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Looper's Delight
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At 11:21 AM 12/12/97 -0500, Andre Cholmodeley wrote: having had the the mind jarring experience of designing products for the music industry and then switching to designing products for the PC industry, I guess I can answer this one..... >here's my .02cents....regar0ding the issue of gear prices... > >How come in the last, say 20 years (or 30, etc) computer chips, electronic >components, micro-wiring and soldering technology and technique, plastic, >have all been greatly improved in quality and been slashed in price. > >Every consumer iterm that involves these components has become >drastically, >amazingly cheaper, yet vasly higher in quality, than 20 or 30 years back - >clock radios, cassette decks, walkmans, VCRs, computers like the ones >we're >all on right now, etc. The key difference between the products you've listed and music industry products is volume. As an example, Compaq computer sells well over 1 million PCs a month. In 8 hours they will sell more PCs than than the total combined looper sales of Lexicon and Oberheim ever. Before the end of the week they will have eclipsed the yearly sales of the entire effects processor segment of the music industry. By the end of the month their sales would have exceeded the yearly sales of the entire music industry. There is a very dramatic difference in pricing at every single production step when you are dealing with million piece pricing, as the PC and consumer electronics industry does, and 100-1000 piece pricing like you would in the music industry. Your manufacturing costs alone can easily change by a factor of 5 or more. And for a lot of the manufacturing techniques you've listed, the vendors won't even talk to you unless you're doing very large volumes. They have huge capital investments in the manufacturing equipment and are not interested in dealing with small players. When you do use those technologies at low volumes, they are not at all cheap because the up-front charge will be quite high. With large volumes, you have access to manufacturing capacity anywhere in the world. Products I design now are being built and sold by a number of large south-east Asian computer and peripheral companies. They get amazingly low manufacturing costs, presumably by using manufacturing vendors in the asian backwaters, using prison labor or slaves or whatever they do. Vendors like that don't work with you unless you can guarantee huge volumes, which the music industry can't come close to. There is also a huge difference in quality. Music Industry manufacturers will generally try to use good quality components, and circuit designs that emphasize quality over cost. The PC and consumer electronics industries are the other way around. They don't care if the sound quality sucks. They use the cheapest jacks, the cheapest capacitors, the cheapest opamps, cheapes ADC/DAC's, cheapest everything. Cost is *ALL* that matters. This is usually appalling to the audio engineer in me, but the reality is that they get away with selling poor quality garbage to people because at the right price people can be convinced to buy it. Those of us who do care just try to do the best designs we can within those constraints, and lobby Microsoft to make the audio requirements for windows logoing more strict. Regardless, the directive in high volume consumer products is always to achieve the minimum quality you can get away with at the lowest cost. That's usually not the point with music gear! And then there's the overhead of running a manufacturing company. If you are only going to sell a few thousand units a year, you need to make quite a bit of money on each one just to pay phone bills, rent, salaries, etc. You can't exist on 5% margins like companies selling 20 million units a year. So the price is going to be higher. Basically, it's not appropriate to compare products oriented towards a small niche market with products mass marketed to general consumers. Music industry products are basically professional/industrial equipment, more closely related to professional video or camera gear, or medical instruments, or factory control systems or whatever. The relationship to things like walkmans and clock radios pretty much ends after "they both make sound." >Yet musical gear, effects processors, many synths, tuners, etc all cost AS >MUCH, sometimes MORE than they did years ago. Of course - many exceptions >to the rule.... but in general, c'mon!!!! why do the people that support , >yes, a smaller industry, hav to keep paying while the production costs go >down for all these manufacturers??? is it just supply & demand ?? why does >a BOSS TU12 tuner cost like $60-80 , just the same that it did 10 years >ago??? Or most rackmount effects???again, there are lots of bargains out >there, but, as anyone who has looked thru a blue book can see, musicians, >who can sometimes least afford it, shoulder an odd set of pricing >structures/strictures. That's not really true, actually. Pricing in the music industry works the same as pricing in every other industry. You have well defined price points where products will be introduced. Those prices remain the same from year to year and will not change. What changes is the feature set and quality available at a given price. In the case of rack mount effects, you can easily chart huge changes in any given price point over the past 10-15 years. Try $450. 10 years ago you might have been able to get a unit that just did delay, or just reverb, at fairly low quality, limited features, and very poor digital audio if it had it. 5 years ago you would have gotten something like a quadraverb, with a DSP processor, multiple effects with so-so quality, and better digital audio than before. The same price today gets you a much more powerful DSP processor, many more effects with much better routing capability and better parameter control, and much better quality digital audio. Shit, compare a 1987-era sampler from emu or akai with one produced now. the differences are staggering! As far as your $80 tuner, there are two possibilities. One is that it probably does cost the same to make it as it did 10 years ago. Same old parts, same old price. It's quite likely that their 10 year old design is still cheaper than anything possible with any newer technology for the same level of performance. And secondly, as long as there are people buying it for $80 then that is what it is worth, regardless of the cost to make it. When people stop buying it for that price, or someone makes one just as good for less that takes the market share, Boss will find a way to lower their price. Until then you pay $80. It looks like we'll be stuck with capitalism for the forseeable future, so that's how it works.... And having worked in the industry, I have to laugh at the notion of musicians being poor and starving. Your typical buyer of music gear is either a professional musician, who will be doing just fine if he/she is any good, a hobbyist who has another job paying for his/her hobby, or a kid with well-off parents. The fact of the matter is that all that expensive gear does sell, and it usually sells very well. Nothing made that more clear to me than working at Gibson. People are always moaning about Gibson guitars being overpriced and not worth it, yet somehow Gibson manages to sell a hell of a lot of guitars! They can price custom shop guitar models at $25,000 and sell the entire run before they even start making them! So keep in mind that while a piece of gear might be out of your price range, it's not out of everbody's. Manufacturers are quite aware of that and target products towards buyers with differing quanites of disposable income. Starving musicians usually don't buy gear at any price, so nobody bothers making much for them. hmmm, maybe I should try doing some work today.....:-) kim ________________________________________________________ Kim Flint 408-752-9284 Mpact System Engineering kflint@chromatic.com Chromatic Research http://www.chromatic.com