Value, lack there of, and "High End"

[firedog]

17 hours ago, crenca said:

As I sit working procrastinating at my computer waiting for FedEx to deliver a $1,500 pair of ZMF headphones, I contemplate the place of "value" in this hobby.  Casualty perusing the show reports, I click on Stereophile's (I know, I know, crenca the hypocrite  ) report on Devore's recent $90k creation:

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/devore-fidelity-orangutan-reference

 

Nothing surprises me about this overpriced bling, nor the Audiophile trade publication obsession with this stuff.  No matter how it sounds, it is simply irrelevant to 99.999% of even "Audiophiles"...or is it? I am pleased however that the commentary is almost uniformly negative.  No one believes that there is anything intrinsically rational to this pricing - it's a unique luxury market.  $90k, $180k, 1 million - it's all the same in that none of it makes sense.

 

On the other hand, are not my HP's just as irrational?  Maybe, but I don't think so.  Given the small boutique company that ZMF is, literally hand making each HP out of real wood, they are going to be expensive.  $1.5k is expensive, but is it irrational?  If they were $15k, ok.  There not, they are "only" $1.5k.  Is the delta between them and say, a $300 HD650 justifiable?  There are some irrational prices out there in the "personal audio" space - Sennheiser's Orpheus 2 for example.

 

What say you?  Has this hobby lost all sense of value?  Do the trade publications and webzines focus too much on "halo" products such as the Orangutan Reference?  What would Audiophile 'reporting' look like if they took seriously the reality of value?

 

Crenca-

I don't really get posts like these. Value is totally subjective. Think how many millions see no "value" in any speaker other than a BT speaker for $40. In addition, the subjective concept of value is often tied to your amount of disposable income. The more you have, the more you tend to see value in pricey items. 
 

More to your specific point: I'm not sure the Devore setup (two speakers and two large sub units powered by internal (not class D) amps) is any more overpriced that your $1500 headphones. I'm not being snarky. But we all know really good sounding full range headphones start at about $100; after that you get improvements on a steep sloped curve of diminishing returns. Your headphones may have "value", but I seriously doubt they give 15X the performance of some of the $100 ones I know of. 

 

And Devore is also a small boutique company. The speakers are also basically hand made, and if you are familiar with them, they have beautiful wood finishes that definitely don't come cheap. Go back to your article link and read the comment from Mr. Devore himself on the price: the parts are almost all custom parts designed and produced just for this model . Devore says the O Reference will never make a profit on it's own: It's a money loser.  He can only recoup the 6 years of R&D cost if there is trickle down of the technology to other future less expensive models, which his intent. He also says it was an exercise in a cost no object realization of his design ideas; he says he could have just made an "improvement" to his existing O model, sold it for $20-30K a pair,  and made much larger sales and a tidy profit. 

Clearly they exist next to his many more affordable models. No one's forced to buy these. 
 

What's the "value" of these? I don't know. I'd like to hear a set. My guess is they are pretty amazing sounding. It's also obvious you can get full range speakers with quite good sound for say $2k or $3k. But if I won the lottery there's a good chance I'd think they are a good value compared to competing $100k or $200k speakers. 

[firedog]

9 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I have to wonder how much of the cost of high end components is tied up in the "bling" of the fancy CNC aluminum casework in components like the dCS Vivaldi DAC.

Lots of it. Anthony Michelson (formerly of Musical Fidelity) said that in a traditional dealer pipeline, as much as 70% of the retail price was due to cosmetics. Those fancy specially designed  machined knobs cost over  $100 each at the wholesale level for the manufacturer....

Fortunately or unfortunately, the looks also sell. Most of the people in the market for 5 and 6 figure components also want them to look like they are very expensive. They may care about the sound, but not just. 
 

A few years ago there was a post somewhere by the high end speaker maker who debuted an $80k pair at Munich. Very  good, but conventional looking model.
He got little interest and they didn't sell well. The next year he did a minor redesign, made a much more expensive looking cabinet, priced them at $200k and they were already selling well at the show. Sound wise basically the same speaker; cosmetics wise - not. People wanted their high end speaker to look the part. Apparently the lesson is that at a certain price level you have to have an expensive look and people are willing to pay for it.