Why do really great speakers cost so much money? Because most really great speakers use really great parts, and those parts aren’t cheap. It’s easy to hide cheap parts on the inside of a speaker because most people aren’t willing to risk voiding a warranty or damaging a $2000 pair of speakers. Manufacturers are also typically unlikely to share a lot of the details of what’s going on inside, save for the few instances where it makes them look good.

We have been doing custom crossovers and repairs for commercial speakers for a number of years now and we can tell you that if you look inside almost any sub-$2000 speakers you’ll likely find one or more of the following: woofers with stamped steel or plastic frames (production and material costs), minimal or no copper in any of the drivers (material costs), compromised crossovers with too few and/or low quality parts (material and assembly costs), and thin walls and/or no bracing to save on weight (shipping costs). All of this adds up to a speaker than might be good, but is rarely in our opinion, excellent.

There are two reasons manufacturers do this. First, it’s unlikely that the average person will open up the cabinets to see the insides, and even if they did, the average person might not know what to look for to know whether quality parts are being used. Second, manufacturers have to produce a product at a much lower price than they sell because they are selling through a retail location that they don’t own and often times even have a distributor in the mix. Both want to make a profit so if you are selling a $2000 pair of speakers by the time it gets to retail, the manufacturer is probably selling it for $250 to a distributor, who’s then selling it for $1000 to a retailer. That $250 has to include all of the costs – cabinets, components, packaging, shipping, marketing, production overhead, etc. – that it takes to produce that particular set of speakers, so you quickly see that the actual cost of components tends to be very low.