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In Reply to: RE: The only "controversy" AN generate posted by Wojciech on August 10, 2013 at 19:20:13
LIke the wonderful OTO Signature at $5520 and K/SPe's at $3715? People who fuss about AN pricing by looking at the fancy show gear up the line slay me. You can put together a wonderful AN system for about what every other good system costs, in some cases less. I do wish somebody who knows something about Audio Note besides RGA would remind the ignoranti about this once in a while, cutting short these interminable, pointless threads. It's okay not to like Audio Note, as many folks don't as do, I'm sure. It can be too beautiful for hard-nosed realists. But price is a weak rung to build a critical case on here.
Follow Ups:
Well Bob
If Audio Note UK price structure is the same as Audio Note Japan where ~$7k dealer cost for M7 preamp translates into $30k retail price I can perfectly understand your sentiments here ;)
A rich man told me story that when P.Q arrived at the door of "Song by Singer" outlet with Ongaku amp and hesitantly announced a price of whooping $30k, the store owner said "..no , lets make it $60k ..." and the history was made.
Snell K cost in 1989 was $380 for a pair. This translates (according to web inflation adjusted calc.) into $724 today.
What is the cheapest AN K/L cost ?? -$2800 .it's a four fold increase in price for basically the same class product. Yes , the quality increased due to slightly better quality drivers available today but it still contains the same $35 woofer and $15 tweeter.
Don't get me wrong , I like the sound very much even compared to more expensive competition and I was not referring to Audio Note speakers via my crap remark. Regards, L
Edits: 08/13/13
Dear Wojciech,
If indeed, which I strongly doubt, Kondo AN-J’s price structure is as you describe then ours is very different.
The rich man you spoke to is talking completely rubbish and even if he was poor it would still be rubbish, when we started working with Andy Singer in 1995 the ONGAKU already cost $89,000.00 but you are right it did make history in more ways than one.
Likewise your calculation on the Snell K – AN-K is completely out of line, you cannot use standard inflation adjusted numbers to work out the price of an item which is not part of the inflation index, anyone who deals in small volume products will be able to tell you, firstly because Governments doctor the inflation figures in various (check out John Williams www.shadowstats.com for further information on this) and have done for years and secondly because the products in the basket used as a measure tend to contain things like microwave ovens, mobile phones etc. where the cost actually goes down due to the enormous volume they sell in, so a standard inflation weighted calculation is quite misrepresentative.
Indeed, if I could buy the woofer and tweeter for the prices you mention about I would buy at least 1,000 of each immediately.
The AN-K made today has essentially the same woofer and tweeter, it is the all birch plywood cabinet, the more accurate and time consuming set up procedure, the wiring, connectors and the crossover caps that are far better than what was used in the original Snell Type K and the end result speaks for itself, this of course does not mean that the original Snell speaker is a bad buy second hand, and here we are certainly in agreement, it is a marvellous speaker even today, 25 – 30 years after it was made, and we continue to service them with woofer foam surrounds and matched tweeters.
At the end of the day quality costs money (in many cases poor quality is equally expensive), but retains its value, a fact which is amply displayed in the old original Peter Snell speakers and a wide range of 40 – 50 year old tube amplifiers, there is not much made today that that will apply to in 30 – 40 years.
Sincerely,
Peter
Dear Peter
The actual dealer price for Kondo M7 is 673,200 Yen. I'll let you do the conversion yourself. I do not think the pricing structure dramatically changed from times You were responsible for it. This comes from I (guess) former dealer of Kondo electronics who advertises here on AA leftovers of his Kondo wares along with dealer's price list.
Peter Snell also operated in small scale business and had quite a bit more difficult job to do than your staff sorting trough and matching the suitable drivers. Modern drivers are way more consistent specs wise also often cheaper to manufacture so you don't have to do nearly as much to match them properly. Yes the drivers are almost identical to the basic , economy line of ancient, cheap vifa products. You basic K do not have (or it didn't few years back) better capacitors. They are the same cheap but good electrolytic bipolar bypassed by equally cheap mylar caps. Sure the wire is better but we don't want to go into wire talks ;)
I only responded to RGA thesis that considering inflation basic prices of your entry level Snell based speakers are very close to original Snell prices . They are not. Pricing in high-end changed a lot since late Peter Snell times and YOU Peter Qvortrup are in big part to blame for it. BUT, I easily agree that the speakers sound great and are more than competitive with almost any other speakers in their price range and well beyond. Personally I'd rather have any AN speaker than almost anything else which can be bought in the store. I know and understand "luxury" and small scale, EU based manufacturing arguments but I don't buy yachts , watches and sport cars . I buy Hi-Fi thus hi-fi prices are what I can whine about ;)
Best Regards,
WojciechPS Here is your source for the tweeters, although you may buy it half that price from manufacturer...
