This isn't much different from whether a $2m supercar is really much "better" as a car than a $500k one. It doesn't really matter as long as the buyer perceives the value/exclusivity/aesthetics.
I had a similar conversation recently where I heard a great summary - price increases asymptotically as quality improves. It seems to be quite an accurate summary.
Saying that quality improves asymptotically implies that it has a max ceiling. This property is consistent with the diminishing returns you talk about.
I think that's about right price point for audiophile who wants return for investment. Beyond that it will be about appreciating the engineering feats, not something you could find in blind testing.
Beautiful craftsmanship and perceived value I think.
I use an old pair of Wharfedales I was given along with an old yamaha amp as my primary PC speakers and they are truly excellent compared to any dedicated computer set I've ever used, so much so when they eventually break I'll probably hunt down a second hand set to replace them rather than computer speakers.
I'd estimate that sound quality improves up to a few thousand dollars per speaker, after that you're pretty much paying for aesthetics and the brand. Professionals tend to use active monitors from companies like Genelec.
Something that tends to be ignored a bit is the build quality. Especially cheaper consumer gear is fraught with shit like glue disintegrating, solder connections becoming loose due to vibrations, wood increasing in volume due to humidity... for headphones, cheap plastic stuff breaking after a single drop, wires so thin they easily break, connectors which don't meet specs...
edit: also, in my experience, expensiver speakers handle abuse like clipping or otherwise "bad" input far better than cheap ones. Most likely because cheap speakers operate on the upper end of their abilities and don't have much reserve margin, while a more expensive one is spec'd below what it can actually handle.
A Swedish speaker manufacturer have been trying to change this for many years and have top reviews on all speakers even though they all cost a fraction of the competition.
You see this stuff in professional anechoic chambers and mixing studios. I have friend who has PhD in audio signal processing and he doesn't see much point going beyond genelecs. The only downside is that you might get "too accurate" playback for hobbyist taste.
EDIT: Actually the price point is quite similar. Sorry.
Many people refuse to acknowledge that you can work professionally with their products. However, I've seen those speakers in many studios where professional work gets done.
I have audion engineer friend who has love/hate relationship with Behringer. Some years back they had quality problems. Good behringer is good, but you might get a bad specimen too.
I have experience with their cheap end mixer, and it was good until it started to slowly break down. One component at the time. Luckily it had some excess potential, so in terms of play hours/price it was still OK.
My assessment of Behringer is much the same. Sometimes it's fine to use their stuff, sometimes it's worth paying more.
One problem though is that the existence of a company like Behringer making cheap products that are often good enough, is that it can tend to destroy the mid-market stuff that used to exist. Once that happens, your choice is either to buy something dirt cheap, or some ridiculously expensive "boutique" item, because there's nothing left in between any more.
(I'm not suggesting this is Behringer's fault, it just seems to be how things go when a mass market comes along.)
Behringer was somehow the "China of the music & audio world" : cheap clones of more expensive pro gears. While usually visually decent, it could be hit or miss soundwise. Mic preamps, guitar pedals or cabinets were bad for example while monitors (like the one you linked) were OK for the price.
Recently they bought companies like Midas and TC Electronics and I think their products have been getting better. Not enough for me to consider them usually but still :)
About speakers the real problem will only be the room and the benefits of expensive speakers are usually wasted because of that. There is only so much you can do treat a living room without cluttering it. The WAF of bass traps is not high.
The reason Behringer is so loathed in the pro audio community is that they are notorious for cloning other peoples products - literally opening up the competition, seeing whats inside, and reproducing the design - with cheaper components - "in China" and so on.
So while we do get cheaper products that are 'good enough' from Behringer, for a long time they had a deleterious effect on the industry - I know of a number of products that didn't make it to market because it was known that Behringer would clone the design ..
I've listened to Genelecs through a Beringer mixer followed by an Allen and Heath mixer. The former produced a weak and disappointing sound. The latter was full, detailed, and sonically impressive. The conclusion was that the Beringer mixer was a weak link. I was also disappointed by a second Beringer mixer as well as a DI box by Beringer around the same time. I wouldn't consider them high quality by any stretch of the term. They are probably acceptable when entering the market, but don't belong with components in the $100k - $1m range that this article is addressing.
