# Fifty grand for speakers? Feh! That was back in '89. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [August 8, 2006, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892 "2006-08-08T18:13:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2006, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/1 "2006-08-08T18:13:00Z")
[http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3\_182.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_182.html) A while back I got a quote for a set of front and surround speakers and subwoofers for a customer’s theater. The sales guy said they’d total “about a buck and a quarter.” One million two hundred fifty thousand dollars American. Saw a presentation by the owner of that company where he explained that his stereo speakers cost a quarter mill per pair because of the design and construction of the nearly solid [Avonite](http://www.avonitesurfaces.com/) cabinets. Very little was in the electronics or the woofers and tweeters, or “drivers.” He said, “Everybody uses the same thirty dollar drivers.” :eek: And no, they didn’t sound much better than the old Harman-Kardons I bought at a garage sale for five bucks, but I have a customer who bought some through us. Thank goodness for rich folk! ---
**Author:** ![Enter\_the\_Flagon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Enter\_the\_Flagon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enter_the_Flagon)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2006, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/2 "2006-08-08T19:26:31Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > [http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3\_182.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_182.html) > > Saw a presentation by the owner of that company where he explained that his stereo speakers cost a quarter mill per pair because of the design and construction of the nearly solid [Avonite](http://www.avonitesurfaces.com/) cabinets. Very little was in the electronics or the woofers and tweeters, or “drivers.” He said, “Everybody uses the same thirty dollar drivers.” :eek: So then he’s claiming that no one actually uses those drivers which are constructed using exotic materials like titanium, ceramic, or even [diamond](http://www.madisound.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?keywords=accuton), which retail for hundreds or even thousands of dollars? If you could somehow purge all the charlatans from the world of “high-end audio”, the industry could hold it’s annual convention in Verne Troyer’s sock drawer. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Lance\_Murdoch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/47e85d/32.png) [@Captain\_Lance\_Murdoch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Lance_Murdoch)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2006, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/3 "2006-08-08T20:12:28Z")
[This thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=364859) is in the same spirit. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2006, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/4 "2006-08-08T21:01:19Z")
Some damn ugly systems here: [http://www.higherfi.com/spkrlist/speakerlist.htm](http://www.higherfi.com/spkrlist/speakerlist.htm) ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2006, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/5 "2006-08-08T21:46:50Z")
> [@Enter the Flagon](#): > > So then he’s claiming that no one actually uses those drivers which are constructed using exotic materials like titanium, ceramic, or even [diamond](http://www.madisound.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?keywords=accuton), which retail for hundreds or even thousands of dollars? Some might. He and the high-end manufacturers he knows don’t, at least, according to him, but we fairly regularly sell theater audio systems, including amps, in the high five and low six figures that use no extra-fancy materials and they sound fabulous. It’s how you put the speakers together and even that guy I quoted could build you a set of speakers for half as much using plain ol’ MDF. Thanks to what I’ve learned about chicanery in this biz my next pair of speakers will be homemade, ultra high efficiency, and using this amp: [T-Amp - Class T integrated amplifier - [English]](http://www.tnt-audio.com/ampli/t-amp_e.html). Maybe then I can finally have a system that sounds good at extremely LOW volume. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2006, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/6 "2006-08-10T06:09:43Z")
I wouldn’t call these people charlatans (hey, they don’t exactly lie about anything). But it seems to me that what sells speakers by far isn’t actual quality but rather image and marketing. Because of this, the price has little connection with the bill of materials, but much more with how good a company is at attracting rich idiots. This pretty much holds true at every price scale, even the “lower-end” ones. The only exception, besides ordinary lowest-price models, is probably computer speakers, since review sites (or even just the feedbacks on newegg) inject both sanity (through non-bs evaluation) and price-competition into the market. Although once you pass the $150 range, you mostly begin treading in over-priced bs fluff land again. This is why on EBay you will find so many people selling hand-assembled audio equipment (using the same components) for much less than professionally-manufactured models. In what other field of electronics can garage labor compete so effectively with organized, mechanized production? It’s ridiculous. Another point to make is that often the thing that separates the more expensive speakers from their cheaper breathren isn’t at all the audio quality but their loudness. For example, the $50k speakers in the article have 2kW subwoofers each. This is pretty much sufficient to be heard from a mile away. By contrast, to have a loud party in your living room you only need sound energy in the magnitude of 100 watts. As one can imagine, stadium speakers can have good reason to cost $50k. However, it is that idiot-focused marketing that is able to sell such ridiculous crap to consumers. Lastly, in pretty much every price range greater than $100, equalizer and DSP settings begin to play a MUCH bigger role than the quality of the equipment. This is something even audiophiles often refuse to acknowledge (partly because their magazines don’t devote 10-page spreads to it, and partly because tweaking the equalizer requires so much patience, dedication, and