Edits: 08/29/13 08/29/13 08/29/13
Dear Wojciech,
I am not sure there this dealer price comes from but it is less than half of the dealer price I saw when i was in Japan 2 years ago, is it conceivable that whoever posted this is aggrieved enough to lie about this to sabotage AN-J/Kondo's sales??
That is the only explanation I can think of that would explain this and if it comes from an ex-dealer/distributor then I think it is likely and not all that unusual either, sadly.
Snell Acoustics was actually not that small a company, they sold several thousand pairs of speakers a year, we sell a few hundred, as speakers are not our main business and only represent about 15% of our turnover, also Snell made their own cabinets in house, do not as the machinery to work in plywood and polish the cabinets to the standard now required by the market are prohibitive.
As far as the drivers are concerned, the consistency is about the same now (which is really very good) as it was when Peter designed and made his speakers, the main difference is that where Snell Acoustics relied on simple Heart Kit chart recorders to measure and match their speaker drivers, we use a far more accurate (the thickness of the line on his chart recorder are/were thicker than the maximum allowed deviation in our matching, as we have increased the resolution of the system by quite a lot) computerized system that is able to match to less than the thickness of the line used in the original Snell speakers.
May I say here as well that the cost of developing this computer system was not cheap, in the order of $ 100K plus and the annual maintenance is no small either!
It may come as a shock, but the modern drivers I have seen, mainly ones coming from China and India, whilst a fair bit cheaper, are also far far less consistent than the drivers we use.
We have recently re-engineered, which SEAS help, the D19 tweeter, so that is now better than the old D19 and is only made for us, we are now working on doing the same with the AN-K woofer as they are also no longer made.
As far as the AN-J/AN-E drivers are concerned, the Tonegen tweeter was discontinued years ago, and we retooled this completely to raise efficiency and improve the overall behaviour, Mr. Ogawa who designed the original tweeter came out of retirement to help us with this and the new version is orders of magnitude better than the old one, which only poses a problem when we sell spare tweeters for older speakers, as it requires a small reset of the crossover resistor.
The AN-J/AN-E woofers likewise are also only made for us, where in the Peter Snell days they were made in huge quantities and sold as a standard catalogue item, our better speakers use hemp cones which cost many times what the standard paper cones cost (reject rate is over 50% for starters), the ferrite magnet material used now is the best and most expensive grade, so efficiency is better etc. etc.
What this means is that even if inflation had been higher (which we all know it has been anyway) the drivers we use today are very different from what Peter Snell used in the 1970's and 1980's, so a straight linear inflation computation is grossly misleading.
It is kind of sad - funny that I will be mainly remembered as the one that changed the pricing of audio, it is true I agree, but what is also true is that it all has to do with improving the sound quality and moving the goal posts and unfortunately that can only be done by investing heavily in R&D, plus in proprietary parts, just as an example of this, I am spending well over US$ 1 million on developing and buying stock of our new non-magnetic resistors, two versions, a basic version with copper end caps and a much more expensive silver version with silver end caps and solid silver lead out wires, now answer this question,
"How many audio manufacturers can you think of over the history of music reproduction who have made commitments of this magnitude?"
When you use super expensive parts, made in small (but still not insignificant in terms of capital investment) quantities, hand build products in the UK, Austria and Lithuania (only the CD and Zero products) using silver wire, nickel c-cores, then how would you avoid serious price tags on the best you make? And why is that a matter for endless criticism?
I can understand that one can be irritated with a world where the richest 1% get richer and hog an increasing share of all wealth created over the past 30 or so years, but rather than whine about this I would respectfully recommend that one uses one's energies on changing that, rather than just complain about the prices of audio, only then may it change.
Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup
I do think that the "average price" of a system of any make has generally gone up faster than the inflation index has - certainly faster than middle class wages, which in most cases has actually declined. And yes, the inflation index does not reflect all prices, but it is helpful to gauge cost of living - and it is a closer measure of the way prices and wages are trending than the cost of silver wire and birch plywood.I sympathize (and feel the pinch myself) with people who complain and dislike the fact that small boutique products such as audiophile equipment have been able to raise their prices and pursue "cost no object sound improvement" rather than the more traditional engineering approach of engineering higher performance through innovation for less money than last year. Audio Note was one of the first companies to break with this tradition.
And while I have absolutely fallen in love with Audio Note systems that I have heard, and even though I could afford the lower rungs of a complete audio note system - it has always lost out on the "value" end for me when it became time to cut the check. I would never in a million years feel it is "crap" - it isn't. It is clear the focus on AN has been to take yesterday's technology and tweak it to be as high performance as you possibly can (always performance first, and price second) - and expend a great deal of money doing so. And clearly that formula is working for AN right now, though I think fewer can afford their wares than ever.
I think it is a bit disingenuous to ask people to stop complaining (even if the complaints are coarsely worded) and change the world so that middle class people can afford product engineered the way AudioNote has done. It is more than a little "let them eat cake" - "Tail Wagging the Dog" - and a hand wave towards the idea that if the inequities of the world would just be repaired, more people would be able to afford Audio Note. It really is the wrong answer to the wrong question. The "complaints" are symptoms of people staying away from high prices stuff in droves - with high end companies pursuing a shrinking number of people able to afford higher and higher priced stuff. It is a precarious position to find yourself in, and frankly people can save a whole lot of money by avoiding the High End altogether, and that savings, regrettably, grows every single year.
I have caught wind of an overall depressed market for high end audio even in the rarefied air, as the world economy slows down, and the rate at which new tycoons in Asia are being minted decreases. This was inevitable, and the world change you condescendingly advised someone to pursue, may in part be happening, as the approach to rising costs has been to abandon a greater and greater portion of the middle classes as you raise your prices, and then pursue even more costly ways of improving performance rather than innovating. Given the middle classes have been the traditional strength in audio sales, this really makes brittle this whole niche economy.
The main question an audio maker has to ask itself - are they making gilded carriages for the modern-day nobility, or are they really trying to bring the best possible performance for the least amount of money to people?
I think one of the reasons this hobby has been "under siege" is the desire to make gilded carriages with more gilding. Perhaps the right approach to this situation, to extend this analogy, is to invent the automobile?
Oh and I suspect one reason that a 30-35 year old design can have relevance, even tweaked, is that perfectionist audio has been focusing on gilding and less on actual technological breakthroughs and innovation. Which isn't surprising, since as a species we are far less innovative now than we were 30-40 years ago. If someone were to pursue anything, perhaps demand innovation in the technological items they purchase, and demand innovation from themselves?
What do you say?
Oh ... and there was a saying when I was going to University for engineering "An engineer can do for ten cents what any damn fool can do for a dollar" ... makes one think, huh?
==
Hey! I have a blog now: http://mancave-stereo.blogspot.com or "like" us at https://www.facebook.com/mancave.stereo
Edits: 09/01/13 09/01/13 09/01/13 09/01/13
Dear B,
There is absolutely no question that the cost of the average specialist high end system has gone up faster than the average working and middle class wages, in the US especially, where, over the past 20 years the overwhelming share of income increases have gone to the top 1%, but also here in Europe although to a lesser extent, what is also true is that we have to price according to the costs we incur when we make products, and silver, copper, nickel, plywood, tantalum, aluminium and most other raw materials have shot up enormously over the past two decades and this is where most of the increases originate.
I have to take issue with your assertion that a "traditional engineering approach" would yield improvements in cost and performance, I think it is worthwhile to point out that audio engineering is a pretty mature industrial endeavour and genuine improvements are pretty hard to come by if they involve real improvements in sound, the kind of pseudo improvements available through taking cost reducing technology from other areas of electronics and applying them to audio count neither as real improvements nor as particularly innovative.
I am always reminded of the following quote by John Ruskin,
“There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey. It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
I think this quote adequately counters the condescending statement you quote at the end of your post.
