Sure Justin
But we're talking about the cost of stock Scintillas, which must be nominal, and Henk's charge
This is a mere frippery compared to what's being charged for modern day high performers
Pricing is a very complex subject when you compare it to competitiors.
• Where is it being made? A dac made in suburbs of Warsaw will be much more expensive if made in Zurich or UK, both for real estate and labor.
• Street Price – His Price is the street price, so you are comparing a Scintilla or a duetta to a 50k speaker
• Design – The top OTL will be cheaper than the top SS. So if you have a speaker that works with OTL, you will save more. My point is, each design has its own price value ladder. SETs have their own price-value ladder. Similarly, a planar by nature is cheaper than a cone. With a cone, you need to spend tons on the baffle (which a planar lover will say shouldn’t have been there in the first place) to make it sound good. Then, you need to ship it around to various distributors, dealers, hifi shows, customer returns. All this is built into the price. So, you could compare an Apogee by price to a cone, or you could say, I have the top planar compared to a meh cone. Then the debate actually is, what are the pros and cons of planars vs cones
• Distribution and marketing – Guess Henk’s cost on this – Zero.
• Profit objective – Your popular speakers need to have a certain margin to sustain their business and have a profit objective. People like Henk don’t, they are happy for you to pay for their hobby and whisky.
• Not to mention, people pay for status, and status here is defined by the groups you hang out in. As you know, on the UK forum, people will laugh at you if come up stating expensive price on cones + SS, and respect you for anything Kondo/Audio Note.