You know what grinds my gears?

[richidoo]

I agree with tmazz on the amplifier price vs. cabling price. Sooner or later it going to pay you to buy a better amplifier. You can seldom turn a sows ear into silk purse with externally applied tweaks and cables despite what purveyors of same tell you.

I agree in principia. No point having wires too dull for the amps, or vice-versey.

My whole system is a tad too resolving for me. This is where DIY fads inevitably take you, lower and lower distortion until it is too clear for the recording quality to bear. Pandora and 50s jazz bootlegs suffer. Some lesser SCs would balance it. I already use cheap ICs.    
series resistor?

[richidoo]

So, if an unknown stranger (under surveillance from the socialist price setters) has Boulder or MBL amps and 3x that in his speakers ("properly" proportioned in price to the amps, of course,) then it's OK to have $20k speaker cables and $10k PCs as "mere accessories?"

EDIT:Oops, soory, I forgot, Boulder and MBL amps and proportionally priced speakers are "never" OK with the socialist price setters. Think of all the potatos we could import for that. /edit

But if you build your own speakers for $1000 and amps for $300 and they are better than most commercial products of 10x their heft, then using $3000 SCs is perverse?

I guess maybe it is because you could "should" have DIY'd the cables too, then they would be the "correct" $300. But no Alumiloy wire on Amazon!  

[GT Audio Works]

 
     Not picking on you that was a general statement. In your case the cost of the rare earth magnets are very expensive these days. Hence the rise in cost of your speaker.

I'm sure there is more that raised the price so please tell us.





charles
   

Well Charlie, if you must know...its the super rare eel farts sprinkled with magic dust that allow it to compete against more expensive planars for $26,000 less.

Greg

   Arghaaaa gotta love those eels. What planars for $26K less. What planars cost 35K ? The Analysis planars are 20K and 28K and discounted.
  Maggies are 14K and 5K. Greg you have a great speaker and more should own a pair. At 9K it is getting harder to buy a pair. Those who are willing to put out 14K for MG 20 should demo your speaker and leave the Maggies in the store. There would be 6K left over to buy amps [ Arions of course] that was for Topround. . BRILLIANT !!!
   

charles  
 
  Your biggest competition is Maggie at 14K which you best IMO

What planars cost $35k ?? At 9k getting harder to buy a pair ??
Charles,
Currently in production ? None I know of.  Though I think you may have heard one that is no longer in production.
I have seen and heard $65k planars, so someone felt they had a product worth that money.
Maybe the market proves them wrong.
My feeling is that there is room in the market for a 9K speaker.
Especially one that competes against more expensive offerings.
You may feel that my current asking price is too high, from remembering my first effort that sold for around $3k which I exhibited at the NYC audio show in 2012.
My current offering is not that speaker, as a matter of fact the $3k asking price for that speaker was only about $500 over my parts cost.
I guess I was trying to make an impression.
This strategy may have backfired in allowing people to believe I have done nothing since, and am just sitting back and cranking up the price to its current level.
My first speaker was a completely different animal from my current offering.
I could not even buy the parts needed to build a GTA2.5 for $3k
How much do you think Maggie puts into their speakers compared to their asking price? Sure they have big overhead and dealers etc.
This is where my business model comes into play, low overhead so the customer gets more of what they paid for, and is not paying for a dealer markup and a manufacturers overhead.
Of course my business model don't mean squat if they dont sound any better than Maggies.
I would not be here if I didn't think they did.
The truth is I have blown tens of thousands of dollars on R&D since 2012. Its one thing to pull drivers off a shelf and call it a speaker..not an easy task..believe me I know.
Its even more difficult to design and build ones own drivers.

9k for a speaker, in the high end audio arena ?? Not ludicrous,
expensive, yes. But for a custom hand built product competing against whats out there, I think it fares well.

Greg

BTW Charles....I offer industry accommodation pricing of $6500
Also I am considering home dealers who do not expect to make more money selling my speaker, than I would get from the arrangement.

[tmazz]

But if you build your own speakers for $1000 and amps for $300 and they are better than most commercial products of 10x their heft, then using $3000 SCs is perverse?

Rich I think the process should be the same no matter what the price of the components. If putting a $3000 speaker cable between a $100 speaker and a $300 amp souinds better than any other combination of three other componebts that sells fro $4300 or less then abosolutely it makes perfect sense to buy the speaker cable, no matter how wacky is look on the face of it. (That is assumuing that the person buying a $1300 amp/speaker combo hass access to and is willing to add another $3000 to his equipment budget.) I personally would want to hear a $3k amp with with a $300 SC and maybe a $2500/800 amp cable combos before I was convinvced that the 3K cable/300 amp was the best combo, but if it was I would have not problem at all spending money in those proportions.

