When you go shopping for new speakers there are hundreds of alternatives. You can look at the options as daunting, or as a world of opportunity! Especially in this day and age of E-commerce, we’d like to point out what our guys are doing better than the rest.

    There are not many speaker MANUFACTURERS out there. Most speaker companies are ASSEMBLERS. The difference is huge and worth confirming as you shop.

    B&W and Paradigm manufacture their own speakers. (Read The B&W Story). They make their own drivers. (Download Paradigm Factory Tour) They have spent years of R&D to determine exactly the parameters each driver, cabinet and crossover will have. There aren’t a lot of companies doing this.

    Most speaker companies buy stamped drivers from OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Vifa, Philips, Seas, etc. Does that make them bad? No. It makes them… generic.

    You can find a speaker that uses $80 worth of Vifa drivers - selling anywhere from $700-3000 per pair. Ouch! Many pretentious companies claim to have "modified" the drivers by painting on some damping material or having custom models made for them (one extra turn of wire on the voice coil does indeed create a different model number for a part). These are, in reality, generic driver choices.

    One should be especially leery shopping the web. There are dozens now bragging that they offer "state of the art" performance at a myriad of price points. When you look below the surface, you see the same "usual suspects" of driver manufacturers mentioned above. Again, it doesn’t make them bad. But it unmasks the source. It works in their favor that you can’t audition before you’ve spent your money to order.

Your Speaker Company
    If you and your friends were to jump into the speaker biz, you would probably do some shopping for reasonably priced woofs/mids/tweets. You would probably buy crossovers and cabinets from the same source. You might even use a local cabinet maker you like better. We don’t doubt you would do it with tender loving care. You would probably listen at length and create a blind listening panel. Your heart would be in the right place. But… give or take a touch of this or a dash of that, your result would not be conspicuously different from many other well meaning companies doing exactly the same thing.

    B&W, for example, has 13 PHD’s on staff. Each heads certain speaker projects. At their disposal are the world’s foremost R&D facilities, IN HOUSE. With a rich history of data and driver, crossover and cabinet building at their disposal, these designers can CREATE, from the ground up, speaker systems to maximize the budget allowed for a given project.

    From this structure Kevlar was introduced into speakers in the 1970s. It has since been revised because Dupont’s Kevlar product needs to be molecularly altered to perform to B&W’s wishes. The shape of the driver’s parts, its electronic and mechanical characteristics are all painstakingly studied and refined every year. Cabinet shapes, materials and construction techniques are similarly improved on a regular basis. B&W went from rectangular, to pentagonal, to Matrix designs YEARS ago. Most speaker manufacturers are lucky to say they’re using MDF or walls a tad thicker than the other guy.

    Our intent is not to say other speakers are junk. It is actually impressive how well basic, inexpensive Vifa drivers (for example) perform in a variety of different manufacturers’ models on the market. But… you have the privilege of going beyond "assembled" speakers. What you get from B&W and Paradigm is a heck of a lot more speaker for your money than what the other guys provide!