When you consider that we make products from the lowly priced AX One and Two speakers, the CD Zero CD player, I Zero Integrated etc, up to the multi million $ systems we seem to be forever criticised for making, so we do have both trickle down and fairly moderately priced products available, and whilst it may not meet with your particular criteria for value, there are certainly enough customers around the world who feel it is.
We also offer a wide range of our parts for sale to the DIY market in an attempt to broaden the understanding of what we do and allow customers with the necessary technical know how to bypass the dealer/distributor margins on finished products.
Correct you if I may, because whilst it is quite true that if one takes a superficial view of what we do it appears that all we do is take yesterday years' technology and develop it, but if you dig deeper you will find that we only use the technologies we use because in our view they are better at the job of reproducing music than anything else and should therefore be developed and refined to get the best out of them, which we do through development of better parts and materials, patented circuitry etc.
No audio company that I know of anywhere in the world designs and makes their own transformers, signal capacitors, resistors, wire etc. etc. ask yourself why?
We at least try to explore the avenues to better sound in a real sense.
There is amble literature available analysing the causes of the US working and middle class' predicament and yes parts of the world is slowing (partly because it is not possible for any economy to keep growing at 10%, if you compound that over a couple of decades it becomes an impossibility), so slower growth is inevitable in many of the newer markets, but we have seen NO slowdown in sales, quite the contrary.
You question to the audio maker about whether to make gilded carriages for the nobility or to offer the best performance for the broader market, is not a fair question to small specialist companies, that is where the big players should be, no small company can make truly inexpensive quality product, something I learned when I worked as a consultant for Technics many moons ago.
Innovation is a very loaded term when it comes to audio especially, is the cross fertilisation of technology from other branches innovation, I would say no, unless it contributes to an improvement in the sonic quality, but the specialist industry is constantly "innovating" this way, as it is perhaps too small to develop the technologies that would make a real difference?
Engineering these days is more about taking cost out whilst trying to still maintain the same simplistic measured performance (perhaps this is what the quote at the end of your post rally is about?), we have been able to buy op amps for years that measure better than any high end product, but they sound terrible, what can we learn from that?
Essentially nothing, so going back and looking for past technologies that offer better opportunities for improvement seems to be the most logical step, remember here that history is a quite good judge of overall quality, remind yourself that no-one would buy a 25 year old transistor amplifier for anything close to what it cost new, whereas a 40 - 50 year old tube amp will often collect multiples of what it originally sold for, why? Because it is better sounding, so time is a good indicator of true value.
Progress was never a straight line (read Nisbet, "History of the Idea of Progress") and the belief system that supports this idea is now largely a corporate consumerist effort to make us spend our hard earned money on the latest gadget whether we need it or not.
Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup
Thanks for such a thoughtful reply - it has set me to thinking quite a lot.I suppose I could distill the approach I was saying when I laid into Audio Note - and frankly it was me sensing a dismissive attitude towards someone who was likely a fan (or potential fan) of the products, but simply could not afford to own anything from it. I felt the advice to go forth and make the world more fair to be unfair. And that prompted my vigorous response. I still feel that there is at least some responsibility from the people engineering products to maximize their value (and it certainly doesn't have to be poor performance).
But for the justification of price? I think an order book that's full and a fan-base that's numerous is probably refutation enough of complaints of the price. The only question you could possibly ask, is have you made your products as accessible as possible to people willing to emotionally value what it is capable of doing? I questioned if the the AN approach did that. IN my brief experience with them at the NY Audio Show, it was clear they performed to a superlative level. I blanched at the price (I did quite a lot of similar blanching at other demos, to be fair) of the system, but
As far as cost reductions, my experience is much different than in home stereo - it is in industrial electronics - where rising prices for the parts that go into it are not a viable option if you want to remain in business - a great deal of creativity, innovation and sometimes brute force is applied to reduce the cost without reducing the performance - the "thing it is supposed to do" by the quote you gave. I suppose another quote along those lines is: "Make things as cheaply as possible, but no cheaper." Where I disagree with your quote, though, is that people can pay too little and get a lot - but I suppose also it really boils down to customer expectation to make that work. If he meant you can't sell at a loss - I'd agree, you sure can but not for very long. But you can exceed your customer's expectations, and companies that are highly successful in all industries are able to do that regularly compared to less successful rivals.
