highend price

It's question for me why price of a speaker like dynaudio evidence master is more than a top car like BMW M5 ?!
All highend audio equipment are so expensive and i don't know why they are expensive!
I'm sure expensive highend sound quality is not far better than a good system under 10000$.
What's your idea?

 

There has been many discussions on this before the reason they exist is that some people are silly enough to pay £100k for a HIFI system.

Russ Andrews sell speaker cable that costs £8000 per metre!

 

we have a saying, you get what you pay for.

sadly this is not now the case, sometimes you do , sometimes you don't.

there are profiteers out there who only care about cash, and they 'create' a product and the image of the product becomes more important than the item. It gives it an identity, rather than a utiltarian use.

So some poor soules with more cash than sense buy things to satisfy their inflated egos, thinking the product will make them worthwhile and satisfy them, seeing adverts with young good looking people everywhere, they think subconciously the product will do that for them, give them perfect hair, teeth, always smily friends forever young.
Its insidious, but there is a sucker born every minute. you don't always get what you pay for, but where there is money, there is a market, and where there is a market, there is money.

(there is actually a marketing trick called the expert from afar....it goes like this..if I started making my own cables, you would think ahhh old data trying to get some cash, this is a variation of 'a prophet is not a prophet in his own town', but if I was some whiz from america, from a long way off, with all sorts of claims, some people would be taken in and buy it.

so RA having this kimber kak has more credibility as this stuff is from afar, the land of the devil, :JOEL: across the pond, caus you don't know this guy, he is a guru from afar.

you have to keep checking you are in touch with reality, and no matter who you are, £8000 on cables is not.

what would you rather have, £8000 worth of cables, or holidays, cds, eat out, new shoes, clothes, carpets, nice things? keep it in perspective. It can become an illness the pursuit of the best.

I challenge russ andrews to prove to me that his cables will give me more pleasure than a holiday and eating out, with 1000s to spare. I challenge him, come on RA, prove your worth, prove your claims

In fact, I will have a look into the claims myself and get the advertising standards, toothless puppies they are to examine them, too.:

 

Why does an M5 cost as much as a house?

Everything has a perceived value to people, and different people perceive things differently. For example, you might place a higher value on an M5 than a pair of speakers. Someone very rich, very into music and blind could well place higher value on a pair of speakers than a car they can not drive.

There are people who will pay that or more for a pair of speakers. And so there are people who will meet that demand. That is the market of competitive commerce.

 

Why is the car so much? A car in Henry Ford's day cost his factory workers the earnings from 58 days' labour.

 

Re: Re: highend price

I don't think the Ford Model T had central locking, electric windows or power steering. Or even a heated rear window, dipping rear view mirror, reversing lights, seatbelts, reclining seats, a radio or even a heater

 

Many years ago, in the early days of my HiFi 'journey' I had what was then regarded as a state of the art stereo amp, a Yamaha C800, finished in the then fashionable silver, with proper aluminium knobs, wooden end 'cheeks', and was a switchable class A, A/B design.

Along came a 'better' sounding, locally developed amp, modelled on a Radford, with dubious build quality, but finished in wood re the external panels, with a walnut veener.

It was visually quite fetching, and it's sound was better, albeit in hindsight perhaps more just 'different' It came with a high-end reputation and price, however after a good many years of service, like most electronic items it required service, however due to it's age, specialist parts weren't available, and advice was that putting in substitutions would alter the sound but with no further guarantees of reliability given it's overall age.

Stripped of it's 'mystique' and 'high-end' status, it quickly became another piece of unserviceable electronic 'junk' that made it's final journey to the tip.

A pity, but such is the reality of life.

I agree 100% that so much of what we perceive re 'high-end' is marketing, rather than performance lead.

Even in careful A/B testing, one usually perceives differences, upon which one must then make a value/taste judgement, rather than an overall and in every sense perceived total improvement of one item over the other, even sometimes where the cost difference is quite large.

As always, the law of diminishing returns kicks in quite heavily with HiFi gear, just as with cars, watches, luxury goods etc.

