Wow thanks a ton Grainger and Glynn! Y'all are first in line for them once we've got our current backlog out in 3-4 weeks. Y'all are going to really enjoy these!
Re: Pat M., I missed your post earlier and just now saw it. It warms my heart so much to hear how much you are enjoying your complete system! What a helluva retirement gift to yourself! Rock on, man!
To all:
here's a link to our website's post about the coming price increase.
http://www.blumensteinaudio.com/news/2012/11/5/notification-of-price-increase-january-1-2013.htmlAs we mentioned in the blog post, Molly and I were really wracking our brains over the increase, as to us it is definitely unwelcome in terms of maintaining our business/ethics model. In the modern day, business and ethics are rarely terms used together in the same sentence to mean a good thing, but in our case it is indeed for the sake of the good kind of ethics that we do what we do.
With the Orca line (including the stands and subs), we are trying to distill prettymuch everything learned at Feastrex and Cain & Cain (and on our own) but to make it into as hollistically ass kicking as possible. Miniscule in terms of price and physical size per the punch, just the right amount of customizability, acoustic adjustability and room tailoring, and convenience. And then we discovered the unexpected
added benefits of this entire approach in the final sound quality.
During this last year in the journey especially, I believe that we are onto some truly new technologies in terms of what is possible for the size, and price and blah blah blah... and then woah! We just weren't charging quite enough in order to grow the business gracefully and practically. And so it is in this way that many makers are reminded that they are actually businesses. Business plans get ammended, and then life goes on.
While we know that the new prices will still be more than competitive in the marketplace and will still afford us the ability to keep production here in the states in the coming years,
our true mission, what is really behind the persistently low prices is that we simply wish (and still wish) to connect alot of people with honest to goodness great speaker designs and it is all too often that price of admission which is the barrier for alot of people into the realm of phenomenal sound quality. I am just not interested in merely "good" sound quality and neither should anyone else be. Its been almost a hundred years since the direct radiator was invented. Isn't it about time that there were truly phenomenal sound systems out there for ~$1500? (speaking of the Orcas and SEX here).
Certain business saavy friends and audiophiles have asked us over the last several years: "Don't they sound good enough already!?! They're only $600 bucks! Can anyone really hear the difference!?!" And these questions have sometimes gotten me to really quiz myself if we were really cut out to be in manufacturing, in possession of the all mighty ability to coldly consider our hand made goods and hard fought design innovations to be "widgets," to be bought and sold in mind numbing quantities on the free market, or were we to consider ourselves to be members of the art world, always trying to push the envelope and be "different," for the sake of amusement to the few people who will invariably cross paths with a small, albiet beautiful body of our life's work.
The truth is that we are a little bit of both, and while its not the textbook definition of a business, we don't see anything wrong with that. We've so much energy in our daily work to see where this mindset takes us in the long term. Where its gotten us so far is that we have a pretty respectable number of pleased customers, and we are still definitely counting alot of die hard "ultra fi" audiophiles as our friends and customers as well, even for a "lowly" $600 pair of speakers.
So in conclusion, thanks to everyone over all these past years for joining our community, making it even better!
Cheers,
Clark
