Value for Money

There are a few people who complain about price and the value of high-end products. This brief article is an attempt to explain why our products are valued the way that they are.

We owe it to people to explain a little further why you get value for money from an Origin Live product — after all you may get far better perceived value for money by purchasing a mass produced item manufactured in China, India, etc.

The key difference is leading edge design — this usually takes close on a lifetime of experience to produce. Otherwise, the radio shacks of this world would have the market sewn up – why not just upgrade the components on a standard regulator and expect great results? The fact is that circuit design contributes far more to performance than components.

Secondly – to value an item by the value of it’s components is a desperately devaluing argument. When you used to buy Microsoft Office software for $500, or Autodesk Inventor at $7000, the CD material cost is less than $1 — is this sharp practice? People appreciate that you pay for enormous design time and a leading product. To continue the analogy further, consider buying a computer. Which looks the better perceived value — a laptop or an equivalent massive computer of yesteryear that would have taken whole living rooms to accommodate? At the end of the day it’s all about design.

If one questions the cost of a power supply design, how does anyone justify the cost of a black gate capacitor or other high-end components? There are certain hidden processes that have been carried out on these capacitors but to all intensive purposes they look identical to other capacitors.

Before I got involved with Hi-Fi I could never understand the cost of high-end audio — that was until I got into the field myself. By way of explanation the following may help.

Even if a product costs nothing to produce you’ve still got the following problems:

1. To outperform all the competition (some of whom have multi-million pound development budgets) design time is extremely costly and most people think a hobbyist has the time to come up with a market leading product — they don’t, unless utterly fanatical and even then most never see the light of day!
2. Even if you come up with a product that is head and shoulders above the competition it’s not easy to publicise it with a saturated market in the face of competitors with well established reputations, dealer networks and large advertising budgets.

Most people think they understand how time consuming and costly all this is — but they probably don’t, which is why only 1-in-10 businesses survive longer than 5 years and only 1-in-100 survive longer than 10 years. These are the actual statistics which make for surprising but sobering reading.