plugged the speakers together and pumped it through effectively a 10.2 setup.
- rasz 4y agoLike $400 "Logitech Z-5500 THX-Certified 5.1 Digital Surround Sound Speaker System" released 20 years ago? "The Z-5500 will consistently give you great sound on a daily basis and was tested by THX experts as well as our audio team." "The Logitech Z-5500 is the best all-around PC speaker system we have used to date." "Incredible sound and tons of amplifier power (505-watt (RMS), total peak power output of 1010 watts)" All from a box fused at 120V 3A :-) and with 10% THD when even a low end home stereo systems were usually 0.1-0.9% THD. You open it up and find four dual channel TDA7294 powered with 2x26V giving maximum of ~30W per "62-69W" channel and ~60W for "188 watts" subwoofer. Logitech was always good at scamming unwashed masses and unsophisticated computer reviewers unable to read labels and small print.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI've been having terrible luck with Logitech, and decided to never buy from them again. An $80 speaker set's audio input jack broke, and Logitech absolutely refused to fix it or help me in any way since it was a month or so past the one year warranty. I live right down the street from Logitech and could have just driven out to their HQ, but they completely stonewalled me.
- stordoff 4y agoFWIW, I've had the opposite experience with Logitech for mice: 2010: replaced a ~18-month-old MX400 with an MX620 under warranty after the left mouse button became unreliable (without proof of purchase) 2013: replaced that MX620 with an MX705 after I asked if it was possible to buy a replacement wireless receiver (part of the USB connecter had broken off IIRC) - I had assumed it would be well out of warranty as the original purchase was back in 2008. I can't say if the difference is because I'm in Europe, they've changed their practices more recently, or it's just luck of the draw.
- daviddever23box 4y agoAre any of these observations "secrets", or simply naive observations that have come home to roost? (Disclaimer: I spent two decades in the hi-fi industry, from tech to sales mgr to product consultant, and I currently work in consumer electronics technology on the software side.)
- projektfu 4y agoIt's the question of whether the Emperor having no clothes was a secret before the child pointed it out. No? But, yes?
- lvl102 4y agoI sold a very limited run electronics once. Less than 1,000. Most of this is true. The key is to make something niche enough that you can justify that fat margin. Pre-pandemic, it was quite cheap to produce even proof of concept products in Shenzhen IF you knew where to go for quality. Not anymore. 2016-19 was a special period for hobbyists.
- dcx 4y agoThis sounds interesting, why is this no longer true?
- flalslsm 4y agoIsn't it obvious? China is still doing lockdowns. Disruptions to supply chains raise costs. It's not complicated to figure out.
- kangalioo 4y agoThanks, although it would have been friendlier without that first and last sentence
- varispeed 4y agoComponents shortage. It's a hit and miss - you created a design, all components are available. You come to order e.g. 100 unit run, turns out the manufacturer already ran out of stock on one crucial component. Ok you can source that component elsewhere (and someone asks 5x mark up), but that manufacturer won't take your stock of components. So you order 100 units anyway, just without that part assembled and you will finish the assembly locally. That complication might have already wiped off any profit you could get on that unit. Alternative example - one crucial component is out of stock, but manufacturer has a different model of a microcontroller, that is pin compatible but has half of the RAM. You run an analysis and your firmware should run fine, but you may need to do some tweaks here and there. You place an order with an alternative part. Suddenly you have to support multiple versions of the same product. Then imagine your product team comes up with a new feature that also users ask for. Problem is that it may not work with the revision with half the RAM. Would you offer an update only to a section of customers? Would you replace the boards for free once they become available? Or do you make a completely new version of a product (which is going to piss customers who just bought the "old" version). Etc. Etc. These supply chain problems make any planning not possible. The common "solution" is to only start making a product once you have all parts physically available. But this can be an enormous upfront cost, as you can't order parts as pre-orders for the product come in. Then let's say you created 1000 units, sold all. In the meantime 5% of crucial components go out of stock and lead time is 52 weeks and growing. You can probably sustain the company for a year and re-design the product to use different parts, but experience shows that they may get out of stock too. You are going to have to focus 90% of your time chasing components than developing the product. This is not viable. Many businesses are closing now because of this.
