Frenchmon

I am certainly not saying it is true for all vertical companies or making or even implying anything negative about Canton - I liked the speaker I heard from them.

But I am weary of the generalizations. Largely because IMO Audio Note speakers sound better than "B&W, Paradigm, Revel, Monitor Audio, Dynaudio and Dali" that you listed. I also like Harbeth and Devore more than anything I've heard from any of these as well.

You can't go and buy an AN E or J woofer from SEAS. SEAS makes the woofer for Audio Note per Audio Note's design instructions only for Audio Note. When the woofer is sent to Audio Note they test them - all of them 100% of them The ones that are not quite to AN's highest standard are sold to the Kits division. These would be the ones that are not matched to with 0.2db. The Kits version get the woofers that are not to that standard but no worse than 0.6db. Below that they are sent back to SEAS. .6db is still excellent - Most of the competition is well over 1db off. The B&W N801 in house design are off by 2.9db.

And I don't think we can take B&W out of the discussion or call it foolish to do so as an example because they are very widely viewed as the best "high end" speaker maker on the market. They're certainly the biggest selling "audiophile" speaker maker and they get rave reviews constantly in the press. And they're in a lot of recording studios to boot.

I may not be a big fan of the sound but it's impressive The making of an 800 Series Diamond speaker - YouTube

After watching that video I soooo want to like them more.

What you said was true - Parts express noted that you could buy a kit from them for $300 and you could buy the same speaker with a name brand logo on the front for $3k. But in general that's not the norm.

The better higher end companies are not just slapping stuff together - they have a design and they either make it themselves - like the vertical companies or they have someone else build it for them. Audio Note for example does both. They build the stuff themselves where they feel there is nothing as good on the market - transformers for example. Other high end tube amp makers buy Audio Note transformers and put their own labels on the front. Some buy their cables, caps, resisters, soldering materials etc. Peter liked the Rega 250 tonearm because the type of arm dissipated resonances that matched well with the TT1 and TT2 tables (which are Systemdek turntables with several modifications). But Rega isn't going to supply the Rega tone arm so they looked around for a replacement found none they liked and now build their own tone arm.

It would be like saying - you can build a good amplifier unless you manufacturer your own caps, resisters, wires and circuit boards or you can't be a good CD player maker unless you design your own transport mechanism. Most all of them buy off the shelf stuff for these purposes. Most CD transports come from Sanyo, Sony, Philips and very few others.

An example of this is the very popular Philips L1210 CD mechanism - Bryston uses it, Audio Note and Sim Audio use it. None of the players sound remotely the same - it's technically an "off the shelf" transport mechanism that does the job at a given price. The AN CD player sounds much better even though it is using the same transport mechanism. This illustrates that it is not the actual parts so much as the design and what you do with the parts that counts.

So I am not exactly sure why is it any different with loudspeakers? Two companies can use the exact same tweeters and or woofers and get very different sonic results.