goodvibes
Headphoneus Supremus
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- Dec 28, 2009
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Quote:
Very little relation in resonance vibration of large surfaces to little pieces of metal, wood or plastic. I think it's marketing or a way to make the chamber a bit larger etc. It needs to be rigid enough but I honestly think plastic would make no difference if strong enough. No disrespect intended as long what they're doing works. People are allowed to make a profit, pay for the R&D and benefit from their ingenuity and marketing.
Brass has a considerable difference in sound with musical instruments - it's roughly 3x as dense as aluminum and conducts energy to the environment about half as well. Encasing a sub I imagine it provides better damping and energy transfer characteristics.
The excess material cost vs. retail cost is a typical marketing strategy... most things the further upmarket you go the marginal profit increases greatly (next configuration up in a compter, options in a car). Sometimes it actually can be somewhat justified based on production volume, but it usually just is a marketing thing. Sometimes the low end is adjusted a bit downward and the lost profit on that is subsidized by sales of the higher end versions.
That said, these things overall probably cost JVC no more than $20-30 to manufacture in materials/labor/energy. The production cost differential between the 100 -> 200 might only be a few dollars if that. If you amortize the full cost of the run, including R&D and expenditures for machinery, it's a multiple of that, but hard to gauge without having any insight on the # of units produced or how something like this is actually developed.
Very little relation in resonance vibration of large surfaces to little pieces of metal, wood or plastic. I think it's marketing or a way to make the chamber a bit larger etc. It needs to be rigid enough but I honestly think plastic would make no difference if strong enough. No disrespect intended as long what they're doing works. People are allowed to make a profit, pay for the R&D and benefit from their ingenuity and marketing.