Quote Originally Posted by RGA
I agree with you 100% on the notion of ecoomies of scale but it also has to be USED. Simply being a very big company one should not ASSUME that said company will have sound as the top priority - see Bose big and could be good but isn't.

My problem of course is that if I hear a relatively small company's speaker a $700.00 and another from a major company with huge tes facitlities anechoic chambers and a speaker at $2300.00 and everyone in the room clearly and not even clsoe chooses the small no name then whatever economy of scale advantage obviously went instead to said company owner's beach house or the marketing department president's golden parachute fund.

I have been hearing rather consistently small no name companies consistently betterring mainstream comapnies. Of course up until a few years ago the dealers I had usually went to kept carrying mostly mainstream stuff -- comparing one big one against another means little - and sure there are bound to be several smaller companies that don't cut it.

Plastic is easier to work with and generally cheaper. I have heard the Silver and Gold I hear no advantage with them or a bunch of other speakers -- I prefer the Paradigm Studio 100V2 to the Stratus Gold which I assume to be the main competitor. Though I generally prefer the sound of PSB speakers over paradigm overall and certainly the case of the new Studio series.

The other thing is that small companies generally don;t make very cheap speakers -- one is probably because the market is too big and the people looking to them are not looking for $200.00 loudspeakers -- two because they don't buy in as large a bulk won't get the same deals the big guys get - three - they're building stuff they love and not just in it to make a buck and have less interest in lower end speakers or various concotions in between.

I also think you give no credit to smaller companies' ability to meet the three criteria you're talking about. Plenty of smaller companies have very good rooms with top flight measuring equipment and computer programs to get flat on and off axis response low distortion etc. So whatever they're using is just as good as any of the big boys -- and really one can tell that when listening.
The PSB Stratus Series speakers do not have plastic baffles. Maybe some new iteration will, I don't know.

I think some speaker design software is relatively inexpensive and is available to small companies or even DIYers, which is why I mentioned it. One small speaker company I am somewhat familiar with is Ethera, and they do use the measuring and listening facilities at the NRC, though I think they have some measuring equipment of their own. They make very fine speakers, too, but they're not cheap.

You can get along without an anechoic chamber by measuring outdoors, too, but this is subject to the contingencies of the weather. Analysis as detailed as from the NRC? Certainly not as quickly unless you can afford comparable facilities, which small companies generally cannot.