actual ability to tell apart the difference that they just go back to their land of bs marketing ignorance). Comparing speakers without first spending a great deal of time tuning them is even worse than walking into an electronics store to buy a tv and not realizing that, by far, the biggest quality difference between the tvs on display are brightness/color/constrast settings. That’s the unfortunate truth behind quality audio/visual equipment. If you can’t figure out the equalizer, you shouldn’t be spending the money. Or else no matter what you buy, your satisfaction with it will be a simple crapshoot of how well its default response mimics your preference. And no, buying the most linear response won’t give you guaranteed good sound. Firstly because there’s no such thing as guaranteed linear response through the entire chain of media/playback device/speakers/room acoustics. Second, because it is a myth that everyone likes the musician’s equalizer settings best. But anyway… it’s probably just best (or at least easier) to like your speakers because the marketing brochure told you to. But let’s not knock the placebo effect. If spending a million dollars convinces someone that his speakers will give him orgasms, then they will give him orgasms. What is the enjoyment of sound if not subjectivity, after all. Why ruin a good thing with such crap as reality. Even more to the point, if you’re someone who’s very discering who’s never satisfied with their equipment, then you’ll never be satisfied and you won’t get any pleasure no matter what you spend. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2006, 6:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/7 "2006-08-10T06:20:14Z")
Reading the above-mentioned thread, my favorite post is about $350 AC power cables: > [@](#): > > I think this pretty much says it all. > > From marketing materials for a power cord (between the wall and the CD player) > "THE DIGITAL AC is an excellent cord for any digital based component, creating a smoother, more “analog” environment for audio and video. Uniquely engineered specifically for the elimination of digital based noise, it very effectively eliminates what we call ‘digititus’, the harshness present and very difficult to remove in all digital sources. Computers and so many other noise sources within today’s homes create an invisible shower of high frequency energy which causes today’s sophisticated electronics to error and perform well below their capabilities. Even the finest component’s generate noise, limiting fine detail and resolution. > > Using advanced RF engineering, THE DIGITAL AC effectively isolates and ABSORBS any noise within the cord itself, allowing any quality digital component to provide amazingly real inner detail and resolution while offering smoother sounding mid’s and highs, or smoother more life-like video. THE DIGITAL AC is a proven universal winner for over 8 years running as it’s forward thinking design allows an increasing improvement in performance as electronics become faster, and offers universal global improvement on any quality digital based low power equipment including CD, SACD, or DVD player, DAC, transport, digtital based preamp, or home theater multi-channel processor (receivers must use Power AC+, Kaptovator, or Aluminata due to their power hungry amplifier). It also allows for a more lifelike picture when used with a video projector, video scaler, DVD player, High Definition (HDTV) receivers or monitor, flat plasma and LCD display, or any other digital based quality video component which will accept a detachable AC cord. THE DIGITAL AC will also keep other components clean on the same circuit." The best reply to the Digital AC was: > [@](#): > > But, since [analog] tube amps are the best sounding, those cables may not work. ---
**Author:** ![joema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@joema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joema)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2006, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/8 "2006-08-10T22:18:59Z")
> [@Alex\_Dubinsky](#): > > I wouldn’t call these people charlatans (hey, they don’t exactly lie about anything). But it seems to me that what sells speakers by far isn’t actual quality but rather image and marketing…Lastly, in pretty much every price range greater than $100, equalizer and DSP settings begin to play a MUCH bigger role than the quality of the equipment… Unfortunately there are plenty of audiophile equipment charlatans. At least with speakers, careful double-blind scientific tests have shown people can accurately identify good vs bad sounding speakers. However the same tests show audio quality isn’t strongly related to price. Sorry I don’t have a URL to the tests, but many were done by the Canadian National Research Council. By contrast, double-blind controlled tests show that amplifiers and other components such as speaker wires cannot be accurately identified. IOW when people who claim to hear the differences are set down in a lab and asked to identify things in a blind A/B test, they cannot. Richard Clark, a columnist for [Carsound.com](http://Carsound.com) will pay $10,000 if someone can reliably identify one amp vs another in a double blind test. It started as a car audio test, but has since been extended to home audio. So far thousands of people have taken Clark’s test and NOT ONE has passed it. You can see the contest rules by searching Google on “AMPLIFIER CHALLENGE RULES”. They are posted many places. Lastly, the point about DSP and amplifier settings are very important. Psycho-acoustic tests have repeatedly shown that people rate louder music as better sounding. Yet different speakers have different efficiencies. Therefore in an A/B test, if the audio level isn’t normalized to the same db output during the A/B switchover, people will usually rate the louder speaker as better sounding, no matter what the distortion. Such care is rarely exercised during audio evaluations. Modern amplifiers have many, many DSP and equalization settings. In fact they’re so complicated it can take hours to study the manual and learn how to bypass those. Unless all those functions are disabled or totally understood during an A/B test, it’s possible two sets of speakers could use different DSP/equalization settings. And this assumes each set of speakers is driven from the same amp. If they’re driven from two different amps, all bets are off. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2006, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/9 "2006-08-12T14:15:23Z")
