“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting
audiosciencereview.com
audiosciencereview.com
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.
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)
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.
- BOM includes only the materials.
- COGS includes not only BOM, but also the variable costs to combine those materials into the final product (e.g. cost of manufacturing labor).
Source: 2021 Annual report
https://ir.mi.com/static-files/b85f34c0-0010-4a8c-94b9-269d8...
edit: source here, since other people are making the same mistake https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112614/whats-differ...
It is not at all comparable to the Xiaomi Cost of Sales figure in GP which includes many things beyond the direct cost of manufacturing their devices.
It's quite jarring to see someone jump in with another misunderstanding, derailing the correction, especially given this is a "hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras" situation. Any argument they're kinda sorta the same thing or it's ambiguous, they could be the same thing, leaves open the Q of how exactly Xiaomi can possibly fund itself if 83% of it's costs are raw materials
There is no standard definition for "cost of sales", or "cost of goods sold". No where in any GAAP or IFRS literate does it say that the term "cost of sales" have specific definitions other than a paragraph or two of ambiguous wording. Indeed, IAS is even careful to say "allocating costs to functions may require arbitrary allocations and involve considerable judgement".
The Xiaomi filing doesn't breakdown what it includes in cost of sales, so we're left guessing without a supplemental to fill in the details. You're welcome to make whatever wilder guesses you like, but they're still just guesses.
It is unknowable, but, that's not helpful information.
It's sort of like if there was an accounting message board where they bickered about it's unknowable if memory usage meant RAM or L2 cache because L2 cache is also memory
I'm out, you're free to live in a world where you can't tell basic information about the health of a company because you're obsessive about ensuring anything you don't grok must be modelled as ambiguous by everyone else.
There's a lot wrong with this, but not in a moral sense.
For all his faults, Elon Musk made a good point about the space industry near the beginning of SpaceX. He asked a team of "rocket scientists" how much a rocket cost. They said something like $100M. Then he asked them to sum up the material costs. Sheetmetal, tubing, rivets, etc... They said something like $500K.
Where did the other $99.5M get spent on, you ask? Inefficiencies such as having PhDs doing welding and riveting instead of hiring contractors with more experience. Even if you say you need aerospace-grade rivets, Boeing and co hire thousands of people with those skills at a much lower cost.
Similarly, if you look at retail prices, the majority disappears into having staff stand around the store while there are no customers, lighting, cooling, retail shopfront rents, etc, etc...
You're not paying for an "HiFi amplifier model X", you're paying for a "storefront in a shopping centre with a HiFi amplifier model X thrown in almost for free."
This issue is most obvious when in some industries, returned items are simply discarded, because they're not even remotely the majority of the total cost! Repackaging and restocking the item would cost more than manufacturing it half way around the world and shipping it across an ocean. That's nuts.
Even EBay and Amazon have only just started chipping away at this problem. There is still enormous inertia.
For example, I recently purchased a flagship TV that costs $5,995 retail. Nobody had it for more than a $500 discount, including online stores that are just warehouses! The actual TV probably cost about $800 to $1000 to manufacture and ship internationally.[1] Where did the other $3500-$4000 go!?
What's happened here is that traditional retail has forced the prices up, and then Amazon -- a near monopoly -- doesn't feel the need to compete on price because they win sales even if they're just a little bit cheaper.
True competition would be if I could buy the TV for manufacturing cost +30%, not manufacturing cost x3.
This won't happen while traditional retail is propping up prices and has no real competition. We need a "SpaceX" to shake things up. Unfortunately, Amazon wasn't it.
[1] This isn't the cost of running the machines in a factory. It's everything up to the point of getting the goods into a cardboard box and on a ship. Design, profit, staff costs, material costs, energy costs, capital, etc...
The "rocket" example is as silly as the "Moore's Law applied to vehicles" arguments that used to crop up on Slashdot decades ago.
"If cars improved according to Moore's law, they'd get XXXX miles per gallon and go YYYY miles per hour". Yes, and they'd also be smaller than matchboxes while seating thousands of people.
Exceptional situations are exceptional. Good on Elon Musk for realising that there was a large latent demand for launch-to-orbit services. Well done, that chap. But you can't generalize from that to everything else. Or anything else, really.[1]
With respect to the rest of your argument, I understood that Amazon makes most of its profit from AWS, while stories about its ruthless exploitation of its warehouse staff are legion. Those factoids don't square with your argument that Amazon is making excess profits.
