Just some small plastic junk and a soundbar. That hardly qualifies as hifi. I'd look at it as more of an iPod dock or some glorified little bed side noise maker. I dont think its much for Bang & Olufson to worry about. Lol
Lol, you posted an assertion without support and I asked you to provide support. So you want to post assertions and then have other people find data to support your posts?
Tried different xo points and slopes, from 1.5 to 3kHz, 2nd to 4th order for the SS and 2.2 to 3kHz 4th order for the Dayton. Of course the Dayton doesn't go as low as the SS but if the xo point is fairly high (let's say 2kHz and up) and steeper slopes are allowed, I would choose the Dayton any day without question, even if cost is no object.
Well, I've heard the Dayton in a speaker (not mine, measurements of that speaker showed well integration and overall voicing) and to be honest it showed coloration in reproducing "s" and "f" sounds and was missing resolution. It was clearly the weakest point of that speaker, no comparison to a Scan Speak dome...
Regardless if the Dayton ND25FW is better than a certain Scan-speak, we can surely find one low cost tweeter that performs better than a much higher priced tweeter. But we are talking about the general market for drivers, and the fact is that there is a high statistical correlation between driver sound quality and price. This would suggest that the demand for sound quality is the important factor, because it has been demonstrated convincingly (at least to me) that while costs are important they aren't the driving factor. (And I'm not going to get into arguments over marketing, but it would be hard for many reasons for marketing to explain the main price differences in raw drivers.)
There is not, even less so in a general scientific marketing sense.
But people still seem to believe this somehow.
Follow any marketing course or study, and the first thing they will show and teach you, is that there is only a very poor correlation between price and quality at best.
That is not an opinion.
Quality in sense of performance quality, not the "we put everything in a fancy suit" kinda quality.
That last part will make and feel a product of higher quality (often artificially), but it rarely has much to do with getting better performance.
Super high quality leather chairs will not make a sports car go faster.
Fancy custom milled parts on a loudspeaker driver won't make it a better product.
The same with certain cone materials.
As an actual fact, I have seen expensive drivers that just perform like garbage.
Often because of poor tuning and implementation.
This is a really good question. What are the factors that make a better sounding driver? Maybe I should start another thread?
Well, it is somebodies opinion, starting with the author of the marketing course. It is axiomatic that people are willing to pay more for products they value highly (more desirable) and pay less for products they value less.
When we say "quality", do we mean quality as defined by manufacturing engineering? In their world, quality has a very specific meaning that relates to defects per million, rejection rates, etc.
Or do we mean quality as defined by the paying customer? All of the tangible and intangible attributes (beyond simple functionality) that make the product desirable?
'Better sounding' is a subjective thing that is not well-defined. Something that sounds good to someone could sound bad to someone else.
You forgot hypersonic missiles ...
Maybe we are getting lost in translation here, but a scientific study is not about opinions.
There is an absolute ton of research on this, showing that the correlation between quality and price is just poor.
Once again, absolutely no offense, but it totally surprises me that people still find this new information.
So much material is available on these subjects.
The customer is mostly naive and ignorant (objectively speaking, not cynically speaking) about the technical side of things.
So they are never in a position to define and judge the technical quality.
Even just the "feel" of a product can't be determined well without knowing what is important and what is not.
Something can feel "sturdy", but it most definitely doesn't always means it will last.
Only skilled people with experience and knowledge are able to tell (in some cases even very limited).
You can make a door very heavy and sturdy, but if the hinges aren't made well, it's still a useless crappy door.
I have seen this with speaker drivers as well.
Some use very exclusive materials and expensive milling.
But the performance just doesn't backs up the quality (HD, IMD, and other things).
I have even seen cases with severe resonance problems.
The fact that some people find it sounding great, probably says more about the bias/placebo effect than anything else.
Besides the fact that anecdotal opinions don't mean much in a general sense (bigger picture).
There is nothing wrong having these btw!
also, I consider myself a very naive, dumb and ignorant person for certain products.
I have very little or no knowledge/experience with those, and have to rely on hopefully decent reviews to make up my mind.
Although purely subjective and anecdotal, but those experiences for me line up with what most of the science says.
The correlation between price and quality is poor.
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How can you have this conversation without any comparison about performance differences. Maybe just maybe the Revelator has a smoother frequency response and the other has audible peaks?
How about when you measure a pair one is +/- 1dB and the other is +/- 3 which could end up creating addible differences between the pair.
Just looking at prices is meaningless.
Rob
The Purifi team is making real advancements. Their blog is a great source of technical information based on science. Suffice it to say that the results speak for themselves. Like many things, it’s not that subjective; it is very measurable.
I think you misunderstood my question... I'm asking the same question you state... Why does the Revelator perform so well? (And it can't be just simple stuff or everyone would duplicate it. I think profiguy touched on some good points.)
