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Romy the Cat wrote:

Chris Widmer [sic] does not understand it as well not to mention that his attempt to explain the high price of Feastrex sound too bogus. The Cat

Romy the Cat wrote:

Mass production of permendur cost nothing and to make this driver cost nothing – two year ago they sold it for $1000, not the sell it for $40.000 – what, the turning permendur become 40 time more expletive? Anyhow, let to be adult about it – there is NOTHING expensive in driver’s mass production if the production is well organized. The Cat

Where do I begin with all the errors in that statement? First, even accepting that you were using hyperbole, to say "production of Permendur costs nothing" and to make Feastrex drivers "costs nothing" is patently ridiculous. If anything, I greatly understated the actual cost of Permendur to Feastrex. I referenced prices for mass-produced Permendur which is called "black rolled"; Feastrex will not use black rolled Permendur for several reasons. Sumitomo Metals, which supplies Feastrex with Permendur, will not give any quality guarantees on black-rolled Permendur: beneath the black coating there could be any sort of cracks or other imperfections that would render the affected section of the material useless and require it to be simply thrown away. Furthermore, they would make no guarantees as to the compositional purity of the material. Feastrex always has their Permendur manufactured on a custom order basis to the dimensions that they require, and they always have it manufactured oversized so that they can have it milled down to the correct final dimensions with a high degree of precision and assurance that there are no imperfections. They also receive guarantees on the compositional content and perfect physical integrity of the material. As a result, their materials costs regarding Permendur are actually considerably higher than what extrapolations from black rolled Permendur would suggest. Another thing that must be kept in mind about Permendur is that any prices that may have been quoted to you a year or more ago are long out of date. The price of this material, along with the prices of many other materials, has been skyrocketing and the simple fact of the matter is, in today's market nobody can tell you what the price of Permendur will be until you actually order it. They will come back with a quote that will be valid for a very limited time and after that the price will be different again -- almost certainly higher. As for the ease/difficulty and associated costs of machining Permendur, that will depend on the actual composition of the material, the size, and that shape that needs to be achieved. Don't believe everything a machinist tells you before he actually tries to do the work. Japan has no shortage of excellent machinists with the best tools and several times they had machinists accept the task of machining their Permendur motors only the return the Permendur to Feastrex unmachined, saying, "Forget it; we can't/won't accept this task as is it is beyond our capabilities/simply too uneconomical for us to accept." And they have also had companies do the work one time and then tell Feastrex, "We will never accept this kind of work again." (Their reasons were the same as the companies that rejected the work after seeing what was actually required.) It is hard to blame such companies -- Permendur is so hard and brittle that it is easy to crack or chip during machining and if they ruin a piece of material that costs thousands of dollars, their loss could be huge relative to the amount of money that they can make from he machining operations. But all these companies were initially interested and offered to accept the work. So -- simply because a machinist says one thing prior to doing the work does not mean it is the truth even for that job, and even if it does turn out to be true in that case, it may have little or no application to understanding the costs involved in a very different job.

Next, Feastrex never sold any driver with an all-Permendur field coil motor for $1,000. You are confusing these with the entry-level D5nf permanent magnet models.

Finally, you speak of "mass production" but there simply is no mass production of anything in a Feastrex driver, and that fact alone will always cause the drivers to be more expensive.

Romy the Cat wrote:

To spending $40K for let it be even good single-driver loudspeaker is a summing of absurdity in my view. The Cat

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