Behringer Truths are not bad for the price, but Genelecs are usually better for most rooms. But I think there are usually (and not in all cases) better options than Genelecs depending on budget and usage. I for instance prefer EVE, because I can’t quite bring my budget up to ATCs or Barefoots.
JBL LSR range is also a low cost budget monitor champ.
These are also studio monitors by the way, so they are not always great for hifi listening - I use separate speakers for that.
These aren't simply "high quality speakers", it's really a separate product category from the kind of audiophile-focused hifi speakers the article is talking about.
> There’s a reason why experts advise against using “ordinary” Hi-Fi loudspeakers for monitoring your audio. These speakers are built to fill a living room and should be listened to at a distance. They come in fancy shapes and exotic wood finishes and are hyped for that full and rich musical sound. Hi-Fi speakers are meant to look and sound pretty.
In contrast, nearfield studio monitors are designed to be placed within a few feet of you in a small room that is close to dead, acoustically speaking. Instead of complementing the source, studio monitors need to be detailed, neutral and reveal problems to the critical listener. If something sounds off, they should let you know.
The difference between a Hi-Fi speaker and a studio monitor is like the difference between a fan and a friend. A fan will flatter you. A friend will tell you the unvarnished truth. That’s probably why most monitors look as sexy as a black brick.
Heh, I considered Genelecs when I was setting up my home audio. This was a few years back, around the same time Genelec started to diversify towards more mass-market equipment at their lower end. Couple of slightly audiophilic friends commented that I probably wouldn't get full value for my money. The room around the equipment has an effect too.
So they all recommended I look at Amphion instead: http://www.amphion.fi/ (Another reasonably high-endish Finnish loudspeaker manufacturer.) A pair of their monitors was more than enough for a straightforward home sound system, and it took my wife's complaints to eventually add a subwoofer to the mix.
Even this pair is accurate enough. We can hear a botched mixing, which arguably may not be beneficial when the audio track is from a classic 80's or 90's TV show...
And the price at the time? €300 per monitor. Genelecs would have started at ~50% more.
I've been moving around a lot and I set up a temporary budget home studio here recently, with JBL305s.
They're insanely good value - not perfect, but considering they cost as little as some PC speakers they're better than many of the entry/semi-pro near fields I've heard costing high three figures per pair.
I'm slightly biased against Genelecs. I think they're expensive for what they are, and I've always found the sound distractingly clinical rather than reassuringly objective. I wouldn't recommend them for home listening.
They do appear in studios, but maybe more often in university/research labs. They don't have a lock down among studio owners, who have a lot of other choices.
Room sound is totally a thing. High end studios can literally spend more on acoustic treatment consultancy than speakers. Low/mid studios won't spend that much, but anyone who's serious about monitoring will put up bass traps and absorbent panels to try to tame the more obvious resonances. You'll get objectively measurable benefits that will do more to improve the sound than magic oxygen-free mains cables and hand-knitted USB leads will.
That makes the mega-speaker audiophile thing kind of ridiculous. If you spend more than $10k on a system without treating your room at all, you're simply wasting your money.
Honestly the best bang for the buck would be to buy decent power amp. Then find good cheap old speakers from Craigslist or something like that. Speakers often outlast amps, which brings the price down. I just had to give away perfectly good three way pioneer speakers for free. Speakers do wear, but not linearly. They are first like new until they are completely broken.
When you have speakers and amp, room acoustics is the next thing. Start with curtains. Clap your hands, if you hear disturbing echo, add something soft.
200e for amp, 60e for two used speakers and 40 for nice curtains. 300e total and you might have better audio than someone who spent 1000e for surround home theater.
In the bang-for-the-buck department, speakers made by Ontario companies like PSB, Paradigm and Axiom (some production may have been outsourced) usually do pretty well.
