Totally agree. That's one of the reasons I have a rather humble 105. I have modified even my Adcom 555 power amps power supply. And other line level things. In the SM v2 there is a rather out of place TO-220 on the bottom of the board. Me thinks this was part of the power supply. No one asked me but I think the SM would be better off with a true bi-polar supply instead of a line inverter.
$700 wtf
How can you possibility know that? Do you run a similar sized engineering business in this sector? What %age return on investment do you consider reasonable?
I would estimate the cost to have the PCBs made, boards manufactured (pick-&-place & solder), tested, shipped to Australia from China, metal work made, printed, unit assembled, tested & boxed to be £300-£350/US$417-US$486 if a 100 were made in a batch. They won't be making them in the 1000s. So US$695/£500 seems fair for a bespoke piece of audio kit to decode obsolete formats.
Fair guess I'd imagine, but there's also the cost of hardware and software development (I imagine Dave alone don't come cheap!) and all the usual overheads of running a business. Not a lot of margin to be had I'd have thought (particularly if a large proportion of them are actually sold to us QQ lot at a significant discount!!)
That's for a bare PCB. The amount discussed earlier was specified as including pick & place, and solder, components. When talking about PCB cost it has to be specified bare board, or a complete assembly (stuffed). (There's the labor and parts.)
I suspect you have no idea how very large those things are (rent, power, insurance, taxes, safety registration, transport, etc., etc.) for a business the size of Involve. You might not like the impact these cost recoveries have on the selling price of a small production run of something you think should be cheap but it doesn't mean its not realistic.
Elsewhere Chucky has said "audio don't pay the bills". At least not yet but I hope the brightest future for them. He's also mentioned that the real $$ comes from their sister company producing solar energy systems. I think he has refereed to them as solar generators. Perhaps there's some shared staff & business space or maybe Involve is a subsidiary. But if Chucky took the route of, say, Dan D’Agostino, the decoder would be the size of a Buick & cost $6k. Now I think there's room for improvement, the SM lacks a few features I would want, but we're very lucky to have what we do.
Yes not their only product so be thankful that they are supporting it out of sheer passion rather than expecting to make a fortune on it. Most people don't like working for nothing.