- vt240 4y agoI work for an old, but small pro-audio manufacturer, and I just started watching AudioScienceReview's YouTube videos. Amazing stuff. I love his commitment to the consumer end, audiophile products, actually testing out many of these, with industry standard test-equipment and test procedures that we use.
- intrasight 4y agoIn addition to "secrets" there are "mysteries" - like why doesn't anyone make an "Amp" except Sonos, and why is it that one so darn expensive? I guess because they are the only one. https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/amp https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/amp
- other_herbert 4y agoI'd point you to many smaller retailers... https://outlawaudio.com/shop/ https://outlawaudio.com/shop/ https://emotiva.com/collections/amps https://emotiva.com/collections/amps and parts-express... I've owned things from all of these places so there's that I guess :)
- intrasight 4y agoOutlaw looks nice. And great name. But pricey.
- chipotle_coyote 4y agoOther companies make streaming amplifiers of various types -- Bluesound's Powernode immediately comes to mind, and one could argue virtually any AV receiver that has streaming services built-in can do the job (e.g., any Marantz or Denon with HEOS, any NAD amp with BluOS). The Sonos's price is actually pretty middle-of-the-road in this category, though. If I were looking to undercut it, I'd look for a two-part combo, like a $99 WiiM Mini streamer coupled with something like the $329 Emotiva BasX stereo amp. That's not going to get you any of the Sonos-specific ecosystem woo, of course.
- cschneid 4y agoWhat do you mean? An amplifier that can drive speakers that's also a streaming device? That exists at various price points. Anywhere from a raspberry pi taped to a "dumb" amplifier all the way to various Roon streamers. Although at both super-low and higher price points, things tend toward individual components for flexibility and diy reasons. But that's easy enough to work with to get something that both looks and sounds good. Sonos's one plays nice w/ Sonos's ecosystem, but if you don't need that there are other solutions.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoAs the owner of a pair of high-end Audeze, this article makes me wonder how much of the cost is marketing, as opposed to going towards "quality", for whatever definition of it. It's nicely built, sounds great, very neutral for production work, but.. $1000 great? Could I have gotten comparable performance for 1/10th the price? Is there an objective way of measuring "quality" in this space for premium products?
- JohnBooty 4y agoYeah, absolutely. Equipment's not cheap, but there are folks out there doing including the guy who runs AudioScienceReview: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/asr-getting-into-measuring-headphones.18086/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a... https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/HeadphoneReview/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Hea...
- lagadu 4y agoBe aware that measuring FR and THD is just that: measuring FR and THD: it's not a measurement of how good or bad something sounds. It's the equivalent of measuring a car's quality by looking at 0-100km times: it doesn't even tell us how fast a car will be.
- JohnBooty 4y agoThere is of course room for individual preference, and one's hearing and the physical headphone fit play a role. But essentially: yes, to a reasonable degree we absolutely can tell how good or bad a set of headphones will sound via measurements. It's the equivalent of measuring a car's quality by looking at 0-100km times The "quality" of a car is the sum of hundreds if not thousands of factors. Audio reproduction has basically a single input, and the output can be well described using a small number of metrics. We know what sounds good to people. It would be a miracle if we didn't, given the fact that the business and science of audio reproduction have been around for 125+ years. It has been studied and is something of a solved problem. Sean Olive and others have published some great research that's worth reading. The TL;DR is that headphone listeners prefer accurate sound reproduction that is fit to what is sometimes called the Harman Curve, which in turn correlates pretty well with the Fletcher-Munson equal loudness curve. It's interesting that these debates pop up around audio but not video. We know what "looks good" in a television: objectively accurate color and motion reproduction. This can all be easily measured. Audio can easily be measured as well, and yet....
- legohead 4y agoI bought some cheap "chinese" (very odd named brand) bluetooth headphones on Amazon, and they sounded great. Eventually they died, so I went with Sony which was twice the price, and the sound is quite noticeably worse. Unsurprisingly my previous headphones aren't for sale any longer [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T25NRLZ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T25NRLZ
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- schroeding 4y agoWhich Sony Headphones did you buy?