1. Take luxury yachts for example, which are about as expensive as rockets. The bill of materials would be a slightly larger fraction of the final cost than for rockets, but the same reasoning would seem to apply. Why has no-one "Musked" luxury yachts?
Sure, but from what I understand, businesses generally list goods on Amazon for close to MSRP, possibly for contractual reasons. Some of that certainly pays for Amzazon fees, but where does the rest of the difference from wholesale price go?
> Why has no-one "Musked" luxury yachts?
Well, for one thing, a luxury yacht is a status symbol. If it became less expensive, more people would be able to afford them, and the wealthy would feel less special about being able to own one. Certainly not the only reason, but I'm sure it's a contributing factor.
There is nothing wrong to multiply BOM with 10. It’s almost as low as you can get it when operating a business.
But when you find a market which is marking up with 200, you have found yourself an opportunity for a competing business.
Additionally advertising a certain price and actually selling at a different price is a surefire way to get delisted from google for example. This is why the whole promotion codes/voucher concept is popular.
That’ll put an end to “I can make myself a Reuben with store bought stuff for $3!!!, $13 at the deli is goddamned capitalist pig ripoff”
It is good to know the failure modes of your AI.
Also the cost to develop, deploy, and maintain your robots.
BTW, most fast food does use robots as far as possible; these are highly automated processes. The robot might not look like you'd expect, but that aint a problem with the robot.
I would guess most people don’t start a restaurant to be financially profitable, instead they start it for ego and status. A failed restaurant is both an example of capitalism, but also some very uncapitalist incentives.
Definition of yardbird
1 : a soldier assigned to a menial task or restricted to a limited area as a disciplinary measure
2 : an untrained or inept enlisted man
The OED apparently agrees:
*"Mil.* A recruit, a newly- enlisted serviceman; also, a serviceman under
discipline for a misdemeanour; one assigned to menial tasks. Also
*transf."*First
ex.: (late) 1941.
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2014-June/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Google_and_Snuffy_Smith
It doesnt need to be rationalized
To consumers, anyway
Nowhere in the original post is the word “dirty” or any implication that there’s anything wrong with the ratios. The OP qualifies their post with:
> None of this is actually secret (it would be common knowledge for anyone employed in the industry) but isn't well-known outside of it. This audience has a lot of professionals in it so a lot of this might not be news to you.
And after going into many things that factor into the retail price concludes with:
> In that sense, a 3:1 retail to COGS price is arguably very fair or even low, especially for firms that do any R&D at all. I personally wouldn't say something is overpriced until you hit 10:1 or more.
The quotes around “secret” are there in the first place to imply these aren’t actually secrets, much less dirty secrets.
So, what, you wanted to be aghast or something and misrepresented the tone of the original comment with a selective quote and addition of the word “outrage”?
Shit HN says. Sheesh.
(This comment was a copy of the one above before it was edited)
Indeed. I read the article, then I read these three comments. The first one reiterates points that the article made but seemingly doesn’t recognize the article made them. The second does recognize that but with a combative tone. The third is just combative.
Y’all can carry on as usual but none of that conflict was actually warranted.
By definition, in a successful business, a significant amount of that markup goes to profit, not anything that's actually productive like salary.
I'd say two things.
1. A listed business wouldn't exist in the first place (or in its present form) if owners hadn't been enticed to put up capital in the hope of getting dividends.
2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to produce goods or services - producing goods or services is just a means through which to pay the owners.
And don't get me wrong - I know that their behaviour is just part of human nature, that our culture tries somehow to tame and this behaviour is no different from monarchs and aristocrats of old days, but it does not mean that this is the ultimate system and there is no metaphorical guillotine waiting for them all somewhere in the future.
Sure. But that's not in contradiction to individual parts of the system having individual (and different) purposes.
Btw, not all companies have to make a profit. That's just a pretty common goal. (And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, you have to at least break even.)
> But this does not mean that they have some god given right to unlimited dividends from work of others.
Duh, obviously you only get dividends from businesses you own.
But those purposes are only allowed because they serve greater purpose. On their own they are meaningless.
