B&W being purchased by a Silicon Valley Startup

Only time will tell...

 

Which is probably exactly what happened.

 

From what I've seen, the CM Series don't hold their value on the used market.

 

Were Classe and Rotel part of the deal, too? B&W owned them.

 

It would seem so. There is a line in a recent TWICE article about Eva Automation's purchase of B&W which states, "Eva's technologies could potentially be integrated into Classe and Rotel audio components."

 

Hey, if I had $800M in F.U. money from Facebook, I wouldn't mind blowing $50 million buying an audiophile company that made great products. I would hope they could at least break even over the next few years... and it's a tough market out there. I hope we don't see $99 B&W speakers for sale at Walmart...

 

Made in Cambodia ...

 

... on assembly lines by 8-year-old children making $10 a day...

 

Could be much less ...

 

To this day, I've never had any audio gear mass produced with slave labor break on me. Only hand made with pride in America stuff.

Off topic of course, just been on my mind as I wait to hear back from Schiit about my DAC that broke after a couple weeks of owning it.

 

Maybe at the online B&W Outlet?

Fingers crossed for refurbished B&W 805s at 50% off.

 

Best Buy here in the US sells their speakers - I assume you can occasionally get a deal on returns there for the models they sell.

 

And then you find out it's the Chinese knock-off made with styrene plastic speaker cones.

 

So can we take that statement as your endorsement of child/slave labor? Or perhaps just your indictment of limited production hand-crafted products? Just curious. ;-)

I'll reserve judgement, but if the history of audio is any indicator this does not bode well for B&W. Let's hope this take over is the exception.

 

Consumer electronics build quality is going down across the board and not just in audio. There are very few exceptions. This is unfortunate particularly since the basic electrical components have tighter tolerances than older production. But even if B&W were not taken over this way as a billionaire toy, it is highly doubtful that their new product would be built to the same standard as legacy gear. If that bothers buyers then they probably need to restore the legacy gear instead of buying new.

 

It's true that there is not the market share for new gear to be cost effectively built to the standards of legacy equipment. The technology for high end stereo is mature and highly-refined, some great gear is being built but the pricing is often stratospheric.

 

Its an endorsement of the idea that it's not good enough to simply put an American flag sticker on your gear and claim it more reliable then the competition. For instance, per the example I cited, Schiit repaired my DAC, then it exhibited the same problem again, and they told me it must be my fault and refuse to fix it again. As they brag about their made-in-America quality and how much better it is then "poorly made" gear that somehow never ever breaks.

My way-too-expensive McIntosh gear also exhibits quirks that should have been easy to fix. But again, my dirt-cheap made in China stuff has no such problems. It's kind of embarassing, really.

 

Agreed, being made in America is not enough to overcome poor workmanship and design flaws. That's a lesson the automobile manufacturers learned all too well.

My Krell and PS Audio gear has been rock-solid and reliable. The quirkiest gear I own is a CEC CD player but it sounds so damn good I put up with it.

Maybe B&W will actually benefit from new cash and new ideas. I hope so, because I have always held their products in high regard.

 

I don't think the usual paradigms apply; we've not before seen a mature audio brand absorbed by a cutting-edge tech company...much less one with the Silicon Valley clout here. Consumer tech on the Apple model is about innovation and integration, not exploitation of the brand name with cut-rate licensing deals.

I certainly think that B&W can use significant input on their industrial design direction - I've always found the biggest resistance to B&W products is their aesthetic.

 

In terms of audio gear reliability I think the dividing line is hand or custom manufacture vs generic part manufacturing. I agree that large company generic amplifiers/ digital from the Far East often are reliable enough but necessarily have bland cookie cutter sonics. They are using only the most highly tested components which were designed for manufacturing stability, not for sonics. Trying to produce something with better than generic sonics inevitably introduces more customized designs which haven't passed large scale QA or RAM analysis (RAM = reliability, availability, maintainability).

The CEC CD players are a case in point with excellent sonics but quirky failure prone design. Far Eastern tubes are often worse than generic sounding because tubes require skill in assembly. Small American or Euro production can't afford industrial QA without extremely high prices.

Krlpuretone is likely on the right track suggesting that the B&W takeover is more about industrial design or transfer technology than any attempt to improve the sonics.

 

And we still haven't. The company that bought B&W currently does nothing else - it has no products, no clout, nothing but a lot of Facebook cash. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, we won't know until we know.

 

Really? Because I think they've easily got the best-looking speakers anybody's making these days, at least stuff you can commonly find in a lot of shops.

 

I agree they look great. However, I don't like the recent design for the 800 series as much as the previous ones.

 

Really their aesthetic is lacking for you? I think some of their speakers have been beautiful, especially those designed by the British design firm Pentagram.

 

I'm conveying the comments of several of my customers over the years, enough that is a bit of a common refrain. Not really looking to spark a subjective debate about it.

I've personally witnessed a lower than normal significant other approval factor for B&W speakers.