- modshatereality 4y ago30% seems a bit off, though yeah dense metal magnets in transformers and speakers are probably what keeps these products >= $100. Transistors, etc, are cheap as hell though. Some of this assembled gear is thousands of dollars and beyond, per single unit... So if you can build your own magnets, cases and push shipping off to the customer while providing 2x greater than behringer *quality*, I want to believe.
- ilaksh 4y agoI guess I'm the worst type of customer for audio retailers. I recently switched from buying $50-$100 gaming headphones to $5 wired earbuds with a built in microphone. They are still working perfectly after months, and I got a spare for another $5. The reason I decided to try that is because the wires in my headphones always get partially broken after a few months and so I end up with only one channel. And the cheap Bluetooth earbuds I had which were great for several months eventually went to a single channel also for some reason. If that happens again, $5 is no big deal to get more. Assuming I can find those cheap earbuds again.
- Cyphus 4y agoThe wires are usually the first thing to go out for me too. Have you considered buying a pair of headphones with detachable cable?
- ilaksh 4y agoDidn't know that existed, thanks for the idea. Will see if I get tired of the cheapos. They sound great to me though.
- gigaflop 4y agoV-Moda is a bit pricey, but I've had my Crossfade LP headphones for somewhere between 6 to 8 years. The cable is standard 3.5mm, detachable from the body of the headphones. They also have a few accessories like a detachable cable with a mic on an arm, which I used for a while until I got a desktop mic. The carry case that came with the cans is also very nice.
- Ekaros 4y agoJust make sure it is standard cable. And not something slightly different. Not that I also haven't had bad experience with general quality of headphones. That is other parts just breaking with only slightly careless use. Thankfully the wireless Pioneers I bought seem to have lasted with Boses I alternate with.
- 4y ago
- fasteddie31003 4y agoI built my own speakers for under $200 and I honestly think they are some of the best I've ever heard for a personal setup. They were inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k (Tech Ingredients) . I built the speakers from foam board, the subwoofer from car audio parts and the amp is a standard class D amp. The best part is whenever someone comments on how good my speakers sound I can say I built them myself.
- jonhohle 4y agoWere there any guides or tutorials you followed? 20 years ago or so, I knew someone who built their own speaker cabinets and I couldn’t believe DIY speakers could match companies that spent hundreds millions on audio engineering. I’ve heard enough anecdotes that I would be interested in learning more.
- bolt7469 4y agoYou might like this playlist from DIY Perks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJU8YJjFwGOeh6BgCWVhZf5HSkfVPVP3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJU8YJjFwGOeh6BgCWVh...
- fasteddie31003 4y agoI sized my subwoofer box using https://subbox.pro/en/ https://subbox.pro/en/ . I built the foam board speakers the same way built here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k&ab_channel=TechIngredients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k&ab_channel=TechI... . The amplifier is a class D amp from amazon somewhat like this one https://a.co/d/8XgEEsG https://a.co/d/8XgEEsG
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agohttps://www.diyaudio.com/community/ https://www.diyaudio.com/community/ is the main online forum. There's a fair bit of discussion over at parts-express.com's forums as well. There's a variety of books out there. Sound Reproduction by Dr Toole is a very comprehensive reference to the big picture, but doesn't really get into speaker and crossover design specifically. There's other books you can find for that, but I'm unaware of the most recent good ones as I read most of this stuff decades ago. In that era the Vance Dickenson book was a big one. The main reasons DIY can rival hifi are: 1. Good components are available to DIY builders. Yeah there's some proprietary stuff that's cool you can't get. But there's a ton of very top quality stuff you can get. 2. Retail hifi has insanely restrictive costs. They'll save every penny possible. So simply by buying better capacitors, etc, or using a slightly more complex crossover, or building a bigger box than is fashionable you can gain an edge. 3. The digital room correction systems offered on most home AV receivers today do a lot to fix simple flaws in DIY designs, giving more slack.
- manv1 4y agoThis is actually true of many businesses/industries. There was an article just like this about the clothing business, and how at the high price points the quality is equivalent - any price delta is due to branding. Once you use the highest quality material, the highest quality stitching for the price point, well, you're stuck. That's when you sprinkle the magic fairy dust on it to raise the price, which usually consists of a nameplate or logo.
- Ericson2314 4y agoI'm just happy niche communities using old school forum software still exist!