>>Btw, not all companies have to make a profit. That's just a pretty common goal. (And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, you have to at least break even.)
Maybe if You mean non profits like charitable fundations that holds water, but those are mostly not real businesses. I do not think is feasible to break event for normal companies. Its like with birthrate - if You naive You could believe that with birthrate equal to 2 (one children for each parent) to preserve status quo. But in real life minimal rate is around 2.1 to prevent population collapse. The same is with profits - You need some to account for future risks.
>> Duh, obviously you only get dividends from businesses you own.
It's only obvious if You ignore platform effects (amazon anyone?) and monopolies, but that's besides the point. The point is that owners collectively as a class are able to extract too much from the system. And by owners I do not mean the hatted guy from monopoly, or rather not only him, but also german pensioner with ever increasing life expectancy crashing his hundred thousand euro camper around Europe. Even here in Poland I personally know people that are retired for decades and their work life was mostly sitting around doing nothing (my own grandma was retired for almost 50 year and before that was a housewife and got pension from my grandpa work). Meanwhile most of younger generation will probably never be able to afford to buy own house (unless someone old dies and leaves them inheritance).
This gets it backwards. In most places, we haven't arranged society as "everything is banned except for this list of allowed activities," more as "everything is allowed except for this list of banned activities."
We're not necessarily good at divining utility of actions when deciding what should be banned, either.
That any individual activity serves some greater good is a happy accident, there's no natural law that individuals will take actions that are net positive when you zoom out.
The free for all strategy (libertarianizm?) may be a great diacovery strategy but it does very little for building and preservin things that works (that were discovered by it). I sincerlly believe that real freedom ends with strongest psyhopaths stomping down on week that are on their way to fullfill their desires.
So even if its all happy accident on the lowest level there is a meta game of rules far above it that prevents our world from collapsing (at least for now)
This is true only in the simplest of world views. Let's take this idea to the real world. Let's say all food producer would say today to stop and instead start producing toilet wipes(or insert anything here) or whatever because the can make more money that way. Now suddenly we won't have any food producers tomorrow and billions will starve. Clearly food productions companies only purpose wasn't to make money for owners, it was also shockingly to keep people from starving.
Further, you are just plain wrong about both of your points. At least as general statements.
1. Of course there are some businesses that are created to be able to pay the owners of the capital dividends (or more common, to be able to sell the business later to someone who hopes to be able to collect dividends). But a lot of businesses are created to for people to just being able to do their job. Say a gardener who wants to work with tending gardens. Their main purpose of the business is not to collect dividends, and they may never do.
2. That a business sole purpose only is to pay the owners is a quite recent (popularised in the eighties) neoliberal idea and far from any universal truth. The purposes of any single business can be whatever the business owner wants, which range from the obvious, become rich, to serving the community with some particular goods or service, providing employment and security to the local workforce or creating opportunity for people work with some craft they love.
The stakeholders in a business are far from only the people that invested capital in it. They also include the local community, the employees and the family, and of course the customers.
- You own some stock. The company pays dividends. You reinvest the dividends into buying more stock.
- You own some stock. The company buys back stock.
A different equivalence:
- You own some stock. The company pays dividends.
- You own some stock. The company buys back stock. You sell stock until your percentage share in the company is the same as before.
Good luck trying to make anything without the capital to buy the materials and hire the people to make it.
This was the theory of communism.
Empirically, we can see that things will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends.
I don't think anything more needs to be said.
Btw, Amazon has done stock buybacks. Which are economically equivalent to dividends, but get different tax treatment.
1. Not paying dividends is communistic. Few people would accuse Jeff Bezos of being a communist.
2. Bad things will happen if no dividends are paid. No, nothing bad has happened to Amazon because they didn't pay dividends. Another example is Apple that didn't pay any dividends between 1995 and 2012.
Obviously, the commenter meant any returns to shareholders, whether that be dividends or stock buybacks or anything else.
Second, the commenter was obviously also talking about the economy in general. Individual companies being run in peculiar ways won't bring down the economy.
As an analogy: some companies give away some products for free. But it wouldn't be a good idea for companies in general to give everything away for free.
Of course, you can still disagree with the points that the commenter made about no returns to shareholders leading to communism (and whether that's bad or not). But please show some charity in interpretation, if you want to have a productive discussion.
