It’s the time of year for saving money!
If you have been involved in the audio hobby for more than a nanosecond you have probably contemplated building an audio component, be it an amplifier, preamplifier or loudspeaker, there are plenty of fine options for nascent builders.
Parts Express and Madisound are two vendors I’ve used in the past. And I encourage you to build something sometime. You learn about how a thing really works. And if your skills with carpentry are like mine, get to see your own failings up close and personal. But I can solder like a pro…
But with the knowledge of what the basic parts cost (plus some small fee for the design, either outright or through the parts kit) some audiophiles jump to some less than 100% correct conclusions about the economics of the audio industry.
How many people does it take to build a kit? Yeah, stupid leading question with the obvious answer of one. If they were to do this, full-time, in the United States of America, how much would they need to take home in a yearly salary? Factoring in some geographic variations, let’s say $100,000 because it’s an easy number. What do you need to add to the retail price of the thing you are going to make to put that $100,000 in your pocket? And how much do you need to gross to cover things like rent, advertising, materials costs, etc., to keep the business humming?
And then there are employees…
What is a skilled audio engineer’s salary worth? I have no idea, except I suspect it’s a quite a bit more than an audio journalist…
And along with advertising comes sales, marketing, and PR and what does one of those kinds of persons cost? Again, see the back half of the last paragraph…
And then there are the costs of warranty support. This is where manufacturers of smaller, lighter things get a break…I know of one manufacturer who had to fold due to the cost of supporting warranty issues for a subwoofer…
So, how much would the preamplifier that you made cost if you decided to sell it via standard retail outlets?
The answer to that question is the difference between successful and defunct audio firms…
And just to cut down on the hate tweets – DIY is, was, and always will be the most cost-effective and immersive way to get into high-performance audio, but the gap between hobby and business has never been greater…
In the past, some of the most radical, and some of the most high-performance audio gear was created by hobbyists, and I don’t see this changing in the future, but unlike the past, where someone could pull a “field of dreams” where they create a product and the world comes rushing to their door, nowadays unless you have a lot of resources behind you, opening a high-performance audio brand or product line will be exceedingly difficult, and even with almost unlimited resources there’s no guarantee it would be immediately profitable.
My advice to DIY’rs – don’t stop building and don’t stop pushing your limits, but also, don’t give up your day job…
I started building audio kits in the 1950s, and graduated to designing and building amplifiers and speakers in the 1960s. In those days it was quite possible to design and build an audio component that performed better than a comparably priced commercial unit. A group of us who liked to design and build stuff got together periodically to show off and demonstrate our creations. But by the turn of the century, few of us were still doing that; it became clear that commercial equipment was now priced below what we could build, given the time involved in designing, purchasing parts, building, testing, etc. A few of us persisted because it was fun, but by and large, only speaker building continued to be done regularly. Electronics were now purchased. BTW, it was this same group that developed an objective way to compare the performance of components; we know that high quality electronics is commercially available that matches what we can do as hobbyists.
In the 70s & 80s I built many designs from magazines etc: a turntable, preamps, power amplifiers, FM tuners, loudspeakers, home computer and a cassette player for the car. Still have some of them. It took much perseverance to get everything sounding right (ground loops, hum, radio interference etc) especially the loudspeakers, I learned a lot but there is always nagging doubt about sound quality in the back of your mind. I believe my time might have been better spent auditioning purchased components and putting together a system that I liked the sound of, rather than all the time consuming trial and error. That’s been my philosophy since I came to the U.S. in the mid 90s.