[Craig Sawyers]

However, the flip side is - it is ****** hard to make money out of hifi.

Back 30 years I spent a torrid couple of years as CTO of Wharfedale. And it was very difficult to make profit. In our case, although we made of order 100,000 pairs of speakers a year, the selling chain was long. We sold to distributors, who would sell to retailers. Distributors would take a 50% margin, and retailers a 30-40% margin. So, per speaker pair, Wharfedale made less profit than the distributors and retailers. It was even worse shipping overseas.

So although the calculation above looks stark, I suspect that their volumes are very low. The higher the price, the lower the volume. Simple really.

And the audio market is volatile. Recession hits, or people are worried about some other thing, and ****! sales plummet. It regularly kills small audio companies, and some larger ones too, often rescued by being sold to the Chinese.

Craig