And if you go back in the thread, it was not a general argument about society. If thaumasiotes wanted to do it about that, that would be the straw man, because no one argued for prohibiting companies for paying dividends, and no one argued that society would be fine if no company ever were allowed to pay dividends.
Finally, if I show some lack of patience with thaumasiotes, it is because they are shouting "Communism!" instead of actually presenting any coherent argument. And that in discussions about economy is the reminiscence of Godwin's law.
If you put it like that: just don't pay any interest on your debt.
The only thing that will happen is that the old owners will be wiped out in bankruptcy, and the older creditors will be the new owners.
Since you don't care about the owners, and only about the 'business', this is means 'nothing will happen'.
Some profit is later spent on other things, but most of it goes is comparatively unproductive in the broader economy.
This is one reason that worker co-ops and employee profit sharing are so good for the economy; when profit is shared among workers, that profit is more likely to go back into the economy and circulate among other businesses and workers.
Reminds me of that Planet Money special where they made their own tshirts from scratch, as “finding a cotton farmer to buy cotton” from scratch. The thing that added the most cost was the transport from the dock in NYC to the store.
I freqently find myself in a supermarket and think that the packaging for the products there was more expensive than the product itself. Plus the logistics.
The big takeaway from understanding COGS is using that to understand fast moving and disposable goods and merchandise.
In the UK a recent (last decade) thing has been fast fashion, Primark and the like are leaders at this. It is possible to purchase a pair of straight leg jeans for GBP 12. Understanding COGS means you can quickly realise that the absolute maximum amount spent on materials and manufacturing is GBP 4.
An awareness of COGS reveals to buyers unethical manufacturing, low quality, and essentially planet damaging goods and merchandise.
On a more individual level, i.e. the Beats headphone example in the article, it can also reveal when you're being ripped off. Where what you're buying isn't the goods as much as it is the sticker on the side and the status.
COGS may not be a secret to most people on HN, but they're an unknown part of the magic of how global commerce works to the majority of people.
Standard, absolutely, but I think many are surprised by how much of that is profit for the company that sells the product to the consumers. I worked for a company that had 40-45% margins on most consumer electronics. Less than 40% and the buyers didn't really want to deal with it.
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If you have ever whore'd yourself out as a 1099 "consultant" <=== you're typically paid ~30% of bill rate... the company claimed all this "I have to pay insurance" bullshit - but if you are paid $50 an hour, the contract is likely $150 an hour... and the company's fat margins are within....
But of course what you say is true. Electronic and software design, physical design, productisation, marketing, distribution, packaging, support, business premises, logistics, and backup business services (payroll, accounting) all cost money. Even a nominal markup of 40% may not be enough to cover those expenses.
Selling at scale - even at small scale - is completely different to buying a bag full of bits and assembling them with a soldering iron.
Having said that - audio and music are particularly susceptible to snake oil. Never mind all the cable nonsense, you can literally buy magic pebbles and boxes full of rocks to "improve" your audio.
The people in those markets are either delusional or knowingly scamming their customers.
At some point branding and market positioning become the biggest driver of perceived value, and spending $$$$$$ just to prove you can - under the pretext of "purer sound" - becomes an exercise in consumer narcissism. In the classic Veblen mode, the product being sold isn't the item, it's the consumer's perception of themselves. And some people will pay huge sums for that.
Which is you can buy magic hifi rocks, magic watches that don't tell the time very well, magic handbags, and all manner of other trinkets, for very silly prices.
But my mindset completely changed after listening to a lot of economics stories on planet money. There was this dude who tried to make a simple toaster on his own, down to refining metal. None of us can make even the simplest consumer product, let alone an consumer electronic product economically.
https://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/342138931/how-do-you-build-a-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay9wFQAW19Y
Dave Jones breaks it down, as usual, very informative.
The general rule of thumb was, that a product in parts and production shall not be more 30% of the final price of the product. If its more, it will be a money looser. With that 30% you have 30% for marketing and distribution, and 30% for research and development. Then there you have about 10% of overhead costs for all over. Then you can play with the numbers. If, like in consumer products, marketing and distribution goes up, you have obviously less either for R&D, which means less innovation or less innovative products, or less for production, which means less quality.