I will totally agree that in audio electronics most of the effort and money spent has not been to push the forefront of music reproduction forward - and it was a bit of a shock/adjustment where not only that was true, but also the amount of money people were willing to pour into hot-rodding older technology. That would not be possible in, say, 35 year old computers, or 20 year old portable phones, to get anything approaching what can be done today.
And I think that Audio Note, as well as many other small companies in this space, can't and shouldn't try to service the mass market, I am challenging them to make sure they have squeezed every last ounce of value from the money they use to build the products, and have sweated over it all to bring the fruits of their cleverness, creativity and to the table to make the value presented as high as you can get for the money being spent. That they have used as much of their ingenuity, cleverness and innovation to do more than last time - and be able to offer better actual performance for less than they charged last year (or at the very least deliver more for the same price, or exponentially more for more money).
And ... the world is changing - the middle class is thinning out, and we're getting an upper class and underclass. Depending upon the size of the upper class after it all shakes out if it doesn't reverse, I wonder what it will mean for audio?
==
Hey! I have a blog now: http://mancave-stereo.blogspot.com or "like" us at https://www.facebook.com/mancave.stereo
Edits: 09/14/13 09/15/13
My wife paid $16-17K a year for her Haverford College education in 1988; it now costs over $50K.
Her Acura Integra cost $14K in 1990; its current iteration, ILX, costs around $27K.
My 1988 house was sold for around $250K. It's now priced at around $400K.
Shit costs more now. It just does, though I love your story on the Ongaku! I won't fight over the upper tier AN gear: those prices scare me too.
But a speaker as good as the K/SPe is a bargain these days at $3715. Not as big a bargain as the JMR Bliss Silver at $2700 but still. And I also think the Audio Note E/SPe HE's are a comparable bargain. These days.
Yes ,I understand that bargain value in today's twisted world. Based on recent auditions on Axpona show I'd take that $3700 midget over most $40k speakers exhibited there ;)
Regards, W
I think everything has gotten more expensive. The cost of the parts are and have always been the lowest cost of manufactured goods. Shipping costs have risen dramatically. Snell used to be built in the US and didn;t have to be shipped anywhere - now it's made in England/Denmark at real wages and paid benefits and then has to be shipped to the U.S.
As one Vancouver dealer noted - there has to be enough points in the thing to make it worth the bother to sell. He has to pay the rent (which have risen dramatically - way above inflation) and the sales guy gets a commission etc. He noted that he doesn't the least bit care what the products sound like. All that matters is whether he can sell a lot of them and can sell a lot of them with high profit. He owns an amp personally that he has loved for 20 years - I asked him why not sell the line - no money it. It would retail for $1500 he'd buy it at $500 and out of that commission, overhead.
So they sell the high profit high sale lines like Totem/B&W/Magnepan/McIntosh - not because any of it is any good but because there is a ton of money in each unit sale and they can sell a lot of them.
So when we began a discussion about him carrying Audio Note (he asked) it really doesn't make much business sense. It's a product that doesn't look sexy (and let's face it if you buy tubes you kinda want see the tubes). Few models have remotes, most are well under 20 watts. The speakers are 1970s retro. And Peter can't ship the stuff in timely manner so even if you do get a sale once you tell a westerner they have to wait 6 months - which turns out to be 9-12 then you're going to lose a bunch of sales right there.
Looking at it from that view I am kinda amazed they manage to stay in business - except for the fact that the Hong Kong dealer in the heart of the city points out that like you just noted - people come in moan about the looks and power of the buttfuggly AN K then they wonder around Hong Kong to the numerous competition up to $40k speakers then walk back in and buy the K.
Seriously - check out the AX Two at $1200.
....Seriously - check out the AX Two at $1200...
I know them well...My friend marveled about those plain vanilla boxes and simply had to take them apart to check what's there ;0) also I refurbished Snell K (first edition) with correct foam and Hiquphon OWI tweeters and the sound has the relaxed character of AN-K with 300b Monos in small room. No, it's not as uniformly balanced but tonally correct and more refined on top and I'll take it for the $$ spent;)Lovely critters..
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