I read with a smile, on other HT forums, of owners of US $10,000 AR valve amps trading them on the new digital amp, the Sony DA9000ES receiver, as apparently it has a smoothness and valve like liquidity in the sound, that is the equal of the likes of the AR, as well as doing the HT processing bit, and all at a fraction of the cost.

One could argue that all the Sony lacks, is the appropriate name tag, and importantly the prerequisite image and mystique.

After all, Lexus, which was a brand name invention, is now recognised as being the equal in many areas to BMW, Mercedes, Audi etc, even though it's mechanicals and parentage etc, are Toyota.

In the market place, branding and image seems to be almost everything IMHO - few appear to have the engineering expertise, or general knowledge/experience to know any different unfortunately.

Cheers

John....

 

Which house are you looking at??? You can't get them that cheap around here!!!


....why does a house cost so much ? After all, it's only bricks and mortar and sure as hell didn't cost anywhere near as much to build.

It is all about perceived value - something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

 

It's the Rolls-Royce syndrome; there are quite simply people with that amount of loose change burning holes in their pockets. When Rolls brought out the Silver Shadow in the 1970s, it became aware of the fact that people were paying £20,000 (when that really meant something) over list price for a slightly used one, just to jump the long waiting list. Rolls thus became aware that there was a market for a car in that elevated price range - so it built one ( a particularly unattractive thing called a Camargue). The first two years' production was sold out on the rumour that such a vehicle existed!

Thus it is with super-hi-fi. The law of diminishing returns has well and truly set in about a squillion pounds before you reach that level, but there are people who will buy it just because they can.

 

Hi amir,
I am not going to comment about the dynaudio evidence master because I never heard them and therefore cannot give my personal opinion about its value.
It seems you are sure that expensive highend sound quality is not far better than a good system under 10000$.
I appreciate that someone writes clearly and not diplomaticaly what he really thinks. Certainly this affirmation from you has a very firm ground and is a result of a long experience in this field. I, and maybe other members of this forum, would love to part a bit of your experiences and therefore would love that you could mention only one or two of the numbrous expensive systems which you had the luck to compare to a under 10000$ system. I would be delighted if you could spend a few words about the background of the comparasons (eventually your tests).

There is also another, not very important, point I wanted to mention.
They say that perception of sound is very subjective, it seems that the brain has also a big influence in it (that's also why people talk about placebo-effect and other sorts of (para)pshychological influences). The brain is resposible for converting the impulses into your perception. Now saying this, to be a little bit more 'objective' in judging we should try to have a 'clear' maybe relaxed mind. One way is for example not taking drugs or alchool or smoking before a test. Maybe we should avoid to get emotional or disconcentrated: I mean for example avoid playing 'dirty' things with your wife, girl friend or friend while testing systems and also avoid getting too emotional into the music. I mean don't wack your bottom or other parts of your body around, don't tap your right (left of course also) foot and especially don't move your head up and down. That will certainly modify your perceptions and cause a milkshake in your head.
But I supose you already know all these things and therefore forget what I wrote.

And what is my idea? First I cannot compete with your experiences. I'm more for enjoying life (with or without music) and taking it easy. If anyway I cannot afford to buy a 100000$ system then just don't bother about it especially after all that experience with comparing them vs 10000$ systems and finding out that the sound quality is not very much better.

One thing you shouldn't forget: In one way or the other everybody is silly depending on the point of view. And this is nice, it gives color to this world and to everybody's life. This of course if it is taken in the positive way.
On the other side envy or jelousy doesn't do any favour to anybody except maybe to the person who is the 'cause' of it all. I believe that talking to the person who you cannot understand, helps to get a wider mind if of course that is what one would like to have. Communication and understanding lacks quite a lot in this world and most of the time causes disputes, fights and wars: not very positive isn't it?…

regards

 

Hey Titian,

thank Christ I'm a subjectivist

 

I suspect you'll find that people who spend megabucks on cables or indeed complete systems are not sacrificing something else in order to do so - they can afford the CDs and holidays as well! It's all relative - if you won some absurd amount on the lottery which meant you were not at all constrained in your spending and thought that spending more could get you more, mightn't you stray into that territory too? I'm not saying I have any sympathy for the pricing policies of RA, but I think people are free to spend their money how they see fit.