That's what I learned for electronic products. Other industries maybe a little bit different. I think of these sometimes when I see a plastic box in the store for 10 bucks or so, and I know this plastics costs only a few cents in production in injection molding, of course not counting what the machine for the manufacturer had cost, what the production form cost and that it can only be used for a few 100 000 items before wearing out and so on.
Odd comparison, unless I missed something.
They said none of this is a secret in the 3rd paragraph of the article.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This goes into the Apple/Atari/FCC story a bit (search for FCC):
https://www.fastcompany.com/90432140/how-atari-took-on-apple...
I strongly suspect that, to a rounding error, 100% of new small-electronics products on, say, Kickstarter, sell at a massive per-unit loss. And yet people will still bitch about the price.
Those teams rarely justify their cost, especially if you factor in all the sexual harassment lawsuits that they're a breeding ground for.
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."
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
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.
Common digital room correction systems can improve the time-invariant linear components of an audio system's distortion (phase and frequency response) by convolving with an impulse response. The best results are obtained at a single point listening position, not a whole line. This technique cannot restore frequencies that were cancelled out by destructive interference, and may increase noise to unacceptable levels at frequencies where it has to apply gain. It supplements room treatment, not replaces it. It does nothing to improve non-linear distortion, e.g. harmonic and intermodulation distortion from soft clipping or asymmetries in the speaker motor, or time-dependent distortion, e.g. dynamic range compression from the coil overheating, or so-called "Doppler distortion" (better named phase modulation distortion[0]) from significant excursion of the cone.
How much distortion matters depends on personal taste and listening material. Moderate harmonic distortion can be very difficult to hear in some sounds. And as the popularity of vinyl and tube amps show, some people prefer more distortion.
This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...
It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.
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)
These are certainly words, and everything else being the same I absolutely would rather have the "bit wooly" kind of review to read.
In my defence, "decent flat reproduction" is at least measurable. However I should have actually been much more precise in my language. It should have read something like "the frequency response across the full spectrum is flat, which means that what you put in is what comes out, there is no extra base or treble, despite the shape and sound performance of the room"
Should be qualified by "since the mic is on the receiver, if you were to situate your head at the receiver's mic position and accounting for the mic's ADC circuit there is a chance that your human ears would hear something like a flat response."
But of course that can't be generalized across the room, different points in the room will have different acoustic response because of the unique positioning wrt other reflective surfaces.
The closest you can actually get is to use something like miniDSP and a umik, position the umik where you would usually sit, and then let the DSP run and calibrate.
Anyhow--I'm not knocking you. I'm all about better audio through such tricks as well. It's just we can't probably say absolute things having a flat response, because at the end of the day people hear different things (both physiologically but also psychologically). One of the things I do for fun sometimes is run a flat signal that sweeps through the frequency range and edit the equalizer until I _perceive it_ to be a flat response, then compare the EQ to the FR chart on audiosciencereview if they have reviewed it or if the product has included it in their marketing :)
IMO the best audio review site currently is https://www.audioholics.com/
Then you start to realize that even the best ear is still subjective, and people will hear things if they want to hear them.
urgh yes.
When I was recording something, I routed an (audio)compressor/gate combo. I was twiddling something on the effect and convinced myself that it was making a change.
Looked to my left, the person was vehemently agreeing with me, I looked behind, the other person had a face like I'd farted. A while later I realised that I had routed the output into a muted bus. (ie I couldn't hear the output of the effect, only the raw original)
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
A hypothetical world where all people are one deviation smarter would probably be way more dangerous and stressful. The number of highly intelligent sociopaths would explode, leading to exponential damage.
Of course, we can't easily transfer money like this from the frivolous to the useful for a ton a reasons. Life isn't a fairytale. But the next best thing is to have them spend their money so that at least it can power some form of growth.
It's not that these newcomers deserve to be mislead by echo chambers, but rather that if they demonstrate so little regard or respect for their money by failing to do much research or understanding what they're buying in detail, especially if they are buying something extraneous to begin with, that I don't see a moral or ethical problem to keep them spending. If anything, the money should be parted from the well-to-do fool, if only to provide macroeconomic support to the rest of the population.