- Lio 4y agoSo am I. As someone that doesn't use Facebook or Reddit it's sad as hell when you join a club or society and they don't really use the forum on their own site any more. I've often wondered if there's something not quite good enough with open source forum software that Facebook is getting right. I suspect it's push notifications, but it's just a guess.
- Eisenstein 4y agoI don't know about facebook, but reddit's killer feature is consolidation. The ability to have one account and access communities for everything is what holds me there.
- Ericson2314 4y agoYeah, that is a good feature. Federated stuff is supposed to be the best of both worlds.
- pedalpete 4y agoAny thoughts on how you would price a HaaS product. Would you aim for 30% of LTV? I've been looking at Whoop, and I think they have a great business model. Based on my estimates, the COG of their product is probably $8-12. The monthly cost is $35 - but you have to subscribe for a minimum of 12 months so $420.
- tradewinds 4y agoI think you're looking for a business/economics hybrid field called "unit economics". Its all about churn, customer acquisition cost, etc. There's a guy who works for Microsoft named Tren Griffin who tweets case studies of this stuff - might find it interesting.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer support, warranty replacements, lost shipments, fraudulent orders, etc.). That’s not even counting the R&D investment costs that go into making the product, as the post says. Salaries, warehousing, shipping, insurance, and all of the others costs of doing business add up. It’s not actually realistic to expect an entire company to be selling you a $300 product that costs them something like $250 to build. Every business in existence must build in enough margin to pay the people who do all of the work to make it happen and support it. If this seems shocking, consider that the COGS of software as a service products are much lower by comparison. Doesn’t matter, though, because you have to pay all of those expensive salaries to make it happen.
- aaroninsf 4y agoUsed to work for a hardware manufacture that did small runs of professional AV products (runs in the thousands, costs in the hundred to thousands of dollars). The standard in the industry at this scale was and is 8x COG. That was what was required to pencil things out. At that ratio we were initially 5x cheaper than competing products in an niche that had a de facto duopoly. Which we disrupted. For a while.
- leeoniya 4y agoyeah, it's quite typical that wholesale = 2x COGS and retail = 2x wholesale. for high end stuff it's likely far higher. that $75 Intel AX210 WiFi 6e upgrade is likely a $5 part at wholesale in 10k quantities. upgraded op-amps for $100? probably $4 each on digikey or aliexpress (and thats already marked up from maybe $2 COGS)
- kube-system 4y agoYeah, last time I worked retail, our prices by default were 2x our cost. People gasp when they hear that, but 2x wholesale doesn’t mean we were making bank. We were spending all that money on wages, utilities, the property itself, taxes, equipment, etc. If people think that charging $20 for a $10 widget is too much, they can fly to Shenzhen and buy it for $10.
- fumeux_fume 4y agoNeither secret nor interesting, just clickbait.
- SpaceLawnmower 4y agoMajor consumer speaker vendors don't make it easy to compare speakers. When I was looking for a portable speaker to play outside I was surprised to see that for most of the speakers you'll find at big box stores, there are no statistics for loudness or how it sounds. The best we get is size and rarely amperage, which I found through trial and error are dubious measures at best. I ended up returning two overpriced soft sounding speakers before the third one was sufficient. Price doesn't make as much of a difference as I thought it would either. As a consumer, I don't know what to trust because the marketing on these things can be pretty useless.
- JohnBooty 4y agoYou're absolutely right. Power ratings are like, useless^2 There's no great way to measure power output for an amp, surprisingly. The old FTC rating system was something like continuous wattage at a fixed voltage at all audible frequencies. This was decent, although actual music isn't anything like white noise. =) So manufacturers give absolute BS "power ratings" like "40W" which usually means the amplifier can produce that much output, at a single frequency, for a zillionth of a second at 10% distortion which doesn't much resemble real music either. But even if they were truthful about the rest of that, it wouldn't matter because knowing the power output of the onboard amp is useless without taking into account the efficiency of the speaker drivers themselves.
- sylware 4y agoAlice brings her broken car to bob, a mechanic. He has a quick look at the engine, then hits a specific spot with a hammer. The car was fixed. Then Bob asks for 100 bucks and Alice replies that it is quite expensive for one single hammer strike. Bob then says, the hammer strike is 1 buck, knowing where to strike is 99 bucks.
