Quote:
Originally Posted by
arsmusic
Well known companys can charge what they want for a product. How much in parts is in a 1176 $300 maybe. How about a ssl g comp $300 also? How much do they sell them for. $2,000 to $4,000. The thing about people paying you money to record. They could care less about your 1176 or your gcomp. They do not even know the difference in what they look like. They are not going to tell the difference if you are using a UA, Urei, hairball audio etc. For some dumb reason people care what type of mic you have. If it is not a Neumann people get weird. Maybe the mic sound 1000 times better but people get weird. Not that they can heard the difference. But artists are dumb about stuff like that.
By the way Neumann could charge $10,000 for the mic and it would still sell. $7,000 is not a lot of money for a quality mic. How much do the top new Telefunken mics sell for. How about the C800G. All more that 7k.
That's not quite how it works. Anybody can charge anything they want for anything. How many people will buy it is another question.
In general, the more expensive something is compared to market alternatives, the fewer units will sell. I am sure that Neumann sells a lot more TLM102s than U67s.
There are a lot of reasons why companies choose to release a product at a higher or lower price. Let's say I could sell a million units of my product if I charge only a $1 per unit markup, or I could sell a thousand units if I charge a $1,000 per unit markup.
Either way, I would make a million dollars net, but the second option means a far smaller customer base, which means I can offer a much higher level of service to those thousand customers. It also affords a lot more margin for error in my business model. If I make a 50 cent mistake in my construction cost estimates, in one scenario, that costs me $500,000. In the other, it costs me $500. It also means I can afford to pay a decent wage to workers with whom I have a personal relationship, versus just grinding out the most units I can per hour from low-wage workers and offshore contract manufacturers.
Now, of course, if I am selling a widget with a thousand-dollar markup, a lot of other people will probably want to offer a competing product with, say, only an $800 markup, or a $500 markup, or whatever. So in order to be able to sustain a high-markup, lower-volume "boutique" business, I typically need to somehow do a very, very good job of building a very high level of reputational trust in the marketplace.
Neumann gets to charge money not just for the cost of producing the mic, they also get to charge money for the decades of credibility, expertise, and engineering that set Neumann-branded mics apart from the slew of well-made knockoffs on the market today. In exchange for paying that premium, Neumann's customers get a couple of significant benefits:
1. outstanding resale value. You can almost always get your money back, when and if you decide that you are done with owning a Neumann mic.
2. the privilege of working with the real-deal, industry-standard microphones, and not having to deal with shootouts, mods, second-guessing, justifying to clients, etc.
The fact that people are complaining about the price is evidence that Neumann is doing something right. Nobody complains about the price of no-name knockoff mics, because nobody cares about them. There has never been a better time to get great deals on bargain microphone, if a bargain microphone is what you are after.
But of course, what everyone really wants is a Neumann, they just want it at no-name prices.