Jim, any idea on costs yet?
Marbles -
That is the question of the day. Everything about these speakers was expensive. The bamboo in this pair alone was over $1600. The drivers are expensive. The labor to produce them was through the roof. (As an example, once the cabinets were finished, it took 3 1/2 days just to assemble them.) And then there were CAD programming and CNC machining costs. I could go on and on.
When Dennis and I started talking about this project two years ago, we decided that design decisions would be based solely on performance, not cost. With drivers, for example, we tested top-tier, cutting edge drivers from the best in the business. When we made our final selection, they just happened to be among the most expensive we tested.
The cabinet requirements were a real challenge as well. First, a very rigid set of requirements, from a minimalist tweeter enclosure to a large woofer section, made it almost impossible to design something with any degree of WAF. And once we had all that sorted out, we had to figure out how we could construct them. Nothing was easy.
Needless to say, these will be fairly expensive speakers. More than once I asked myself if it makes any sense to introduce a speaker like this in this economy. But, in the end, it is a speaker we wanted to do.
When we originally introduced the Veracity HT3's, I wondered the same thing. I had my reservations, but it was the speaker I wanted personally so we went ahead and produced it. The HT3's went on to become our largest selling speaker and, today, only the SongTowers outsell it.
Will history repeat itself? Who knows. But after completing these today and spending a few hours with them, I do know one thing: I have the speakers I want.
- Jim