Speakers are the no. 1 source of distortion in sound reproduction, and so we haven't exhausted the technological solution space. However, at close range and (relatively) low volumes, you can do a pretty damn good speaker with just good construction techniques, proven designs, high quality components and some R&D. That's why you see a lot of companies concentrating on 2-3 way bookshelves and floorstanders with simple bass reflex subs.
Things get more interesting when you're trying to go really loud and cover a wide audience, or when you go all out.
Interesting speakers:
Danley Sound Labs [1] with their tapped horn subwoofer and their "synergy" horn speakers that have slot-loaded mid- and low- range speakers. They do insane stuff like the TH812, with 8 12-inch speakers, that weighs 584 lbs.
JTR speakers are best known for their "growler" [2], an 88-pound sub with huge output for its size.
Meyer Sound [3] speakers are very expensive, but they do some mad stuff like the X-10 with a servo-controller woofer.
Fulcrum Acoustic [4] uses DSP to correct problems with horn-loaded speakers.
Large soundsystems for clubs and festivals have an entire culture of their own[1], heavily associated with the dub and reggae music scenes. Many are hand-built and maintained by a core group of people who travel with them and operate them on location, bringing resident DJs and MCS, and competing in sound-clashes at dub festivals.
On the speaker-technology side, Funktion One systems are easily recognised by their polygonal tweeter horns[2], meant to disperse high frequencies in a very specific cone, which makes it easier to avoid dead-spots and phase-interference in complicated environments while directing the sound.
Your correction of the headline question is on point.
I'm not sure about your answer, though. I doubt any 20k USD speaker sounds "bad". It's more like: most are not measurably better than speakers that cost only 1/10 as much.
To address the question in the title of the article, here are some aspects not addressed:
/ R & D has a lot of time associated with it. Specifically, time not spent making finished products for sale. People working on the product still need to eat.
/ Anechoic chambers and other specialized equipment are expensive.
/ As the article details, solving for novel/unique problems can involve unique solutions. That will translate to new/ non-standard manufacturing techniques. And that means more costs.
/ The Wife Acceptance Factor. As pointed out in the article, getting small speaker systems to sound as big as the orchestra recorded for playback is a challenge. One approach is to use bigger drivers. Another approach is to use large arrays of drivers. Either way, you get cabinets that have the volume (size, not sound) of refrigerators. Anything that big has a noticeable visual presence. Looking good adds more to the price [If there is a question as to sources on this point, I refer to my ongoing experience as a Klipsch Cornwall owner].
Sidebar: As a BBC article, kinda surprised they didn't profile Tannoy for contrast.
Quite often the manufacturing process is expensive - For instance in some high end drivers the materials are just expensive to source. Who knows how much of that is bragging rights though
Because people have more money than sense? Same with any luxury item really. And I don't mean that more money implies _less_ sense, just that sense is limited and money isn't.
The wire cutter did a recent article on best bookshelves speakers in the sub $500 range. There are clearly better (and more expensive) options out there. But the summary managed to find a bunch that punch above their price class.
They are famous for their 2's and 2C's which did away with a box for the speaker altogether. The money went to circuitry and drivers which are enclosed in cloth on all 4 sides. The 1, 1C, 2, 2C and 3 are fantastic and amazing value for the money, probably better than competitors costing 5x as much.
Their newer speakers and some higher end speakers do have boxes and in my opinion don't deliver anywhere near as much bang for the buck.
43 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThe whole 'audiophiles use music to listen to their equipment instead of using their equipment to listen to their music' springs to mind.
I use an old pair of Wharfedales I was given along with an old yamaha amp as my primary PC speakers and they are truly excellent compared to any dedicated computer set I've ever used, so much so when they eventually break I'll probably hunt down a second hand set to replace them rather than computer speakers.
edit: also, in my experience, expensiver speakers handle abuse like clipping or otherwise "bad" input far better than cheap ones. Most likely because cheap speakers operate on the upper end of their abilities and don't have much reserve margin, while a more expensive one is spec'd below what it can actually handle.
These http://i.ytimg.com/vi/OlydiO2EpA8/maxresdefault.jpg nothing to set the world on fire but the sound quality is spot on for me and they are basically indestructible.
http://www.xtz.se
They have measurements on all speakers and room measurement equipment for "cheap" - the room really makes a huge impact on the sound.