How come an "audiophile" balanced XLR cable is 10 times more expensive (or more) than the ones used to connect the mics in the original recording, even when using the best Mogami cable, Neutrik plugs and paying somebody for hand soldering it?
More or less same as you, the team made by my "cheap" Denon amp plus a couple of Q Acoustics bookshelf speakers (and a relatively cheap high quality bluetooth receiver) sounds great, and the whole costs just a bit more than some crappy Beats headphones.
(Now that I'm venting, brands like Bose have some nice things but overprice lots of their equipment. Not to talk about the "DSP boards" needed to run their classic 802 PA systems, that was so bad)
because the studios were pretty well booked, we had a fair few repair jobs. Cables break, normally its where they are soldered into the XLR. From what I could tell, the main difference between cheap and expensive cables was the amount of string that was bundled into the core along with the actual cable. I suspect now is both string and the woven sheathing on the outside.
sure some were copper, others were aluminium coated in copper (although they broke more often, I'm not sure because copper is more ductile and AL just stress fractures, or because they were really cheap and shoddy)
They all sounded the same, apart from when we used phantom power on long cables. Then sometimes they turned into microphones. You didn't notice it unless you were in the theatre, and people would accidentally stand or kick the cable, making a massive thud.
The simple fact is most "audiophiles" are rich people showing off their wealth. It has little to do with actual audio reproduction.
The website linked here is in fact trying to solve this problem, with reviews based on measurements:
So if it's all good enough for the mass market then the audiophiles need to look in the mirror and ask what they're after. Some will say a mystical, ethereal experience. Some will say total control over the signal chain from outside the body to inside. These are orthogonal wants crammed into a single market.
The second path is harder, but it at least the end result is some form of truth. Very few engineers want to devote themselves to a pointless crusade for a tiny market of consumer goods. There's better things to do on the weekend. However, when they do it's special.
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.
Listeners prefer objectively accurate (ie, the input matches the output) audio reproduction, with some added emphasis on the bass frequencies. Because most of the sound we hear indoors is actually reflected, it is crucial that frequency response of the speakers remains constant as we move off axis.
This might seem blindingly obvious, especially the first part, but it's groundbreaking work as far as demystifying audio is concerned.
For so many decades, the snake oil salesmen dominated the hifi industry with bogus claims. They wanted us to think that building speakers was like crafting the perfect wine. But it's not. It's engineering. =)
What I love about Toole's book is it's basically the whole big picture of audio, completely sourced and grounded in real deal empirical research, but research that also worked to correlate objective measurements to subjective preferences.
All those internet arguments over the years about what matters and what doesn't, tubes vs transistors, class A vs class AB amps, you name it... Toole's book is the cliff notes of what's actually real. It's such a huge advantage vs when I first started reading this stuff in the 90s and it was a lot harder to find information that wasn't just someone's "golden ear" opinion imagined out of thin air.
The bundling is a matter of membrane diameter and frequency. Bigger diameter result in stronger beam forming, however lower frequencies have less beam forming. You can see the effect very well in the directivity pattern of this 8" wide band speaker: https://www.visaton.de/sites/default/files/dd_product/B%2020...
I've a FAST/WAW with a 4" wideband (250Hz XO). As personal monitor speakers these work great with an amazing stage and "resolution" (the illusion of being able to pinpoint the exact spatial location of a single instrument).
//woah: Thanks you two (you&GP) for triggering me on this (not /s)! While grabbing a coffee I spent a few minutes thinking about beam forming in audio applications; and came up with the line array. Not so novel, I know, but I'm happy to have gotten there on my own.
Of course this only applies to DIY. Though I wonder what's the cheapest commercial speaker one can get with an ADAU145x in a crossover-less design.
But also what I was getting at with mentioning the common room correction systems is these days, you can do something like take a textbook Linkwitz Riley 4th order crossover, do the little bit that's necessary to match levels, and then just call it good and let the receiver's DSP handle the large scale FR response. That advice might annoy some more knowledgable people, but the blunt truth is it'll work and done with reasonable care you'll have a truly impressive system for the price.
I don't know pro gear that much but my understanding is there's a bunch of vendors now that package DSP + ClassD amps in a way the speaker companies can white label as their own. Kinda like half the AV receivers on the market are ultimately mildly tweaked Audyssey designs.