- yeuxardents 4y agoAlways an enjoyable one https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
- im3w1l 4y ago> the hammer strike is 1 buck, knowing where to strike is 99 bucks. The hammer strike and knowing where to strike should both be accounted as cost of goods sold. 30% cogs would mean a price tag of $330.
- 1-6 4y agoI was waiting for a Amazon purchase link recommendation but was disappointed.
- idontwantthis 4y ago> Most Chinese factories and engineers are perfectly capable of producing high-end equipment... but their customers don't ask for it You can also get cheap and really good Chinese gear now. I bought KZ-ZS10 Pro IEMs for $45 on Ali Express and they are fantastic. Very clear sound and isolation that beats my Sony XM4 around ears. Unfortunately the bluetooth adapter you can buy for them is static-y garbage.
- jcronenberg 4y agoI don't know if you are interested in this, but for anyone who wants the audio quality of wired headphones while also using bluetooth, I can highly recommend a bluetooth DAC, like the Qudelix 5k[1]. It has excellent audio quality and their app is quite nice and allows for some very in depth customization. [1] https://www.qudelix.com/ https://www.qudelix.com/
- frankzander 4y agoI wonder if it's the same or similar with music making products or especially with this unbelievable amount of guitar effect pedals.
- chadcmulligan 4y agoThe world of consumer audio makes very little sense. The beats headphone mentioned is often poo poo'd by anyone interested in sound reproduction, they are very over priced, but most people don't pay for the technical reproduction its the brand they want, and the belief that because its expensive its better. It used to be that more expensive was better, but that has decoupled now with many products, now it's a lot of marketing you're paying for. Sound is one of those things that used to be you'd pay more and get better stuff - in the days of record players and onkyo amps. Now you can get a class D amp for peanuts that's as good as anything else on the market, all sound is digital so there is no real need to spend more. The only thing where you can spend more on is speakers, there's still some engineering there. The world of audiophiles and golden ears is a crazy place, where you can spend as much money as you want on things that don't make a difference.
- aljgz 4y agoYears ago I visited a friend in emmm..., "Europe". He was not home and the neighbour let us in. He asked us to entertain ourselves until he gets back. It took little time to notice the pair of speakers: 50cm cubes, almost. I managed to turn them on and connect them to the TV. There I heard the most lifelike sound I ever heard from any speakers. I wondered: these should be some crazy European brand... no brand names anywhere on the boxes. Later that night I asked about the speakers and he went: "What? They sound good?" It turns out his friend works at "Insert big European brand, not only audio here" and they decided to make a great pair of speakers. Then he brings home a measurement device north of 6 figure €s, and they tune it so that you would not be able to distinguish a person talking behind you, from the recording of them being played with these speakers... Or as close you can get to that. Then they take their product to the company only to be laughed at: "for anything below 5000€, we don't use any part above 50€. You have parts north of 500, this is not feasible for the market."
- anhner 4y ago
- bigfudge 4y agoThis sort of comment just isn’t necessary, doesn’t add anything to the discussion and I’d be happy to see it deleted. English is likely not the gp’s first language but we should be grateful that smart people from all over the world want to talk to us in English.
- anhner 4y agoFair enough. I don't know how to delete it so I'll edit it. I genuinely didn't understand what they were trying to say. However at some point we WILL need a way to differentiate between real humans and AI generated content for farming.
- JohnBooty 4y agothey tune it so that you would not be able to distinguish a person talking behind you, from the recording of them being played with these speakers That's interesting! I'd love to know more about how your friend did it. It's trivial to get perfect on-axis sound (ie, the tweeters are pointed at your ears) even with cheap speaker components if you add some active DSP to compensate for the speaker's imperfections. In professional studio audio this is more or less the norm with monitors from Genelec, JBL, etc. In nearfield use (ie, you're close enough to the speaker that the direct sound from the speaker dwarfs the sound reflected off of the walls of the room) this will sound eerily good, basically like putting on a pair of headphones.
- comprev 4y agoEverything said could also apply to the bicycle industry. Two or three heavyweights own the factories and produce for everyone else.