For the most part, you do get what you pay for with the majority of drivers.
Having done some consulting for a smaller company designing mid level speakers and some other passive audio accessories, I had first hand experience working in a strict driver budget. We attempted to stay within a $30 - $40 range for a suitable 25 - 28mm soft dome which could be comfortably crossed around 2.5k 2nd order with 93 dB/2.8V@6R sensitivity and user replaceable VC. There wasn't anything suitable available until you got into the $60+ price range in smaller quantities.
The most substantial costs were primarily the enclosure and hardware, secondly the crossover and finally (in the case of a traditional 2 way floor standing speaker) the woofer and tweeter. You had to spend about the same amount of money for both woofer and tweeter if you wanted anything which could perform to the standards we set that could handle a decent amount of power at a lower crossover point. In this case, the tweeter was more expensive compared to the 160mm LF driver we wanted to run.
We had Seas do a custom soft dome for us, ending up costing $52 in qty of 500 units. We couldn't use some little neo job with 1500 hz Fs like most other speaker companies were starting to persue. These tweeters typically sounded awful regardless of implementation and this wasn't acceptable in our final price point of roughly $2500 retail.
We wanted to create a monitor style speaker which could play just about any material very loud at low distortion levels with a 50 hz target f3 and easily to drive with tubes. The tweeter was roughly equivalent to a Seas 27TDFC but with 93 dB/2.8V @ 8R sensitivity. We tried working with some Asian companies like Misco and Versatronics, but they couldn't produce a driver for the cost.of the Seas with half the performance. The main weak point in the cheaper drivers was the dome fabric and surface treatment. The cheaper drivers all sounded either too harsh at higher volume or too veiled without enough top end.
Things have obviously changed over the last 20 yrs since then. Companies like Peerless/DST can build $30 tweeters which sound like the basic soft domes Vifa and Peerless built back in the 90s. Ferrofluid has become more stable too and adhesive technology has really come.a long way as well as the automated assembly methods that are now available.
My reference for a cheap soft dome is the old Vifa D27TG45. If you could get close to that nowadays for around $30 you're doing good. The Peerless DX25TG59 and DX25BG60 are the new yardsticks for budget soft domes. You'd have to spend about $60 to get close to those and still not surpass them.
Once you pass the $100 mark, you're not getting that much proportionately more in return. At the $200+ mark you start to move into the more exotic designs using Beryllium, Textreme / carbon fiber composites on Titanium formers with edge wound wire, inductance control and cnc machined back chambers with large neo magnet structures.
In terms of overall musical performance using the simpler, more common materials, the more exotic materials often don't deliver the extra subjective performance and don't always compliment the listeners tastes in tonal balance. This is especially true with the more.organic paper or pulp cone materials and silk fabric domes, which can deliver a smoother, more natural type of sound compared to the vivid and drier sound of a harder metal alloy dome tweeter along with composite cone drivers.
Having done some consulting for a smaller company designing mid level speakers and some other passive audio accessories, I had first hand experience working in a strict driver budget. We attempted to stay within a $30 - $40 range for a suitable 25 - 28mm soft dome which could be comfortably crossed around 2.5k 2nd order with 93 dB/2.8V@6R sensitivity and user replaceable VC. There wasn't anything suitable available until you got into the $60+ price range in smaller quantities.
The most substantial costs were primarily the enclosure and hardware, secondly the crossover and finally (in the case of a traditional 2 way floor standing speaker) the woofer and tweeter. You had to spend about the same amount of money for both woofer and tweeter if you wanted anything which could perform to the standards we set that could handle a decent amount of power at a lower crossover point. In this case, the tweeter was more expensive compared to the 160mm LF driver we wanted to run.
We had Seas do a custom soft dome for us, ending up costing $52 in qty of 500 units. We couldn't use some little neo job with 1500 hz Fs like most other speaker companies were starting to persue. These tweeters typically sounded awful regardless of implementation and this wasn't acceptable in our final price point of roughly $2500 retail.
We wanted to create a monitor style speaker which could play just about any material very loud at low distortion levels with a 50 hz target f3 and easily to drive with tubes. The tweeter was roughly equivalent to a Seas 27TDFC but with 93 dB/2.8V @ 8R sensitivity. We tried working with some Asian companies like Misco and Versatronics, but they couldn't produce a driver for the cost.of the Seas with half the performance. The main weak point in the cheaper drivers was the dome fabric and surface treatment. The cheaper drivers all sounded either too harsh at higher volume or too veiled without enough top end.
Things have obviously changed over the last 20 yrs since then. Companies like Peerless/DST can build $30 tweeters which sound like the basic soft domes Vifa and Peerless built back in the 90s. Ferrofluid has become more stable too and adhesive technology has really come.a long way as well as the automated assembly methods that are now available.