These are a good step up for a living room, although $240/ea: https://www.parts-express.com/Amiga-MT-Tower-Speaker-Kit-Wit...
There are a few other sites that sell kits, either just the electronics or including pre-cut cabinets, i.e. https://meniscusaudio.com/product-category/speaker-kits/
I have a pair of these in my garage to build as a summer project (although getting a bit late for "summer"): https://www.parts-express.com/Solstice-MLTL-Reference-Tower-...
Paul Carmody has quite a few designs: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy
Jeff Bagby is another big name in the DIY speaker world, although he died of COVID in March 2020 and I'm not sure there's a centralized site of his designs :(
Edit: nevermind there is one with ARC: https://www.parts-express.com/AudioBar-powered-1.5-way-2-cha...
A step up from the overnight sensations, the Twiggy BR: http://www.hifi-forum.de/index.php?action=browseT&forum_id=2... Built them myself, hard to improve on price-performance ratio. They have no right to sound this great given their size & budget.
The Bantams are supposed to be very good as well, suitable for eg desktop use, haven't heard or built them myself yet: https://techtalk.parts-express.com/forum/speaker-project-gal...
There is also a more fancy version called Bantam Onyx, for when looks matter: http://www.hifi-forum.de/viewthread-205-1154.html
Reference class monitors DXT-MON 182, 36-20000Hz, completely flat frequency response: https://heissmann-acoustics.de/dxt-mon-182/
If you don't have a workshop to work on wood, you can buy pre-made speaker cases for some of the speaker plans, I only know german shops though:
- https://lautsprecherbau.info/de/
- https://www.speakercase.de/produkt-kategorie/gehausebausatze...
Very important: price and sound quality are at best very loosely related in the consumer market! I mean off-the-shelf products here. Never assume expensive stuff sounds great. This is counter-intuitive but true.
I've always wondered if buying (or now I'm thinking about making) better speakers would make a noticeable difference in the mediocre sound? I only ever play at pretty low volumes and the receiver itself is no gem.
The manual says RMS output power is 20W + 20W, 1kHz, 10% THD 6 ohms, but then a couple of lines later says THD is 0.05% line in, digital in 1kHz 1W. That's pretty bad, right? If so, then speakers may not be worth upgrading. If they are, how could I tell if these[2] are compatible?
[1]: https://www.intl.onkyo.com/downloads/manuals/pdf/cs-n575d_ma...
[2]: https://www.parts-express.com/HiVi-B4N-4-Aluminum-Midbass-Ro...
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
That said, designing your own high quality (I'm defining "high quality" as "measures objectively well") speaker "from scratch" is quite a bit of work.
https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy-speaker-faqs/...
Most folks, even designers, start by building other peoples' designs. If you really want to design your own speakers, then absolutely go for it. It's not rocket science, but it's somewhat involved if you want to do it right.
If you just want a pair of high quality speakers for cheap (I am one of those people!) then use an existing design w/ a flat-pack kit from Parts Express or elsewhere.
The reason DIY audio gear matches really expensive factory built gear, is that the secret to good sounding audio is good sounding speakers, and good sounding speakers are heavy and big, and have intricate cones made out of expensive materials. Imagine how expensive it is to manufacture such a thing and have it marketed and shipped, and you'll realise they need large margins on something that's already expensive. Combine that with that the actual construction of speakers is very simple anyone could it do with a basic set of woodworking tools, not to mention that many people enjoy doing it as a hobby.
Of course good amplifiers are also part of the story, but their development is a sort of by product of the computer industry, as better transistors has generally meant better amplifiers, with class D amplifiers basically being the state of the art right now.
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.
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.
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.
A COGS of 30% is, as they say, on the upper end. For brands that have to offer a certain amount of quality in order to sell instead of going purely for ads and brand recognition.
50% is the retail store margin. I thought it was 40%, but that's probably a global rate, with electronics being higher.
Retailers make more money on cables and mounting brackets than a TV, for example.
I don't remember the exact price, but it does indeed mean that the margin must have been less than 16 %.
And how often it is returned to the store because buyer didn't like it. Some things can be resold, but most of the time the seller eats up the costs. It is always amusing for me to see people being outraged by the costs and seeing nothing wrong with returning something to the store just because they can.
It’s not rocket science.
