Sammy is nice, and he has some / a lot of talent in terms of tuning. However I feel that at full price, his iems are a bit overpriced. And I sometimes wonder if he doesn't know it and take us a bit for audio-fools. And don't get me started on the infrared stickers.
Hi Mim I understand your sentiment. In general, audio prices are very high.
But let's break down the cost of an iem like the Solar for instance, although this applies to all multi-BA iems. The Solar consists of 10 BA drivers on each side, which cost between $20-$30 each. So let's say 20 x $25 = $500. However, the labor cost to put it together by a trained engineer is usually around $200, bringing the total to $700. This might seem like a large margin on an iem of $1500, but the majority of sales is in countries like Japan, followed by China, Korea, and Singapore. The Western market is negligible by comparison. Sales in these countries goes via distribution, which takes 35% of the MRSP, which in the case of the Solar is $500 out of $800, leaving $300. And like Erik points out, this excludes the production cost of a quality, hand-built cable.
Now, your appropriate response is to point at single dynamic drivers like the Galaxy. Even the most expensive dynamic driver costs less than $100, so the margins are indeed significantly larger compared to multi-BA's. I'm not sure there is a need for any single dynamic driver iem to cost over $1K, with the exception of the Dream which uses expensive materials, and is outsourced for production in Japan. I probably shouldn't even mention the RE2000, which I think most likely only costs $2K is according to Brian Fang's famous words, "because it sounds good".
However, Sammy spends several months developing these dynamic drivers himself, experimenting with different materials (graphene, titanium, etc). More importantly, from a practical perspective his situation is that as a small business owner he needs to pay rent for 3 workshops in a pricey city as HK, which costs approx. $3K. Then he has 5 employees to pay salary for, let's say $2K each per month, plus himself. So to break even, he needs to make a profit of at least $15K per month.
As I mentioned, I've been speaking to Sammy for over 2 years. The conversational topics are nearly always about whatever projects he's working on, but that he doesn't have the money to pursue to them. Sammy likes to constantly play with stuff and dreams big, but he mostly doesn't have the resources to do what he would like. If I scroll back through the conversation, I can probably find at least 20 instances of him telling me "I'm broke", also often as reply on my urging him to get more reviews out for promotion. These 3 iems are also not samples for me, I will be sending them on to other reviewers later. (Btw, other recurring topics are which companies have been attacking him on the local forum hehe).
So just to be clear, I'm not saying you are wrong, or that this is a big defense of Sammy and Rhapsodio; just to say that the situation is often more nuanced than manufacturers playing people for a fool. Conversely, also not saying all manufacturers are saints of course.
Awesome nic, it is always welcome when you have a new toys to spend a christmas and holiday with. Really looking forward to hear the infinity impression from you, really interesting new line up there.
about rhapsodio, of course at one point I have considered them when i looking for some TOTL lineup. I have looked up lot of reviews and solar is really tempting to get.
but after some other lookup one thing that made me reconsider is the vast choice of the lineup and the type, the galaxy itself has the rev1 and the rev1 with different housing or something, and they also got a bunch other model like earth, RT1 i also saw this mythical gold rhapsodio IEM thing in the singapore lsiting website which i couldn't find any information about. Seeing galaxy itself has reach v3 now made me feels they have a really fast model iteration that with my budger right now is honestly quite hard to catch up.
Yes as Lau replied very eloquently:
That's the gift and curse of Rhapsodio. Their product lineup refreshes so fast it's hard to keep up unless you have a vested interest in the company.
When I first got into TOTL iems and cables, I purchased most of Rhapsodio's cables. But Sammy's problem is that like the rest of us, he constantly wants to try new stuff. So every year he would refresh his whole cable lineup, or offer multiple similarly-priced copper cables at the same time, making it very hard for the customer to know what's going on and what to choose. Even I had to give up pretty quick. The case of the Galaxy shell is similar. Sammy keeps on experimenting with different shells (I've seen pictures of even more types of housing with different materials) because he likes to play around. It's not the best economic model, hence Sammy's image of 'mad scientist' rather than marketing & strategy expert.
Now for the Infinity, I'm going to be honest and confirm Lau's suspicion here.
..Infinity in all honesty sounds like a novelty item rather than a true contender bcos of its huge driver count.
Infinity's allure is its huge driver count. But there is already a current awareness that more drivers does not give 'more midrange' or 'more resolution'; you can only use more drivers and crossovers to fine-tune a frequency response to your liking. Whether that happens with 3, 6, or 12 drivers is not necessarily very relevant (I've heard that FA Lab 2 is one of the best iems and only uses 2 BA's for instance). And as we have seen in the shootout, there was no real trend between driver count and performance, at least according to my own judgment.
In the case of Infinity, I'm afraid that this will not live up to the hype. It has a pleasant tone, nice timbre even, but the imaging is not very precise and the vocal transparency is low. One might say.. there is some weirdness in the vocals (too soon?). In this case, I suspect there is some incoherency in the driver implementation, so the timing between the frequencies is off. I've already discussed this with Sammy, and most likely the Infinity will be shelved unfortunately. The Zombie however is not only more realistically priced, it shows a promising sound that quite frankly surpasses the Infinity.