My reference for a cheap soft dome is the old Vifa D27TG45. If you could get close to that nowadays for around $30 you're doing good. The Peerless DX25TG59 and DX25BG60 are the new yardsticks for budget soft domes. You'd have to spend about $60 to get close to those and still not surpass them.
Once you pass the $100 mark, you're not getting that much proportionately more in return. At the $200+ mark you start to move into the more exotic designs using Beryllium, Textreme / carbon fiber composites on Titanium formers with edge wound wire, inductance control and cnc machined back chambers with large neo magnet structures.
In terms of overall musical performance using the simpler, more common materials, the more exotic materials often don't deliver the extra subjective performance and don't always compliment the listeners tastes in tonal balance. This is especially true with the more.organic paper or pulp cone materials and silk fabric domes, which can deliver a smoother, more natural type of sound compared to the vivid and drier sound of a harder metal alloy dome tweeter along with composite cone drivers.
You joined at post #100 so may have missed a lot of the conversation. Why does raw speaker driver A cost a lot more than speaker B?
It's not quantities. And it's not marketing. I don't know what artificial prices are, we are talking about market prices that will come out of your back account and into the sellers account.
Rather than A and B, consider why the Morel TSCT1044 Supreme costs $404 (41% more than the Scan-speak), and why does the ScanSpeak Revelator D2905/9900-00 costs $286 (100% more than the Satori TW29D at $141)?
We've ruled out many things in the first 100 posts. So I have proposed subjective sound quality, which must depend on know-how/trade secrets that go beyond standard distortion measurements.
(It's not because Morel markets the tweeters better than Scanspeak to a bunch of fools who pay 41% more for a Morel tweeter that sounds worse than the Scan-speak)
Is that why Purifi cost an arm and a leg even for the smallest one?
Feels ridiculously expensive even if they are a "premium product", or do they have diamonds inside
I'd venture to say that the loudspeaker driver market is not much different than most markets that operate both in the commercial/consumer and B2B space.
If we assume that the vast majority of companies have generally competent leaders (broadly speaking) and that typical market forces are in play, you can assume:
So... generally speaking... a company charges what the market will bear for any product in most situations.
No matter what... on the buyer's side... It is (generally speaking) perceived value against cost.
Value is not always performance and quality. Cost is not always $$
So, the seller wants the most profit and the buyer wants the best value within a cost / budget.
The two meet somewhere....
There will be exceptions, certainly... but this will hold true for the vast number of markets.
Just ask what makes people (in general) be willing to pay more for something.
That's what truly drives the cost. The seller just gets what they think they can get. If buyers won't pay enough (don't perceive enough value at the cost), then the product doesn't last long.
Rhetorical Statement / Question - Don't ask why companies sell drivers at such different costs. That's easy. Ask why people are willing to pay such vastly different prices for drivers.
Some answers might be, but certainly aren't limited to:
If we assume that the vast majority of companies have generally competent leaders (broadly speaking) and that typical market forces are in play, you can assume:
- Companies enter markets / market segments for a profit. Leaders will try to extract the most profit (long-term) from the business.
- Leaders understand their competition and place / price their products appropriately against the competition. If they screw up, they adapt and/or drop the product.
- Leaders will understand their own full product line, product tiers, and cost / overhead sharing.
- Leaders will look at long and short-term goals for profitability and market position.
- Leaders will understand their current and prospective customer base and segmentation.
So... generally speaking... a company charges what the market will bear for any product in most situations.
No matter what... on the buyer's side... It is (generally speaking) perceived value against cost.
Value is not always performance and quality. Cost is not always $$
So, the seller wants the most profit and the buyer wants the best value within a cost / budget.
The two meet somewhere....
There will be exceptions, certainly... but this will hold true for the vast number of markets.
Just ask what makes people (in general) be willing to pay more for something.
That's what truly drives the cost. The seller just gets what they think they can get. If buyers won't pay enough (don't perceive enough value at the cost), then the product doesn't last long.
Rhetorical Statement / Question - Don't ask why companies sell drivers at such different costs. That's easy. Ask why people are willing to pay such vastly different prices for drivers.
Some answers might be, but certainly aren't limited to:
- A lot of people aren't rational in driver purchasing decisions
- A lot of people care not what the "pros" do.
- A lot of people wouldn't know how to read a set of properly presented speaker specifications even if a standard were available for their measurement and followed by every manufacturer.
- People are silly
- People have fun, and they know they're just having fun.
- The people that swear that one driver is vastly better than another with no supporting data are no fun.
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Purifi have designed and patented their own surrounds, the price is justified since theses parts are not standardized and difficult to produce and produced in small quantities.
"Amplify the art of sound, and let the music speak for itself." - B. Putzeys
Every perception is a mental creation, we have to create a kind of "perception of the reality" in our brains, everyone have its own.