22 year olds know this stuff when they leave school, right?
After a decade working post graduation and nowadays being comfortable negotiating and managing millions-dollar projects, I still find the book covering all the fundamentals you need to know about modern business.
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
Both Lowe's and Home Depot sell metal faucets, taps, knobs, etc., in a variety of styles.
> Yes, that is our name. Shih-tah. It's a proud German name, host to a long line of audio engineers who slaved away in crumbling Teutonic fortresses as lightning lashed the dark lands outside, working to perfect the best amplification devices in the world...
> Or, well, no. Yep, Schiit is our name, and it's pronounced, well, like "hey man, that's some really good Schiit!" And now that we have your attention...
I'd not heard of them before, they look great.
You might snag a deal on some dusty new-old-stock part, but for just about anything else, I much prefer the box stores or Amazon or supplyhouse.com (I can vouch heavily for these guys, who used to be called pexsupply.com)
Good luck getting most HD employees to do much beyond looking up a location on their phone slower than you can do yourself.
I'm generally willing to pay for the experience of being surrounded by a tenured team who know what they're doing rather than a rotating cast operating at inattentive high schooler levels, but I do still go to HD a lot.
And there was one store I stopped going to because the old guy knew too much and could tell I was doing things out of my depth and - while being somewhat helpful - made me anxious. At HD if you buy a weird combination of stuff or just don't have the air of a pro, nobody's paying attention or knows the difference.
Together with the trusted Sennheiser HD600 headphone set, it is my standard advice when anybody asks.
At least some kinds of progress.
How can someone actually find a quality item and know that's what it is on Amazon?
- what’s actually going to be in the box
- how soon is it going to break after you open said box
- is the thing so cheaply made it’s going to give you cancer
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.
https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/company/newsroom/press-rele...
But, which company/companies were first with celeb staff members/owners (ie not just endorsement)?
Planet Hollywood seems like it was an early version of this. Victor Kyam's (sp?) "I like it so much I bought the company" is on similar lines but not quite there. Thoughts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
These new headphones seem to comply stunningly well with that target curve. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
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.
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.
And of course $300 or $600 or even more expensive headphones probably sound better. But IMHO the difference doesn't justify the cost.
As a consumer, I don't know what to trust because the marketing on these things can be pretty useless.
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.
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.
Is there an objective way of measuring "quality" in this space for premium products?
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Hea...
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
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....
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.
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.
The 3rd parties and universities are actually doing the research&development and manufacturing.
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.
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.
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.
I luckily realized very quickly that they had gone out of production, and managed to find a case of 24 of them on Mexican Ebay. Each pair probably lasts a little more than a year, so they'll get me through this stage of technology (for around $100.) So instead of buying $100 gaming headphones, buy $100 worth of those (hopefully with a bulk discount.) If you get sick of them one day, they'll make great gifts.
You probably have to spend more than $100 for that, though.
Jesus. "After months".
I have been using my Sennheiser HD600 for 5 years now. They don't even seem to show any sign of age. Should anything ever break, they're modular and the individual parts can be bought separately anyway. But what's most important is that they sound really, really good. To me and to a very comfortable majority of audio equipment reviewers. Subjectively (ears) _and_ in objective measurements (i.e. accurate FR, low distortion on a pro head-shaped measurement stand). And there's no shortage of these, for a set that was released in the late 90s and has been popular audio equipment in the hobbyist/pro markets since. To top it off: They're even extremely comfortable to wear.
And the worst part: Is, it is, by now, near impossible to do even cursory research on what headphones are good and not hear about them.
It remains a mystery to me, to this day, why it isn't the case that everybody owns a pair already. Particularly, as they're not even expensive. They cost only a little more than the average gaming headset everybody seems to own. Instead... utter crap sounding, ear-exploding "cordless" trash from "popular brands" do sell well, alongside awful-sounding, fickle, gaming headsets.
Consumers are this easily misled by marketing, and seem incapable of doing even the most basic research.
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.
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.
As for most companies in most industries. It's still worth repeating over and over again.
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.
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.
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.
https://emotiva.com/collections/amps
and parts-express...
I've owned things from all of these places so there's that I guess :)
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.
Sonos's one plays nice w/ Sonos's ecosystem, but if you don't need that there are other solutions.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
(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.)