Attack of the Uber-Speakers
An exclusive club to be sure, the category of "uber-speaker" contains more options than one might think, assuming you have a spare $100k or so to spend.
People who don’t have billions tend to think lavishly about what they would do with that kind of bank. Houses the size of resorts or exotic supercars. Maybe a private jet ready at your beckon call.
There is a corner of the audio world that at first look, you’d think caters mostly to rich, err make that—loaded guys. But truth be known, the world of “uber-speakers” (defined as those retailing for more than $100,000 per pair), is currently served by more than 35 manufacturers worldwide. That’s a lot of competitors vying for more than just the super rich’s audio dollar. And while many of these companies’ clients are venture capitalists, oil tycoons and trust fund babies, many uber-speaker customers are just every day music lovers and aficionados who have a very high reference and wouldn’t trust their extensive music collections to just any run of the mill loudspeaker.
Unlike a supercar, these audio works of art don’t depreciate the day you take them home and are more politically correct than the vulgar ostentation of a yacht complete with a crew of 50.
What they do most simply is deliver a truly goose-bump raising, emotional experience every time your use them.
As long as we’re using a car analogy to try and describe the value of an uber-speaker, when speakers cost more than $100,000, they must be compared to Formula 1 cars where cost is no object. F1 cars are tuned according to the circuit they have to race on. Besides serving as a top-down reference model for the rest of the company’s offerings, designers of uber-speakers typically take one of three design paths. Achieving live level, perfect fidelity or refinement of some particularly vexing engineering issue like uniform dispersion or complete elimination of distortions normally associated with more pedestrian price points. In general, the more you spend when it comes to uber-speakers, the more these three paths converge.
To read more and view slideshow of most expensive speakers, check out
[Link: electronichouse.com]
