Eric Carroll wrote:
FatElvis2000;173898 Wrote:
Can't imagine much money is being made here, if even helping Slim break
even.
The price of many of the components, such as many of the DACs are
available on the Internet. Check out some of the volume pricing - the
cost of DACs is not as high as you seem to think.
I'm sure that Eric knows that the bill of material (BOM) cost of all
mass market products is only a tiny fraction of the market price. For
audiophile products, the calculations are quite different, because the
volumes are so small.
Except for parts of Harmon International, nearly all the audiophile
manufacturers are private, so real volume, revenue, and other numbers
are not available.
The price of any product is the sum of BOM cost, engineering cost to
design, marketing cost, returns, support, marketing, etc. Most
audiophile manufacturers have tiny volume, typically only a million
dollars a year or so of revenue, which is not a lot of units when they
are $5000 (retail) amps or CD transports. Since the wholesale
distributor, dealers, etc. all take a piece out of the retail price, the
manufacturer may only be selling several hundred units a year. It is
really, really hard to pay for the NRE (Non-recurring expenses) when you
spread them over a couple hundred units.
I have bought three Squeezeboxes and a Transporter, and there are
hundreds if not thousands of active folks on the Slim forums. So we know
that SlimDevices has a lot larger number of units than Classé Audio or
Sonus Faber (to pick two random companies whose products I can look at
while I type this).
Its all about volume, Intel sells some amazing technology for $200 a
chip, but they sell millions and millions.
All I know is that for me, the price of the SqueezeBoxes was proven to
be worth it, and that let me make the leap to the Transporter.
We could be looking at serious disruptive technology. It is, but it may
not be important, as 99% of the market doesn't care about audio quality.
Its not clear to me that the market even cares about TV and movie image
quality.
--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/
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