Look guys, sourcing drivers is a little bit like buying hamburgers. There are thousands of factories that build speakers in Asia. For us, only three or four meet our standards of quality and reliability. In any case, some are like McDonalds--they sell the same speakers to everyone and some are like Fuddruckers--you get a healthy piece of meat and a bunch of fresh toppings you can apply as you like. The quality of the driver you get from the McDonalds-like supplier is easy to determine--you can just look at the thousands of other drivers they build to understand precisely what you get. These "burgers" are less costly because there isn't significant engineering to be done--they turn them out one after the other and they're all nearly the same.
If you buy the driver from the Fuddruckers-like supplier, you either pay them to engineer the driver according to your spec or you do the engineering and they just build it. Many companies choose to do something in-between, relying on the manufacturer's engineers for as much work as possible and taking up the slack with your own engineers in cases where the spec pushes the manufacturer out of his range of competence.
Almost everyone sources speakers in Asia and the quality can be damn good. It can also suck, but if you're sourcing stuff from other companies, you have to bear the responsibility of quality control. You can do it yourself or you can pay the manufacturer to do it. Quality isn't free in speaker sourcing, in speaker installation or in hamburgers.
Many speaker manufacaturers have great engineers, but some don't. There are catalogs of standard parts and many of the best speakers are simply the results of makiing the right choices in the use of standard parts with a few tweaks. Because the speaker looks like another one doesn't mean it's the same. Especially in midrange speakers and tweeters. Small changes to cone or dome geometry can make huge differences in sound--and those are tweaks you won't see in a cell phone picture or find adequately documented in some brand-lover's rant about a brand he sees as a competitor.
If you want great speakers, buy them from a company with great engineers, whether those engineers are employees of the brand or the manufacturer. For consumers, it's much easier to determine whether the brand is well-equipped in the engineering department than it is to determine the technical acumen of the manufacturer.
Ask the brand how they develop speakers. If they do it the right way, they'll be happy to explain. If they do it the wrong way, they'll feed you some long winded BS about passion and art and wine and cheese and love and a bunch of materials you've never heard of but they'll never offer real documentation and you'll never see any real innovation from them.
The experience you have listening to music through speakers may be similar to drinking great wine and eating the best cheese, but the speaker isn't the wine, it's the wine glass. The music is the wine and cheese. Artists make great music, artisans make great food. Engineers and factories design and make great speakers.
As Dr. Toole used to say, audio electronics engineering is "science in the service of art".
.....I would say the OP has no respect for him.
