Why you should consider buying non-mainstream brands

By George Moraitis

One day in Europe back in the early 80’s, a speaker designer started making some speakers that were immediately applauded for their sonic ability. Possessing a rare ability to voice a speaker and extraordinary craftmanship skills, his speakers were captivating to listen to and distinctively designed. I remember seeing a pair of these speakers for the first time in a hifi shop in Melbourne in those early days and ‘losing my marbles’. I decided that one day, when I could afford them, I just had to have them in my life.

This talented designer chose some of the world’s best drivers and had them customised to suit his designs. He used multiple layers of differing density woods in the cabinet and pioneered new speaker construction techniques. For a time, they became the ‘in’ speaker. If I had a dollar for every time I heard from an audiophile that this brand was their ‘dream speaker’… They became the Lamborghini Countach of speakers.

Then decades later, a large corporation who owned many well-known audio brands came along and bought this brand. The founder retired and the corporation decided to audit the factory’s processes. They decided that there were many opportunities to gain efficiencies and maximise profit.

The accountants had a meeting and eventually asked questions like:

• Why spend so much money on these expensive custom designed drivers when cheaper drivers with a similar performance curve could do a similar job?
• Why stay with this rather expensive and laborious layered wood cabinet design when using cheaply sourced MDF could do a similar job?
• Why make the baffles by hand when some robots can cut them out using a template?
• Why use expensive real wood veneers when cheaper fake wood veneers virtually look the same?
• Why use expensive capacitors in the crossovers when cheaper capacitors perform almost at the same level?
• Why make them in Europe and not in the corporation’s factory in China? If the construction is simplified, then you don’t need those expensive artisans to make them anymore. Anyone can make them, right?

This is a true story and today, this famous brand is still going strong. These speakers are commonly available & stocked in prominent hifi dealers in the bigger cities, heavily marketed and frequently reviewed in the audio press. Speaking to people and looking through the forums, I can see that it is still considered to be a very respectable, highly desirable brand of speaker. It is certainly considered a safe buy and would be on many conservative buyer’s short lists. Speaking to dealers, I can say with confidence that these speakers sell in good volumes and are considered to be part of the “establishment”.

Now you know there’s a ‘but’ coming, don’t you?

And here it is. To me, these days they have a disappointing sound.
Well, let’s be kind and say they are a shadow of their former selves.

Years ago, I achieved my dream and bought a pair of this brand’s top of the range stand mounters before the founder sold the business. I loved these speakers and had them for years. I know what they were capable of. Yet, when I auditioned the current version of that model, they sounded like a diluted, generic, uninspiring, obscure version of what had given me so much enjoyment years ago. The modern versions sound like a completely different speaker brand to the previous ‘pre-sale’ versions. Chalk and cheese.

And there’s a good reason for this. With all the changes that the new owners have made, it looks like the identical speaker on the outside, but there is not even one part that is the same as the original speaker, and it certainly doesn’t sound anything like the original speaker.

The founder dreamed about a concept and carefully bought it to life. It was his whole world, his obsession, his baby. He poured everything he had into his creations and never rested in his pursuit of excellence. His objective was to make the best speaker possible and his life’s work resulted in a range of products that earned a great reputation and level of desirability. The corporation paid money for that reputation and desirability and then tried to work out how they could get a maximum return on their investment. Their objective was to make profits.

Two very different objectives!

If you investigate, you will find that this story applies to many well-known brands that we are all familiar with. Some brands build a reputation based on the original creator’s vision, grow and become a large business, reach their ‘hey-day’ and are then sold to larger businesses who then run them as profit making entities. Without the original founder’s presence & passion, they kind of lose their soul and quite often, lose the sonic attributes that built the brand in the first place.

I am not saying that we should not support these brands. We should buy whatever we like and whatever gives us pleasure. Actually, statistically we do support these brands out of the force of familiarity. According to the observations of social scientists, we as a species on average tend to be creatures of habit and tend to seek comfort in the known rather than ‘risk’ the new. Not all of us but a lot of us. When shelling out well-earned money on expensive audio gear, this cautious tendency is understandable because we think about resale values and generally speaking, the more well known a brand is, the more buyers would be in the market and we don’t want to ‘get stuck with it’.

But I would like to pose this question. If you were looking to buy a nice pair of speakers and say you really liked the afore mentioned brand, wouldn’t you have been better off buying that brand’s speakers before the founder sold his business to the corporation and they started making those changes?

In many ways, this is what a lot of boutique, or non-mainstream brands represent – products that are hand made by the founder with the goal of making them sound the best that they know how. Uncorrupted by big business agendas. I am simply suggesting that we should consider brands that are not in that small group of very familiar, commonly available, highly advertised equipment that many people think represents high end audio.

Understandably, many people feel a sense of caution, or trepidation when considering the purchase of a brand that is not so well known. Some people even experience auditions of products which they describe as profoundly more enjoyable than other products recently auditioned but nevertheless hesitate because the ‘better’ products are considered ‘boutique’ or ‘non-mainstream’.

I feel that we should be encouraged to try to look beyond the predictable norms and be open to supporting a brand that may not be as well known, may not be advertised everywhere and may not necessarily have volumes of reviews associated with it. It is these brands which are often pushing the envelope. It is these brands which are often building products with pure sound quality in mind. Building products that the ‘accounting dept’ at a corporation would not approve.

And they sound great! Go on, unearth a gem!

How about you? Are you reasonably conservative with your purchases and tend to only stick with established brands that are commonly known and commonly available? Or are you a bit more adventurous and tend to gravitate to products that are well regarded but ‘non-mainstream’? Or are you somewhere in the middle?