- orangetuba 4y agoThere is a lot of talk about DIY here, which sounds cool, but I'm also pretty lazy and I have started way too many projects. What are some really underestimated systems that you can buy?
- ehnto 4y agoI think part of the discussion is that there are no 'hidden gems' at fair prices. You have cheap products sold for cheap, and cheap products sold for a lot, and then you have expensive products sold for much much more. There is no good products sold for a fair amount, just bargains on commodity gear. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the 'middle market' is only such in price, not product quality. I would say though that Audio Technica, while still commodity products, do seem to get better the more you pay up into the middle market. I think you get diminishing returns in their higher end range though. I've had the same Audio-Technica ATH-500's for perhaps 14 years now. I drop them all the time too, like daily. I had to buy some replacement earpads as the pleather wore out, but that's it. Still perfect audio. I'd wager they'd have 10,000+ hours of use easily.
- VLM 4y agoMost marketplaces are like that including food, lumber, fasteners (screws and nails and stuff) and clothing. Cheap junk at cheap prices, cheap junk at medium prices for the aspirational shopper, good stuff at luxury brand prices, nothing else. If you do woodworking you can buy inconsistently zinc plated insta-rust steel for $1 online, $5 (of which $4 is pure profit) for the same junk at big box stores, or about $50 at a specialty store for stainless steel and solid (not plated) brass that looks nice and will last a lifetime. Another example: Cell phone chargers. The one apple ships with their phones actually follows all FCC/UL specs and is legal. Dollar store charger, not so much...
- acallaha 4y agoAs an example, these $50 headphones just released, co-designed by respected headphone reviewer Crinacle - he measures headphones on an expensive rig simulating the human ear, which can then be used to EQ the headphones to comply with a standard target response (typically, the "Harman curve"). These new headphones seem to comply stunningly well with that target curve. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/truthear-x-crinacle-zero-iem-review.37380/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
- KaiserPro 4y agoThe problem with audio in general is that its really difficult to find decent reviews of the product. I used to work as a tech in a recording studio (along with a theatre and TV studio) We have a set of nearfield speakers, and that was about it. However audio reviews are basically: "Its got punchy bass" and "sounds a bit woolly" or "has brilliant clarity in the upper regions" are about as descriptive as review get. Not only that but "high end" audio is replete with proper charlatanism. Without trying the devices, its impossible to assess how good they are. personally, I have a second hand denon HDMI decoder thing, with airplay. I have some cheap surround speakers. The thing that separates it from "high end" amplifiers is that it has a microphone to add some basic DSP filtering during a calibration stage. It gives a decent flat reproduction of what's coming into the amp (ie its not mid or treble heavy), and cost about £250 all in (the amp was second hand)
- MengerSponge 4y agoMost amplifier reviews are less informative than the Knob Feel YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/KnobFeel https://www.youtube.com/c/KnobFeel
- n49o7 4y agoAnd they do it in all languages, which is really helpful.
- etherealG 4y agoI like rtings personally. Understandable for mere mortals like me, but clear about their test methods which seem scientific enough.
- brosinante 4y ago"personally, I have a second hand denon HDMI decoder thing, with airplay [..] dsp filtering [..] calibration stage [...] decent flat reproduction" These are certainly words, and everything else being the same I absolutely would rather have the "bit wooly" kind of review to read.
- 4y ago
- NonNefarious 4y agoA few years ago I decided to move up from what I'd call "good consumer" receivers to something high(er)-end. So I shelled out $1400 for an NAD A/V receiver. This thing is unmitigated trash. It's riddled with design defects and bugs that render it unfit for purpose, some of which are acknowledged by NAD but with no solution. For example: You can't watch 1080p content through it because it reports incorrect EDID info to the source player, saying that the max resolution of the display device is 720p. Another: Dirac audio processing is well-regarded by many to fix room acoustics, so that was a major factor in the purchase. Welp, the NADs will simply "lose" or stop using your laboriously-sampled Dirac EQ curve at random. Another defect admitted by NAD, but "we don't know why it happens." An authorized repair guy said NAD simply contracts out their designs, and the gear is often built by a hodgepodge of suppliers out of low-grade components. This was after driving two sets of speakers from one set of terminals apparently caused on over-current condition... which didn't throw a circuit breaker or blow a fuse, but rather destroyed the entire amplifier and rendered the receiver permanently inoperable unless the main board was replaced. Brilliant design. I have replaced it with a Pioneer, which only suffers from one insufferably stupid design flaw that I've discovered so far (also shared by the NAD): You can't play digital sources through secondary zones ("zone 2" speakers). I mean... WTF.
