Freelunch, once again you've ignored over 90% of what I've written, taken one statement out of context, and twisted it so that you could construe it as confirming your pre-existing opinions and guesswork.
Your logic is actually rather amusing. When I gave the retail price for an assembly that includes the FET, it may not have been directly relevant information--but the fact that I gave that information doesn't logically confirm anything that you might believe. If it did, then any other piece of irrelevant information should have equal logical force--e.g. it should confirm your opinion equally well if I had said that it snowed here this week or that my mother played the piano. But those statements obviously don't help your position--so neither does what I said, except in your remarkable brain.
I posted the $190 price not to be tricky or to conceal anything, but because I wanted to stick with what I know to be factual. Being an editorial consultant and German-to-English translator here in Brooklyn doesn't give me telepathic access to Schoeps' purchasing records over in Germany. And let me just say for the record that I'm not a spokesperson for Schoeps nor an employee of theirs, and that I'm affected by their prices the same way that everyone else is, i.e. there's plenty of stuff that I would eagerly buy, but I have to tell myself "down, boy" because of how much it costs.
--Now, you surely know the following already, but I hope that other people will be interested to learn a little about it: The manufacturer of any semiconductor will generally offer it to customers in several "grades," with the higher grades costing more (sometimes considerably more). This is simply a way to maximize their income, given that quality control is never perfect. In general, the parts sold in the lower grades are the ones which failed to make the selection for the higher, more costly grades, so they are actually worse on average than a random sampling of the production as a whole would be. Nonetheless they're all still marked as "BC 104" for example, since grading generally occurs rather late in the manufacturing process. So if you're outside the company and you have a bunch of parts without the ordering paperwork, you can't tell which selection grade those parts represent unless you measure them all individually and infer on that basis.
With some exceptions (especially among integrated circuits), semiconductor manufacturers don't generally copyright or patent the parts they develop. That actually works out to be in their own self-interest, because there are big customers who are unwilling to buy any part that's available from only one supplier--to do so would leave them dependent on the pricing and delivery schedule of an agency outside their control. So it's a normal, even a desirable, part of a product's life cycle when other manufacturers step in to cash in on the market that was created by the original supplier. Those other suppliers can claim whatever they want about the so-called "equivalence" or the functional ability of their part to be used as a replacement for the original part. Of course their reputation is on the line when they do that, but their reputation may well be for low price as much as it is for quality. It's always up to the buyer to be clear about what they're looking for.
On a whim some time during the 1970s I went to my neighborhood Radio Shack in Boston with a copy of the schematic for my new Schoeps CMC 5--s, and for only a few dollars I bought a blister pack of FETs that Radio Shack said were "equivalent" parts. I happened to mention this to the chief engineer at Schoeps, and on a similar whim, he offered to test the FETs to see how they measured as compared with the ones that Schoeps selected from their own suppliers. We didn't go through with that, but I would be quite surprised if any of the Radio Shack FETs would have come within, say, 5 dB of the required noise levels.
I guess if there's a point in all this, it's that the serious microphone manufacturers buy top-grade parts from manufacturers that they often have decades-long relationships with; parts acquisition is a crucial part of their business. Then they test each part individually, and use only the ones that meet their own standards. That's not meant as an extraordinary claim; to them it's the only way to stay in business. (Incidentally, it is also one of the big differences between the Western European manufacturers and the intensely price-driven manufacture that has been especially typical of China.)
Now, when low-noise FETs were a new thing in the mid-1960s, I think they probably did cost tens of dollars apiece. Prices have fallen considerably in the intervening decades; perhaps Schoeps really is paying less than one Euro per FET at this point. If so, then it should be evident that all the other associated costs (handling, testing/selection, assembly and testing again) swamp the raw parts cost completely, so now they're the issue. Again, either Schoeps and Neumann are foolish to undertake the cost of buying top-grade parts and then further testing and selecting from among them, or they're not--in which case the catalog price of an "equivalent" part of unknown grade from a discount parts source is just not highly relevant information.
The question remains, as Nick's Picks points out--if this stuff is so cheap and easy to make, where's the competition? The U.S. list price for a 5-meter Colette cable is currently $575; where are the $200 Colette cables that are as reliable, as low-noise and low-distortion, as successful at not picking up RFI despite being unbalanced, that stay flexible in cold weather, whose insulation doesn't tear, that don't twist and turn when you suspend capsules from them even when hot theatre lights are shining on the cables, and that are equally well backed up by professional service? The Schoeps patent on active accessories has expired, so as long as you don't try to sell your cables as Schoeps products, they can't touch you legally. You can already buy two different kinds of (almost worse than useless) fake Schoeps shock mounts from China, Inc.; why haven't they (or you) duplicated the Colette cables or extension tubes? Hell, why don't they (or you) sell equivalents to the CMC-- amplifiers for, say, $350 instead of nearly $1000--an even bigger profit opportunity?
--best regards
Topic: Continuing KM184 discussion (Read 14434 times)