Cost and Value: A Counterpoint by Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note UK
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| Where Peter Qvortrup weighs in on cost, value and sound |
I was on a forum that I absolutely love, and joined in on a discussion that had turned to a typical complaint (high prices), but this time Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note UK joined in. We had a healthy and vigorous exchange surrounding price, value and the responsibility of engineers with regard to these highly specialized products. Unlike a lot of talk on forums, his was a well reasoned point of view that provided a valuable counterpoint to our usual assertions - and as such we felt it provided something our readers could use to help form an opinion beyond the usual "it costs a lot therefore it can't be worthwhile."
I questioned several things (and honestly these would be applicable any boutique/small audio manufacturer):
1. When faced with rising costs, do you innovate or simply pass costs on? I suspected cost-passing.
2. Are you pushing the forefront of technology and sound reproduction forward, or are you hot-rodding yesterdays technology? I implied the hot-rod approach (as I feel much of this segment does or is tempted to do).
3. Are you making "gilded carriages" for the nobility, or are you inventing the automobile, figuratively speaking. I think our readers would already know my feelings on this one.
After making these assertions, much to my surprise, the manufacturer responded to my diatribe with a calm reasoned counterpoint and rebuttal (and for some perspective, Audio Note is famous for their high prices which can run into the 6 figures for a single component. They also have less expensive gear where a more modest system could be had for under $5-6k. If you are handy, they sell plans and parts kits which would allow lower cash prices, still). With a few exchanges of email and on the forum, I felt that he brought up some damn good points, that would be worthy of presenting to the readers of this blog. We don't insist that everyone agree with us and we always respect any well reasoned fact-based opinion, since it informs the debate and dialog on the subject. And as a side, I quite enjoy a vigorous exchange as long as it doesn't stray into dogmatism, and I have to say, Peter Qvortrup is not dogmatic, and his opinions and conclusions are very well thought out. He agreed to us posting his rebuttal, and here it is:
There is absolutely no question that the cost of the average specialist high end system has gone up faster than the average working and middle class wages, in the US especially, where, over the past 20 years the overwhelming share of income increases have gone to the top 1%, but also here in Europe although to a lesser extent, what is also true is that we have to price according to the costs we incur when we make products, and silver, copper, nickel, plywood, tantalum, aluminium and most other raw materials have shot up enormously over the past two decades and this is where most of the increases originate.
I have to take issue with your assertion that a "traditional engineering approach" would yield improvements in cost and performance, I think it is worthwhile to point out that audio engineering is a pretty mature industrial endeavour and genuine improvements are pretty hard to come by if they involve real improvements in sound, the kind of pseudo improvements available through taking cost reducing technology from other areas of electronics and applying them to audio count neither as real improvements nor as particularly innovative.
I am always reminded of the following quote by John Ruskin,
"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better."
When you consider that we make products from the lowly priced AX One and Two speakers, the CD Zero CD player, I Zero Integrated etc, up to the multi million $ systems we seem to be forever criticised for making, so we do have both trickle down and fairly moderately priced products available, and whilst it may not meet with your particular criteria for value, there are certainly enough customers around the world who feel it is.
We also offer a wide range of our parts for sale to the DIY market in an attempt to broaden the understanding of what we do and allow customers with the necessary technical know how to bypass the dealer/distributor margins on finished products.
Correct you if I may, because whilst it is quite true that if one takes a superficial view of what we do it appears that all we do is take yesterday years' technology and develop it, but if you dig deeper you will find that we only use the technologies we use because in our view they are better at the job of reproducing music than anything else and should therefore be developed and refined to get the best out of them, which we do through development of better parts and materials, patented circuitry etc.
No audio company that I know of anywhere in the world designs and makes their own transformers, signal capacitors, resistors, wire etc. etc. ask yourself why?
We at least try to explore the avenues to better sound in a real sense.
There is amble literature available analysing the causes of the US working and middle class' predicament and yes parts of the world is slowing (partly because it is not possible for any economy to keep growing at 10%, if you compound that over a couple of decades it becomes an impossibility), so slower growth is inevitable in many of the newer markets, but we have seen NO slowdown in sales, quite the contrary.
You question to the audio maker about whether to make gilded carriages for the nobility or to offer the best performance for the broader market, is not a fair question to small specialist companies, that is where the big players should be, no small company can make truly inexpensive quality product, something I learned when I worked as a consultant for Technics many moons ago.
Innovation is a very loaded term when it comes to audio especially, is the cross fertilisation of technology from other branches innovation, I would say no, unless it contributes to an improvement in the sonic quality, but the specialist industry is constantly "innovating" this way, as it is perhaps too small to develop the technologies that would make a real difference?
Engineering these days is more about taking cost out whilst trying to still maintain the same simplistic measured performance, we have been able to buy op amps for years that measure better than any high end product, but they sound terrible, what can we learn from that?
Essentially nothing, so going back and looking for past technologies that offer better opportunities for improvement seems to be the most logical step, remember here that history is a quite good judge of overall quality, remind yourself that no-one would buy a 25 year old transistor amplifier for anything close to what it cost new, whereas a 40 - 50 year old tube amp will often collect multiples of what it originally sold for, why? Because it is better sounding, so time is a good indicator of true value.
Progress was never a straight line (read Nisbet, "History of the Idea of Progress") and the belief system that supports this idea is now largely a corporate consumerist effort to make us spend our hard earned money on the latest gadget whether we need it or not.
Peter Qvortrup
Audio Note UK
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