But where the waters start to get really muddy and the price/quality equation gets totally distorted is once you start looking at sales strategies, routes to market and margins. People manufacture and sell products to make money, but there are many different ways that your carefully manufactured ‘baby’ might arrive in a happy customer’s hands.
Seismic shifts…
The last half decade has seen a significant shift in the high-end balance of power: or at least, the identity of those brands dominating the debate. Where the likes of Wilson Audio, D’Agostino, Audio Research, dCS and Constellation used to be the benchmarks for high-end performance, more recently, their places have been challenged or usurped by upstart brands or the competition they once dominated. Fanciful? Take a look at the evidence…
The Wadax Reference products have established a critical hegemony previously unseen in the digital realm, leaving the old-school digital providers floundering in an undignified scrabble to try and regain ground that hasn’t just been lost, with the arrival of the Studio Player it’s disappeared out from beneath their feet. Historically, the half-life of digital product has always been Mayfly short. The question is, how many brands, having fallen from grace are going to be in a position (financially and technologically) to bounce back?
CH Precision’s products seem to go from strength to strength, offering ground-breaking musical performance while the company keeps faith with its future-proof, expandable, upgradable mantra. Those who question the value and longevity of high-end products need to take a long hard look at the CH model.
Magico – the Raymond Poulidor of high-end loudspeaker brands – is enjoying a new and revitalised lease of life, in the substantial shape of both the M9 and M7, but also the far more affordable S3 and latest S5. Meanwhile Stenheim and Göbel have become fixtures in the conversation while YG have also wakened from their slumbers.
And the tremors keep coming…
Between them, these brands have put a significant dent in the market share once enjoyed by the likes of Wilson Audio, dCS, D’Agostino, Audio Research and Constellation, while those established providers are squeezed from the other side by a shrinking global market. What do all of these upstart brands have in common? An unusual degree of consistency across the critical community. It’s not just that the high-profile reviewers are agreed on their qualities, there’s also a remarkable degree of agreement when it comes to their individual natures. But there is something else that connects them too. Commercially, they are transiting the shift from a three-tier to two-tier market model more easily and effectively than older brands with their long-established associations.
“A bargain is something you don’t need, at a price you can’t resist.” – Franklin Jones
What exactly does that mean and why is it important? The high-end audio market went global in the late ‘70s and 80’s. The growing pains were visible and the restructuring of pricing it necessitated came as a serious shock to the buying public. Some brands never made the jump, with both Vandersteen and Magneplanar refusing to raise home pricing to achieve price-parity with overseas markets – and it’s no accident that both these brands have failed to establish a substantial, long-term presence outside of the USA. But back in the day, with so many small and emerging companies involved (and primitive international shipping options, compared to today) the chosen route to market was via in-country distributors. These distributors were responsible for shipping product and landing it, stocking it, establishing a network of authorised (and trained) dealers to sell it, provide service, support and in-country marketing. For this, they added a margin, calculated on a percentage basis, before selling the product onto the dealers – who, of course, added another margin. Hence the three-tier nomenclature.