 

High end Hifi, like valuable art or classic cars, is highly subjective so it's pricing follows the "it's worth what someone is willing to pay for it" rule.

Expensive cars follow this aswell. Why does a Ferrari 360M CS cost so much more than a Porsche 996 GT3 and why does the Porsche cost so much more than a BMW M3 CSL? In terms of measurable performance and value of the parts etc they are all pretty similar but their value goes much deeper than that. It's all about the brand, the mystique and the hype and no one can say they are immune to it. Honda's NSX was at least the equal if not far superior in every meaningful measurable parameter than it's Ferrari and Porsche competitors and it also cost a fraction of the price. However, hardly anyone bought it. If the exact same car had come out of Maranello with a prancing horse badge on the front and costing 3 times as much it would have sold by the bucket load.

HiFi is even worse than cars as it really has no accepted measurable parameters that people can use to evaluate it. It's entirely subjective so the sky's the limit.

Michael.

 

Indeed - on my Top Trumps 'Supercars' set, the NSX wins hands down in most of the vital areas.

I wonder if we could sponsor a hifi version of Top Trumps?

 

This is an excellent point. The same car with a Toyota badge would have been laughed at.

Raises interesting questions about the VW Phaeton. It's a VW. It could be the best car in the world but it will always be seen as an overweight Passat.

Ford obviously recognise the problem which is why they now own Volvo and Jaguar.

You'd think they would have learned from their cousins at Toyota wouldn't you. Mazda got the message and tried the Xedos brand but didn't really make it different enough from the standard car.

A few of the bigger fish in hifi now own several brands with which to address several markets. Others buy parts from posh brands and put them in cheaper boxes (NAD S300, a thinly disguised Gryphon Tabu Century). Some do it the other way round (the Primare T21 tuner is a NAD S400).

I've lost count of how many speakers there are out there that consist of a box with one or more top of the range Vifa or ScanSpeak bass-mids and a ScanSpeak Revelator tweeter. They range in price from about £1500 to £10000 or more. There cannot be that much of a difference surely if the essential ingredients are the same.

 

They (Honda) did - in the US they use the Acura brand which was supposed to be Honda's answer to Lexus. In the US the NSX was sold as the Acura NSX but it didn't make any difference. TBH I think that Honda as much more credibility as a sports car brand than anything invented but you can't just take on Ferrari and Porsche in the brand stakes just like that. For a start it takes time to build the mystique and the racing history.

New brands like Acura and Lexus seem to work better in the luxury car segment but I still think that Toyota would have been better off making Lexuses as Toyotas, it would have moved the whole brand up a level in the way that VW has done recently to the extent that cars like the Phaeton and Touareg (especially the Touareg) now have serious credibility against the BMW, Mercedes etc competition. In fact, the VW Touareg is a Porsche Cayenne with a different body and it's cheaper and much better looking to boot. If I were buying in that segment I'd take the VW every time.

Michael.

 

And who could blame you? I saw a Porsche Cayenne yesterday and I have to say, that is one willfully ugly vehicle. What were they thinking.

If I needed a big load lugger, I'd get a Volvo Estate with the 5 cyclinder turbodiesel. That is one seriously grunty motor. I recently drove the S60 coupe with the D5 expecting it to be like driving a christmas pudding. I came away seriously considering ownership

All of which has nothing to do with the price of hi-end hifi. The only answer to that is to set your budget and stick to it (and stop browsing magazines and hifi fora )

 

I could be wrong, Michael, but I think it was the other way round. I believe that it was Honda that came up with branding some models and pricing them in a higher segment. Toyota then came in with Lexus and Nissan with Infiniti (I think). Toyota took the step of setting up an entirely different dealership network for Lexus.

However, as you've pointed out, all they have done is to expand the market for luxury cars. The average would-be Porsche or Ferrari owner is indifferent to mechanical excellence, s/he wants that badge on the nose and will accept no substitute.

 

the grunt comes at a price - I've got the petrol T5 and it eats tyres almost as fast as it drinks petrol!