I understand selling direct is a saving, but you still get value for money paid and quality. Yes, spatial speakers would cost more in a store, but the store does incur additional costs for staff, store rent, and so on. But even then Clayton's prices are based on the value Clayton says they should sell at, if he asks for a speaker for $20,000 then he would feel that what you receive sound-wise is a fair selling price and also based on sound quality and cabinet costs plus the hours to design the speaker. I worked for Sony, our SCD1 SACD player cost $5,000 or more back then, due to Sony's size and production it was more than reasonably priced, but if you and a small Boutique high-end manufacturer can name a name that unit has been selling for $20,000 or more and till this day if you looked inside of that unit, it looked like a piece of medical equipment it was so well designed and made. Esoteric asks $20,000 for their top-of-the-line unit and it is not made any better than the Sony, in fact, their transport is a large part of their asking price. It is a wonderful unit though and sounds great!. So cost has many factors company size, production power, parts cost,, etc. I by no means mean to say a good-sounding product cannot be very affordable, but the price asked is the price that the designer feels it is worth and of course to make a profit and stay in business.
