Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler NRC speaker article on Test & Measurement World

It's online at: http://www.reed-electronics.com/tmworld/article/CA475937.html?industryid=3125

The reporter interviews Dr. Floyd Toole of Harman International, a competitor of Axiom. Still, makes an entertaining read. If you read to the end, Dr. Toole makes an interesting comment at the dollar figure a speaker needs to sell for before reaching the point of diminishing returns.

http://www.reed-electronics.com/tmworld/article/CA475937.html?industryid=3125

To wit:

""We can build the best loudspeaker in the world," said Toole, "and we can build the best speaker available at a given price." It's the latter, he said, that's most interesting from an engineering perspective. Toole said that the law of diminishing returns comes in to play at $1800 per pair, and that you can do well at $700 per pair if you're willing to sacrifice some bass. "We take pride in the fact that we can produce the best-sounding inexpensive loudspeaker in the world. If you can't build a good sounding speaker for $10,000 a pair, there is something seriously wrong with you. But if you can deliver comparable sound quality at a fraction of the price, then you really know what you're doing."

Interesting article, Daniel, which again makes the point that many fail to grasp, i.e. that in audio there's little correlation between price and sound quality. If you haven't read it in the past the revised version of Dr. Toole's paper which is shown as reference 1 in the article is very informative. In particular the discussion and fig.4 on page 10 demonstrates the necessity for blind tests even of items, such as speakers, which have significant audible differences. As Dr. Toole put it at an AES meeting: "If you can see what you're listening to, you can't hear it".

This is the same company that "bought" JBL's home audio division,..........and have all but ruined right?
If so, I would like to see those speakers in the article.

I'm not a fan of JBL nor Infinity. Both are available at Futureshop or Best Buy, and my initial impression with other peoples' music is that they're average, though I'm open to think otherwise in a fair A/B fight. JBL always struck me as a brand cross-shopped with Cerwin Vega by college dorm students impressed by the brand at their last stadium concert. Not sure what Infinity's marketing strategy is, b/c they have no sales angle (Internet sales channel w/ 30 day return policy, unique construction techniques, high tech tweeters) and they're not mass market, niche, nor high end. It's not a surprise that I keep hearing rumours that Infinity will be phased out. I have no qualms about the Revel line though.

I wouldn't be surprised if all this testing by Harman Int'l is parallel to what grocery stores do: send people out to competitor stores and read barcodes and prices of their competitors so that they can raise their prices and increase their margins without charging too little.

After all, if a company is capable of scientific speaker design, and they have the measurement facilities, wouldn't it be the ultimate competitive sales advantage for JBL, Infinity, and Revel to publish their frequency response curves in their literature, and force inferior companies with inferior performance curves to respond or die? Or maybe I'm being too cynical...

>This is the same company that "bought" JBL's home audio division,..........and >have all but ruined right?