- potmat 4y agoPossibly the problem is the "V" in "A/V". AFAIK NAD was always an audio components company. Introducing video adds a huge amount of complication they were probably not prepared for. But that's just a guess. As a counterpoint I have an NAD integrated amplifier I bought because it has a Chromecast built in. Even though it was a floor demo model it has never once put a foot wrong for me.
- NonNefarious 4y agoThen they shouldn't advertise what they can't deliver. As time goes by you realize that what you thought were solved problems are not, and precious few people actually demand that they be solved. Precious few people (and almost no "reviewers") actually exercise the features advertised by vendors, and that they checked off on comparison shopping lists. When you sell an A/V receiver that can't handle HD HDMI signals in 2022, you suck. You suck at the level of fraud.
- alex3305 4y agoThis doesn't at all surprise me. I consider myself a enthousiast with a limited budget. For instance I have a pair of Sennheiser HD 25-1 II for maybe 15 years now and I still enjoy them. Same goes for my KRK Rokit monitors. But recently I wanted to buy some Bluetooth headphones, since you know, the 3.5mm is absent from my new phone. For those headphones I just went to the local MediaMarkt. First looked at crazy expensive Sennheisers, than at some boomy JBL's (Samsung) until I finally settled at some House of Marley Positive Vibration II - Bluetooth. It was the least expensive set of Bluetooth headphones in store with the poorest reviews online. But for me the sound was great. At that moment I realized that I had forgotten an important lesson for audio devices: Choose with your ears. Especially when you have a limited budget, like myself.
- andybak 4y agoMy gut feeling for headphones is that the $40-$80 price point is optimal and everything above that is smoke and mirrors. (or more charitably "a difference without a difference" - something that is perceptible but which doesn't improve the pleasure derived in any meaningful way)
- alex3305 4y agoI think that $40-$80 is ideal for most. However like I said my Sennheiser HD 25-1 II was about $120 when it was new, so a bit over. But everything on it is repairable. So when I replaced the foam bits last year, it felt like a new pair of headphones. And of course $300 or $600 or even more expensive headphones probably sound better. But IMHO the difference doesn't justify the cost.
- nottorp 4y ago> Most Chinese factories and engineers are perfectly capable of producing high-end equipment... but their customers don't ask for it. For cheap ish stuff, for example: do you want a test done in the factory? That will raise the manufacturing price by 50% or more, depending on how cheap your widget is. So you get your DOA widgets from the store and just return them instead. Source: I worked for a company that did direct manufacturing in China.
- anonymous344 4y agois this because 90% of consumers are stupid or even idiots and getting more stupid every year?
- projektfu 4y agoI think it's because nothing has any meaning anymore. Brands used to pride themselves on quality, but then they realized that the listener perceives quality based mostly on price and aesthetics. Even people who know better. I remember about 30 years ago, my father was shopping for a stereo receiver. The salesman happily let him listen to them all, and he said, "You know, there's two people in this industry. There's the guys with the lab coats and measurement devices, who say that there's no difference in the line output quality between these amplifiers, and there's the guys who smoke a lot of weed and they say they can tell the difference." My dad, a CS professor, didn't really like that description of reality and still wanted to hear each one, of course. Past a certain level of amplifier fidelity, the speakers, their placement, and their wires are responsible for all of the sound quality. My dad even used to tell a story about how an acoustics professor at his school used to take a car stereo speaker (cheap, think 1962) and he would put it into his own enclosure, and it would sound better than the expensive store-bought speaker. So he was well aware of this. But, still, he listened to each receiver and considered its sound quality. But I bet he bought mainly on functional features and his perception of the brand. Unfortunately, in these days, where the brand can be sold randomly, and old quality brands are recycled by formerly generic suppliers, our perception of the brand is way off. So many people choose based on price. And, yes, they do think we are idiots. Remember when Sennheiser was selling identical headphones for two different prices, and the $300 ones actually had something added to make them sound worse than the $500 ones, which when removed gave you the same sound? Not only did this happen, but people who presumably were happy with their Sennheiser gear were on here defending the practice like any fanboy.
