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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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In Reply to: Why are cables sooo expensive??? posted by Josh on October 26, 2001 at 12:30:11:
Cables costs can be higher than you think.Lets take a look at a well known DIY coaxial cable, Belden 89259.
It currently costs around $1 a foot, and this is a stock item for the manufacturer that they make in quantity when they manufacture it. The cost here is mostly due to the teflon insulation material and teflon jacket. If you wanted a custom run of it, say changing just one thing that did not cost any more for Belden to make, then it might cost $3 or 4 a foot, and you would have to commit to a minimum quantity buy of say, 50,000 feet. This uses a good grade of ETP copper, not 99.999% pure, or some umpteen nines purity silver.
Let's say that you wanted OFHC 99.99% copper, this might jack the price up to almost double what it was as a custom cable, now in the range of $5-7 dollars a running foot.
Not so bad you might think, as you only use about 3 feet per side in a 1M stereo interconnect cable for a total of say approx. 7 feet of cable. So only $35-49 worth of cable in the product. Ah, but then there is now the cost of the RCA plugs, these can run up into the range of $10-20 apiece wholesale for the really fancy ones milled from solid material and quality plated and finished.
Then there is the HS, maybe some Techflex covering, silver solder, etc. Then the most expensive thing of all: hand labor to assemble them, as there is no way to afford machine termination for custom cable sizes AND off the beaten path RCA plugs for the smaller companies. In many cases, the simple act of soldering them up PROPERLY costs as much as the materials. So $100 worth of raw materials may cost another $50 to $100 OR MORE to assemble and test/check.
Then there is the packaging, advertising, distribution, overhead, and so on.
In the electronics industry, the usual rule of thumb is to multiply the parts cost by 5X to reach what the retail price should be. This is for mass market consumer gear. High end gear, due to the limited production (loss of large scale production efficiency), tends to run around 10X the parts cost in order to assure making some amount of profit from selling the gear. (It needs to be kept in mind that many items typically get sold for 10X their cost to manufacture: clothes, many toys, many appliances, etc.)
For the above mentioned example interconnect cables, this would amount to a reasonably fair selling price of nearly $1000 for a 1M pair of what amounted to a simple variation on good old Belden 89259 (using OFHC 99.99% pure copper). This is for a simple coaxial geometry, if the cables used a fancy geometry, or required even more labor to assemble, or used pure silver as the conductor, then the costs and final retail price would be even higher.
Now, once we get past this point, we are strating to enter the realm of what the market will bear, what the consumer thinks the product is worth, and is willing to pay for it. Whether it is due to brand name prestige, or some other marketing ploy, if consumers are willing to fork over the cash, then they will make it and sell it. This is NOT unique to the cable or audio industry, just pounced upon by some who like to see it as some sort of conspiracy or such.
As for these particular MIT speaker cables, I am not immediately familiar with the details of their construction, but if they use the typical MIT network box, then these parts costs and assembly time can be added to the equation, and likely the cable costs would be higher still for significant amounts of copper in the cable (speaker cable vs. interconnect cables).
For a ten foot pair of not very fancy high end speaker cables, the costs to manufacture might easily reach $200 or more, if the 10X rule of thumb is used, then the retail price would be somewhere on the order of $2000 or more. How much more might depend in part on the actual materials and labor involved.
The difference between $2000 and $3400 might be partially due to particularly expensive materials and construction, or a portion of it a result of what the market will bear. Use of pure silver alone would pretty much make up for the difference.More ambitious cables, such as some of the woven/braided types that interleave the wires in a helical criss-crossing winding around a core can involve tremendous amounts of labor, very costly materials, and so on, so that actual costs to manufacture would stagger your mind. Again, with very limited production, no economy of scale, these are one off hand-built products, and they need to recoup their expenses every time they sell a set.
A fully hand built custom car can easily cost 10 to 100 times what most cars sell for. Should everyone run out and buy one? Many folks are quite happy with their mass produced Chevy's and Fords, so I don't see the custom car bussiness putting them into any trouble anytime soon. Same with the really high priced cables, they are there and exist for the same kinds of reasons as custom cars, etc. Someone knows how to build them ever so tweaky to the nth degree, and then offers them for sale.
Jon Risch
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Follow Ups
- Re: Why are cables sooo expensive??? - Jon Risch 20:19:03 10/28/01 (1)
- Great explanation... - Statman 08:14:11 10/29/01 (0)
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