Beacause in the end this hobby not about the technology you use, or the amount of money you spend or how you allocated that moey among the different pieces of equipment you need, rather it's all about musical enjoyment, so whatever you do to increase that enjoyment is ultimately, the right thing for you to do.

[Werd]

He is still bagging out on cables. But now he is put into words why. He doesn't want people to spend money on it. He is still in the same sales pitch mode. It is a waste of money and what you save on cables you can upgrade to a better amp.  

We may not agree with his conclusion, but he does have a logical point from an evaluation point of view. For a long time cables were considered an accesory that  you needed to purchase to complete your system and if you spent a little extra on them it would produce sonic improvements. Well that held true while even high quality cables were priced in the hundreds of dollars. But now that cables can cost several thousand dollars one needs to evaluate how much improvement the make relative to what else you can do with the money. When you were talking about upgrading a $2,000 amp with $200 worth of cable it was a pretty good bet that the combo could sound better than a $2200 amp. But now tha the cost of the speaker cables and ICs can easily exceed the price of that amp it is not such an easy call to say that a $2k amp plus premium cables will sound better than a $4k amp with lessor cables. Maybe yes, maybe no, but it is a decision that needs to be thought about and made. And I certainly don't mean to prejudge any cable based on price. We all know about certain purple cable that many think are pretty insanely price but many others consider a good investment based on what they do to their system vs what you wot
Ulsan have to spend in hardware upgrades to achieve the same performance upgrade. This sword can cut both ways. And the only waxy to know is to try things in your own system and see how you feel about them.

It does cut both ways. You ever see a generic cable these days? They are far worse now. I can't find a generic that isn't using garbage nickel plated copper. Show me a generic like they use to make them using copper.

[topround]

cmon one more page...lets make it to lucky 13!

[Werd]

Going from 3rd to 1st gear with no clutch work. Just pushing it into gear.

[_Scotty_]

It doesn't even have to be nickel plated. How many people still think an "el cheapo" cable from China even meets ETP copper purity standards? All it takes to have bad sound is cables constructed from highly contaminated copper. Which at this point would virtually all of them. This is not the good old days when cheap stuff came from Japan and at least met some kind standards.
Scotty

[tmazz]

It does cut both ways. You ever see a generic cable these days? They are far worse now. I can't find a generic that isn't using garbage nickel plated copper. Show me a generic like they use to make them using copper.

You are absolutely correct, it does cut both ways, but if the stock cord does sound like cr@p, then it will be no problem at all for an upgraded cord to beat it. But that is what you need to find out for yourself. And who knows, maybe a given manufacturer got his hands on a whole bunch of 25 year old NOS stock cords in a warehouse sale that are made of decent copper and sound pretty good. My point is that you will never know unless you try and listen with an open mind. And remember that the cable and the component are not two separate items, but a system that must play well together.

And then simply follow your ears to wherever your wallet will allow them to go.  

[tmazz]

Going from 3rd to 1st gear with no clutch work. Just pushing it into gear.

I can remember in my college days nursing along a car with a bum clutch until I could scrape together the money to fix it. I got pretty good at upshifting through the gears by matching the out and in RPMs to the various gears, but downshiftung into 1st without a clutch.... OUCH.   

[tmazz]

I'm trying Mike... Come on 13. 

[tmazz]

I'm trying Mike... Come on 13. 

Should I pull an Evan and just keep putting up one word posts until I fill the screen? 

[topround]

Since none of the cable manufacturers actually manufacture wire they could be call "cable assemblers" just like pretty much all of us who  have made DIY power cords and speaker cables etc.

I am sure the process is assemble...then listen.....assemble(a little different)then listen......assemble(a little different again) listen....until you find the right combo that works.....package sell.

The huge bulk of time testing building and listening to many many combos until you find something that works, it truly is the nose to the grindstone work the assemblers do,...and Kudos for that!

So who really knows what wire is in their cable?

[tmazz]

Since none of the cable manufacturers actually manufacture wire they could be call "cable assemblers" just like pretty much all of us who  have made DIY power cords and speaker cables etc.

FYI, while this used to be the case there is now one exception (at least that I know of.) From what I read in one of the recent Audio Advisor catalogs, the company in Japan that made the Ohno Continuous Cast wire has decided to take it off the market. In response to this, George Cardis has begun to manufacture his own premium wire called Cardis Grade One Copper. In addition to his own Cardis cables this wire is being used , at least to some extent in the newest versions of some of the Pangea power cords. I do not know if any other cable companies have incorporated it into any of their own products as of yet.

[richidoo]

Expensive wires may have custom conductor alloys, custom braids, custom insulation, custom cable design that you can't do that at the kitchen table. Custom wire vendors can do almost anything. Then they build the final products as you describe.