- midoridensha 4y ago>My dad, a CS professor, didn't really like that description of reality and still wanted to hear each one, of course. Past a certain level of amplifier fidelity, the speakers, their placement, and their wires are responsible for all of the sound quality. That should really be obvious to anyone knows how amplifiers work. The total distortion of any decent stereo amplifier is minuscule, and the difference between any two decent (or better) amplifiers is really tiny. But speakers, and the environment around them, make an enormous difference in sound. Even 30 years ago, the real differences between amplifiers ("receivers" really) was the features included, not the distortion level of the amplifier. Also aesthetics: people wanted their stereo systems to look good and for the components to match. The power level was important too: if you were driving 6-feet-tall speakers, you needed a higher-power amp than one for driving bookshelf speakers.
- bbarn 4y agoI have an inexpensive surround sound system from Sony with a soundbar on my TV. I enjoy it a lot when we're watching movies. For everything else I use a JBL plastic covered bluetooth speaker. I used to be really into speaker quality, swallowed all the audiophile pills. Wired my first home for audio. You know what made the difference for me? Portable, water proof, long battery life, and good enough sound to play music while hanging out with my friends or cooking in the kitchen. I know I'm no longer the target audience that I was in my 20s, but comparing the small 150$ unit I have now to literally anything made 20 years ago at that range is crazy to me.
- IgorPartola 4y agoAny time this comes up I wonder: isn’t the ideal setup aimed at giving you a flat frequency response curve? Why reviews? Why experts and subjective opinions of online reviewers? Sure other factors can be a part of it like longevity of the product, price for performance, power, but at the end of the day sound quality can be objectively measured, no?
- diroussel 4y agoIf you look at measured frequency response of any audio equipment then you never see a truly flat response. At least I haven’t. And the phase shift of often far from flat. So if you have two systems that have near flat responses it’s possible that one sounds better for certain inputs. Also Bose plot (frequency and phase plot) is a type of analysis that assumes the system is linear. If the system is not linear, what is the plot showing you? I imagine many systems are very close to linear, but at the edges of dynamic range they can’t be.
- 323 4y agoWith our current technology it's impossible to make a flat frequency response speaker. It's possible for amps, mics, DACs, but not for speakers, unless you talk about million dollar facilities. So you need to pick from different non-flat speakers, which means listening test if you really care. You can't figure out which one you'll like just from looking at the frequency response graph.
- IgorPartola 4y agoWhy is it not just picking the flattest response you can afford? Will a less flat response ever sound better than a more flat response?
- 323 4y agoFlatness is a curve, not a number. If you try to distill it into a number (by integrating the error for example), you can have two speakers with the same "flatness number" which cost about the same, yet sound very different. This is not theoretical, I've experienced it - two professional speakers (or monitors as they are called) from different manufacturers, which cost the same and the frequency plots look the same to a human eye if you put them side to side, but sound very different. Which is why it's preferable to listen them if you really care. But there are "safe" recommendations for every price range.
- PaywallBuster 4y agoI think the most interesting is that brands that claim to have the best R&D and most advanced technologies are simply picking supplies from 3rd parties. The 3rd parties and universities are actually doing the research&development and manufacturing.
- anuvrat1 4y ago> Most Chinese factories and engineers are perfectly capable of producing high-end equipment... but their customers don't ask for it. Now there is a market for good sounding IEM's and headphones, Chinese brands such as Moondrop and HiFiMAN are dominating every price bracket. They are even innovating, earlier for Planar IEM's you can either have good sound or usability (Audeze isine). Now you have both with 7hz timeless. The stagnated market has finally started moving, and the pace is insane.
- DrJaws 4y agoHiFiMAN has really destroyed the audiophile market for other brands. Every single bracket of their products perform like any other company +50% extra price product Sundaras were amazing, but the new edition XS were just the last straw for competitors, never a headset of that quality was so affordable, the equivalent from other brands can even cost 2x the price.