uggghh… i had written a nice, elegant, full reply and then accidentally turned off my computer before sending. anyway, the two main points to take away from it: I would argue that setting the equalizer to be identical to compare two sets of speakers is precisely the opposite of what you should do. If one set has poor bass, but it is entirely correctable through the equalizer, then why in the world should one hold that against it? In the ideal test, you should tune the equipment as much as possible to bring out the full potential of the speakers. If you were to conduct a purely synthetic test, then of course you’d want identical inputs. For a real-world test, you should have real-world conditions. In fact, the results may turn out different with different equipment which has different tuning capabilities. You’d also need to collect different groups of listeners (divided up by taste and hearing acuity) to get a full picture. You’d also need to retune the entire setup for each participant in your study. Better yet, you’d have to let them do the tuning themselves. If you say that that’s too much work, then you’d probably be right. However, let us not lose sight of what an ideal assesment of quality is. Of course, when you’re stepping away from the ideal you get into another gray mess as well. If you don’t let everyone retune the setup for themselves, then perhaps you should keep the equalizer the same to not bias the test in any direction. Or rather, better to just run the study many times with a varying, random selection of equalizer settings. However, averaging over individual preference like that will get you into big trouble no matter what you do (eg, the public loves crazy bass and lossy DSPs like surround sound or whatnot, while pure audiophiles hate them). Second, double-blind A-B tests are not the standard of ideal examination either. They suffer from “multiple-choice test” syndrome. SAT instructors always tell their students that if they come to a question of which they’re not sure (but have some hint), then the more they sit thinking about it, the less the chance of them getting it right. It’s kind of like when you were a kid and you could sometimes repeat a word to yourself enough times that it almost got disconnected from its meaning and became very alien-sounding. Our minds just get confused that way. If the A-B pairs are varied each time, then that effect can be minimized. However, if you sit a person down to go A-B between two synchronized versions of the same song for 10 minutes, then by the end he won’t be able to tell apart his hand from his face (so to speak). An ideal A-B test would take place over many days spread out over many listening sessions, and the As and Bs should even have breaks between them (the way wine tasters have to clear their pallete, although i don’t quite see how a cracker does that). Admittedly, i haven’t argued effectively my belief that straying from the ideal (in the way that past researchers have done) will impact the results enormously. However, i think it will impact the results enormously. In particular, if I had a [double-blind] week with that super amp you mentioned, i’m sure i could discern any difference. Of course, maybe the whole thing is a scam and they just found some crappy over-priced model. Ideally, you would make a test across all expensive amps. Ideally, you would also look for cases where a playback device produces some super-carefully aligned harmony that only an amp of the super-duper class could reproduce. Perhaps if you set it to play back ordinary, improperly aligned/tuned music, it just wouldn’t hold much of an advantage. Such special cases might make a big difference for some (who posess properly tuned equipment and recordings). Of course, i’m by no means disagreeing with the general conclusions that high-end equipment poses no more than a subtle benefit. I’m just clarifying that previous studies have had a margin of error that may be even greater than the span of most definitions of “subtle”. Ie, no point mentioning them. Anyway, the people on this forum have this strange notion that just cuz someone does a study and stamps it with the ACME stamp of science, then its value is as that of gold. Well, guess what, if studies were so great, then THEY WOULDN"T CONTRADICT EACH OTHER ALL THE F\*\*\*\*\* TIME. I’m sorry, this is a bit of a non-sequitor. However, i just wanted to insert that after my dissection of the ways a study could go wrong for one particular example of a field. Maybe some of you will even come away with learning to cry “cite” just a tad bit less often. ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2006, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/10 "2006-08-13T07:37:58Z")
Er, I should add, that with super-expensive subtle equipment like amplifiers, you have to ask where purchasing decisions are really made and on what basis. Are there enough evaluations out there that a typical consumer would be buying this amp primarily on the basis of these assessments? Or are there other mechanisms that drive a person to want to buy this object? Also, do these inducements apply equally to all brands (ie, does a customer want to buy a bassy, pretty, red amp, and will he buy it from any amp manufacturer that has one), or are the inducements applicable only to individual companies (eg, brand recognition, marketing, ads, trademarked aesthetics, or patents). These things will determine a) how concerned companies are about improving sound quality b) the market power of these companies to jack up prices as they see emotionally-devoted customers pouring in. So yeah, I totally agree. Price for amps does not correlate with quality (unless you search really hard, don’t look for manufacturer-specific traits, and read a whole shitload of reviews). ---
**Author:** ![Alex\_Dubinsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dbc845/32.png) [@Alex\_Dubinsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alex_Dubinsky)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2006, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fifty-grand-for-speakers-feh-that-was-back-in-89/367892/11 "2006-08-16T13:20:38Z")
Oh, another TPS piece of audiophile equipment. Almost as bad as the Digital AC but heavier on the wallet: CD Transports. (those things that don’t have any DACs but just read a cd and output the binary data to the main system) It doesn’t take a $2000 piece of equipment to read a CD without bit errors. My $20 cd-rom drive does it just fine. Jitter? It is called a b-u-f-f-e-r. You first read the cd into a $2 piece of ram, and play it from there. ridiculous.