I have the S-800 Speakers and the new Cinema Package
http://www.genelec.com/
You see this stuff in professional anechoic chambers and mixing studios. I have friend who has PhD in audio signal processing and he doesn't see much point going beyond genelecs. The only downside is that you might get "too accurate" playback for hobbyist taste.
EDIT: Actually the price point is quite similar. Sorry.
Many people refuse to acknowledge that you can work professionally with their products. However, I've seen those speakers in many studios where professional work gets done.
I have experience with their cheap end mixer, and it was good until it started to slowly break down. One component at the time. Luckily it had some excess potential, so in terms of play hours/price it was still OK.
One problem though is that the existence of a company like Behringer making cheap products that are often good enough, is that it can tend to destroy the mid-market stuff that used to exist. Once that happens, your choice is either to buy something dirt cheap, or some ridiculously expensive "boutique" item, because there's nothing left in between any more.
(I'm not suggesting this is Behringer's fault, it just seems to be how things go when a mass market comes along.)
Behringer was somehow the "China of the music & audio world" : cheap clones of more expensive pro gears. While usually visually decent, it could be hit or miss soundwise. Mic preamps, guitar pedals or cabinets were bad for example while monitors (like the one you linked) were OK for the price.
Recently they bought companies like Midas and TC Electronics and I think their products have been getting better. Not enough for me to consider them usually but still :)
About speakers the real problem will only be the room and the benefits of expensive speakers are usually wasted because of that. There is only so much you can do treat a living room without cluttering it. The WAF of bass traps is not high.
So while we do get cheaper products that are 'good enough' from Behringer, for a long time they had a deleterious effect on the industry - I know of a number of products that didn't make it to market because it was known that Behringer would clone the design ..
JBL LSR range is also a low cost budget monitor champ.
These are also studio monitors by the way, so they are not always great for hifi listening - I use separate speakers for that.
These aren't simply "high quality speakers", it's really a separate product category from the kind of audiophile-focused hifi speakers the article is talking about.
> There’s a reason why experts advise against using “ordinary” Hi-Fi loudspeakers for monitoring your audio. These speakers are built to fill a living room and should be listened to at a distance. They come in fancy shapes and exotic wood finishes and are hyped for that full and rich musical sound. Hi-Fi speakers are meant to look and sound pretty.
In contrast, nearfield studio monitors are designed to be placed within a few feet of you in a small room that is close to dead, acoustically speaking. Instead of complementing the source, studio monitors need to be detailed, neutral and reveal problems to the critical listener. If something sounds off, they should let you know.
The difference between a Hi-Fi speaker and a studio monitor is like the difference between a fan and a friend. A fan will flatter you. A friend will tell you the unvarnished truth. That’s probably why most monitors look as sexy as a black brick.
http://www.nethervoice.com/2013/12/04/the-truth-about-studio...
So they all recommended I look at Amphion instead: http://www.amphion.fi/ (Another reasonably high-endish Finnish loudspeaker manufacturer.) A pair of their monitors was more than enough for a straightforward home sound system, and it took my wife's complaints to eventually add a subwoofer to the mix.
Even this pair is accurate enough. We can hear a botched mixing, which arguably may not be beneficial when the audio track is from a classic 80's or 90's TV show...
And the price at the time? €300 per monitor. Genelecs would have started at ~50% more.
They're insanely good value - not perfect, but considering they cost as little as some PC speakers they're better than many of the entry/semi-pro near fields I've heard costing high three figures per pair.
I'm slightly biased against Genelecs. I think they're expensive for what they are, and I've always found the sound distractingly clinical rather than reassuringly objective. I wouldn't recommend them for home listening.
They do appear in studios, but maybe more often in university/research labs. They don't have a lock down among studio owners, who have a lot of other choices.
Room sound is totally a thing. High end studios can literally spend more on acoustic treatment consultancy than speakers. Low/mid studios won't spend that much, but anyone who's serious about monitoring will put up bass traps and absorbent panels to try to tame the more obvious resonances. You'll get objectively measurable benefits that will do more to improve the sound than magic oxygen-free mains cables and hand-knitted USB leads will.
