Doug,
OK, You're cool.
No offense taken. And you're correct, our speakers are not inexpensive. But...and there's always a catch, there's a lot of technology crammed in those suckers. Let's see...constrained-layer damping of the outer walls, transmission-line diffuser/damping chambers, internal damping foam & fiber-fill, 1.5 inch walls on all six sides, mitered corners and corner blocks, a very complex crossover assembly with many expensive parts, killer drivers AND our waveguide. That baby alone is a small engineering feet. It's milled out of solid MDF (or hardwoods of your choice coming soon!) and with the new tweeter, it's milled to a thickness of 3 inches in the waveguide area!
Ever wonder why you don't see more people making waveguides that large? Besides the fact they haven't figured it out yet (thank goodness)IT'S EXPENSIVE!!! You can't just buy an "off the shelf" machine to make the thing. We had to engineer and build our own mill from scratch just to make it. We work cheap (we paid ourselves nothing for the time to design and build it, and even used our own money to purchase all the parts), but if you had to have someone design and build a mill like that for you, you're talking big $$$!!! And the waveguide mill doesn't spit out parts one after the other, it takes a while just to make one front panel. That's a lot of material to carve out at one time.
Now, a much bigger company could spend the $100,000.00 or so that it would take to machine a die to injection mold the whole thing - and then they could pop 'em out one after another. But then it would be just a cheap piece of plastic and I don't think most audiophiles would care for the result. I prefer a nice solid mass to mount my drivers to. I'll bet I won't get much disagreement there either.
And then there's the labor. How much do you guys make an hour? Here in the midwest you'll be hard pressed to find anybody that even gives a rip about their job unless you pay them at leat $10.00/hour. And then we're expecting them to apply the kind of attention to detail that is required of a product of a relatively high level of technology, fit and finish? Now personally, I'd starve on that level of income but with as much work as is involved in our designs, it doesn't take long to rack up some serious $$$ in labor at even those modest wage levels. And $10.00/hr. is cheap by most American's standards!
I didn't mean to whine, I just thought it might help everybody to understand why our stuff costs as much as it does. These ain't your garden variety cabinets with a few tweak-o parts thrown in to drive up the price. I hate to boast (no, really), but there's a ton of solid engineering, parts & labor in even our little Timepiece (not so "little" - 21.5" H X 12.5" W X 15.75" D &
65 lbs. each!) as compared to most any other 8" two-way speaker. This is true all the more so, of our larger models.
Also, I agree that there are some excellent planer (planar?, whatever) designs out there. It's just that I believe the reason they get as much of a following as they do is because a whole lot of dynamic driver based system designers really aren't all that sharp. They just slap some drivers in a box (yeah, they do their little bit of "research" to pick them first, run their computer models and such), throw in a few expensive peripheral parts, use rediculously expensive cabinet materials (machined solid billets of aluminum? YIKES!)do some funky modifications or expensive assembly techniques (i.e.,"cold welding" the speaker wire to the driver voice-coil leads and such - DUH!) and BAM - you have a high-end dynamic loudspeaker. Nothing really new, innovative, or particularly significant - except the price.
Oh, I suppose machining a huge block of aluminum takes a bit of innovation, but why
??? And it seems if they don't go to such extremes then their product suffers for it. C'mon, let's get real. I guess the old saying that "common sense isn't common" is true in high-end speakers, if nowhere else. If more of these guys did their homework, dynamic speakers would be a lot better and they wouldn't require a mortgage to buy them. AND...planer designers would have a lot tougher time competing. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
PS. - Brian, the Continuum 2.5 is a floor standing version of the Continuum A.D. It's in prototype stage right now but the crossover and drivers are the same as the Continuum A.D. (& the Revelation as well) Computer models predict a -3dB down point of around 23 Hz. Nothing definite yet though - I DON'T TRUST COMPUTER MODELS!!! Proof will be in the testing but that wont take long. The height will be 54.5 inches with the width and depth the same as the Continuum A.D. More specs to come. It will be a "crossover" product bridging the gap between the Continuum A.D.'s bass performance and that of the Revelation's. A ton of "bang for your buck" in this guy. Stay tuned.
-Bob
