Sony Speaker Costs

In the post A Cynical Discussion of Speaker Pricing I make the point that commercial high-end speaker pairs cost from 20 to 30 times the driver cost of a single speaker.  This is just a little math to make it easier, but it's equivalent to 10 to 15 times the cost of all the drivers in a  pair.

In this post I present a slightly more detailed example of this for those of you who are still incredulous. I'll use the Sony AR1. Sony is by no means unique in this field by the way, it's just that the Sony AR1 lends itself particularly well to public scrutiny. 
 
A discussion on another topic over at the DIYAudio forums led me to post an example of how speaker prices are so high. Here is a part of that discussion, and my thanks to the contributors including planet10 (Dave):

The Sony SS AR1 MSRP to Driver Cost

Here's a good example, the Sony SS-AR1.

All Scanspeak, off-the-shelf drivers, and they don't even bother to use the top of the line Beryllium tweeter either. Retail is around $27,000.

By the way, I am a huge Scanspeak fan, I think Sony did well to choose them. That's not the point I want to make here though! The real point is that at Madisound a hobbyist would spend around $2,110 in speaker drivers per PAIR! So, counting the speaker drivers, the markup from hobbyist to commercial speaker is around 13x. Add in that Sony probably gets a 35% discount and Dave is then exactly right, it's 20:1.

Of course, this doesn't count labor, lumber or crossover components, usually the crossover is not shown when they spend as little as possible on them.