That makes the mega-speaker audiophile thing kind of ridiculous. If you spend more than $10k on a system without treating your room at all, you're simply wasting your money.
I do wonder if studios actually compare monitors before just putting in a low-range to mid-range Genelec setup.
Totally right about the room. It’s the number one factor.
When you have speakers and amp, room acoustics is the next thing. Start with curtains. Clap your hands, if you hear disturbing echo, add something soft.
200e for amp, 60e for two used speakers and 40 for nice curtains. 300e total and you might have better audio than someone who spent 1000e for surround home theater.
Speakers are the no. 1 source of distortion in sound reproduction, and so we haven't exhausted the technological solution space. However, at close range and (relatively) low volumes, you can do a pretty damn good speaker with just good construction techniques, proven designs, high quality components and some R&D. That's why you see a lot of companies concentrating on 2-3 way bookshelves and floorstanders with simple bass reflex subs.
Things get more interesting when you're trying to go really loud and cover a wide audience, or when you go all out.
Interesting speakers:
Danley Sound Labs [1] with their tapped horn subwoofer and their "synergy" horn speakers that have slot-loaded mid- and low- range speakers. They do insane stuff like the TH812, with 8 12-inch speakers, that weighs 584 lbs.
JTR speakers are best known for their "growler" [2], an 88-pound sub with huge output for its size.
Meyer Sound [3] speakers are very expensive, but they do some mad stuff like the X-10 with a servo-controller woofer.
Fulcrum Acoustic [4] uses DSP to correct problems with horn-loaded speakers.
[1]: http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/
[2]: http://jtrspeakers.com/portable/growler/
[3]: http://www.meyersound.com/product/x-10/
[4]: http://www.fulcrum-acoustic.com/technologies/whitepapers.htm...
On the speaker-technology side, Funktion One systems are easily recognised by their polygonal tweeter horns[2], meant to disperse high frequencies in a very specific cone, which makes it easier to avoid dead-spots and phase-interference in complicated environments while directing the sound.
[1]: https://boilerroom.tv/systems-of-sound/ [2]: http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1836
http://stonessoundstudio.com.au/stone/Bybee/Bybee_Slipstream...
http://marigoaudio.com/titanium-power-cable/cd-mats/3-d-sign...
How good are the world's most expensive loudspeakers?
(To which the answer is: it varies, from very good to horrendously bad. You're paying for status, not performance.)
I'm not sure about your answer, though. I doubt any 20k USD speaker sounds "bad". It's more like: most are not measurably better than speakers that cost only 1/10 as much.
/ R & D has a lot of time associated with it. Specifically, time not spent making finished products for sale. People working on the product still need to eat.
/ Anechoic chambers and other specialized equipment are expensive.
/ As the article details, solving for novel/unique problems can involve unique solutions. That will translate to new/ non-standard manufacturing techniques. And that means more costs.
/ The Wife Acceptance Factor. As pointed out in the article, getting small speaker systems to sound as big as the orchestra recorded for playback is a challenge. One approach is to use bigger drivers. Another approach is to use large arrays of drivers. Either way, you get cabinets that have the volume (size, not sound) of refrigerators. Anything that big has a noticeable visual presence. Looking good adds more to the price [If there is a question as to sources on this point, I refer to my ongoing experience as a Klipsch Cornwall owner].
Sidebar: As a BBC article, kinda surprised they didn't profile Tannoy for contrast.
Also, it's too bad they chose to display stock photography instead of, you know, pictures of actual damn speakers.
thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-bookshelf-speakers/
http://www.vandersteen.com
They are famous for their 2's and 2C's which did away with a box for the speaker altogether. The money went to circuitry and drivers which are enclosed in cloth on all 4 sides. The 1, 1C, 2, 2C and 3 are fantastic and amazing value for the money, probably better than competitors costing 5x as much.
Their newer speakers and some higher end speakers do have boxes and in my opinion don't deliver anywhere near as much bang for the buck.