savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:43 pm
Lindsayt wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:30 pm
savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?
There's scope for a wide variety of DIY approaches.
With this including sub-contracting the cabinet building to a friend or a cabinet maker, for a design that someone else has already done.
And sub-contracting any crossover assembly to someone with skills in that area.
Doesn't most of the pleasure comes from using the damned things for many years to come? Whilst using the money you saved by not buying some overpriced dealer mediocrity for other things in your life.
When you see case studies where people buy mediocre 4000 euro speakers and then feel compelled to spend another 2000 to 4000 euros on an amplifier to "drive" them, that's an awful lot of missed opportunity cost there.
When you buy a speaker from a dealer it is not usually overpriced. But, it is priced to a model that includes costs that you may or may not value as a consumer.
If I make a basic Cube kit available in acrylic with drivers that you dope yourself, what value do you attach to that beyond the cost of the parts?
I think I see both sides of the argument here, the intellectual property of the pre built speaker is 'baked' into the overall cost of said speaker. To reverse engineer it you have to actually deconstruct one, and try to recreate the production process which will certainly involve specialist tools that the average DIY'er does not have lurking in his shed* .
If you supply a kit then you are exposing yourself to being cloned and absolutely ripped off because you are making your 'workings' easily visible and eminently more prone to plagiarism. So quite how you bake in the IP of the original design, build, testing tweaking into a kit? The only way I can think of for NVA to do this would be to supply the drivers already doped. To you DIY doyens the doping process may sound easy, but to the likes of me, I would find the first one daunting, even though I have some old drivers I could practice on, doing it for real would still be off putting, at least for me.
I confess that on the speaker front I'm biased in so far as the last time I looked at the then current crop of speakers with a view to replacing what I already had I left with my money in my pocket because as mentioned elsewhere the great majority of them sounded if not awful then not as good as the modest boxes I currently have. I have locked very closely at kits, but the ones I've encountered haven't really grabbed me.
*Karetestu excluded here of course