Thanks for explaining. I won't comment on how another manufacturer designs and manufactures their products.
You seem to believe that price should be determined on a cost-plus basis. That's your prerogative of course but it ignores performance which is the other half of the value-for-money equation and is the way the market generally works. I'm fairly sure the cost difference between the BMW 535 I drive and the 520 I don't bears little relation to the relative cost of the engines... I'm paying quite a premium for the performance and am happy to do so.
There is also nothing inherently superior about "from the ground up", though it does typically cost more! Even the most exotic CD players used to use mainly Sony or Philips drawer mechs because they were proven to be high performance and reliable. They could have spent a lot more developing their own and by your logic charging more but would the CDP have sounded better? I doubt it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it appears to me that you're probably not in the market for a Tempus anyway
EDIT: hats off to @kennyb123 who said the same far more eloquently than me! That's what you get when you hop around out of sequence...
I entirely appreciate that people are more than happy to buy products on perceived value, so a product costing $5000 some will perceive is great value and others as terrible value.
I’m fully aware of the sorts of business costs that might arise and I tend to investigate the background of a business and its proprietors before I consider their products, because that’s what I’ve done professionally for about 35 years.
When I started streaming in 2010, I very soon came to the following conclusions:
- Much of the technology already exists
- Streaming will drive down the cost/performance ratio of high quality audio, and traditional premium audio manufacturers will struggle to compete.
- We will likely see a whole new stable of streaming manufacturers, mostly from Asia.
The first streaming product I bought in 2010 was a Linn DS. Gilad Teifenbrun (an engineer with an MBA) saw the future and scrapped most of the existing product range, including disc spinners. I’ve not used a CD since. On details, he decided that network storage was best and only offered that option, no USB, Coax, AES. One approach, do it well, no wasting money developing multiple options. There are various other decisions made, and generally I think he was right.
Most of the good streamers came from Asia and still do. From Linn, I moved to Auralic. The software is better and they offered better value. They originally made all sorts of products, including amplifiers, but soon realised that they were ahead of the game in the streaming world, so abandoned all their other products and focused on streaming. Traditional manufacturers just can’t do that, many seem to look more backwards than forwards, because their history is their brand value. Personally, I have little interest in brand value.
When I started buying servers, they were more on a "cost plus" basis because you could see exactly what was in them, usually third-party components and in the early days you would choose your storage drive capacity, chipset etc and it would be built to order. So you could easily add up the cost of the contents, and my first server simply ran off a modified version of Windows media server.
I have some history in digital data. Back in 1980 I started working for a company that used to digitise telex traffic. We set up some fairly serious hardware and had to lease international telephone lines. It was a very profitable business. Some years later they became a client and I was advising them on buying similar businesses. In 1990 a business in New York had a team of Russian programmers. They put them in a room, fed them and paid them 10% of what they would’ve paid American trained programmers.
Things like switches haven't changed much in 45 years. The most popular switches, Netgear GS105 and GS108, which I've used and still have, have been listed on Amazon for 22 years. CAT 6a is a pass/fail specification. You can get perfectly good cables for $5, a fully tested and certified one from BJC for $10. Telegartner connectors add nothing to performance, only perceived value. That's why cable companies use them. Telegartner explain on their site that they are designed to enable quick, crimper-free connections in data centres where access can be difficult.
On CD players, I contacted Pioneer, they are the holding company of both TASCAM and Esoteric. I had a TASCAM CD player with their ubiquitous $40 CD-5020A bullet-proof drive unit. I asked them what was the difference to their $3,000 VDRS in Esoteric. They replied:
"difference will be the durability of the mechanism and a reduction of jitter, which in turn helps your DAC achieve a greater audio
conversion accuracy. To a certain level jitter is not an issue when extracting data (computer files and the like), but when a real time DA
conversion is done to the data stream, jitter becomes very important and can create minute timing issues in the DA conversion. Whether it would be actually audible is another thing altogether. Audio is a very subjective."
So I still look at digital primarily from a cost-plus. My main digital component is an Innuos Pulsar - most of the cost is the Sean Jacobs ARC4 power supply, there is the same processor as in my previous Zen Mk3, a proprietary usb output board, the rights to use a fantastic piece of software (Innuos Sense), a few connectors and a case. It's quite easy to see where the money goes. It is mostly cost-plus, but for me the software is perceived value.
With regard to rebranding cables, if you a get away with covering up a branded cable with a nylon braid and change the connectors (completely pointless technically) and treble the price, they I say good luck to you. With regard to UPOCC cables, the UK distributor is HiFi-Collective and they publish videos showing how to construct each cable type, with or without having to use solder, and they provide a parts list. A pair of 4.5m copper UPOCC 11AWG (Neotech 3004) with WBT would be about $1,000. I looked at ZenWave and for a bespoke company their prices seem very fair. Plus Dave seems to be extremely knowledgeable, and I'm a believer in paying for good advice.
My network infrastructure has and remains largely enterprise grade - a managed Ubiquiti switch and VLAN controller, fibre optic, Belden BJC at either end, and a Cisco switch with an audiophile clock that I suspect is necessary. Roon hosted on a QNAP, which was purchased for business use.
I might be interested in NA if I knew what was in it. Seems I will never know.
