Exciting!!!
We’ll see… I’ve watched Sean on zero fidelity and he had a tremendous amount of industry experience. We talked about Thomas trying to do the same thing before. That many people fail to cost out all aspects of the and end up with something 200-300% higher cost than what they planned going in.
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Yes IME, when you talk about competing with product 10x your target price, unless you have some revolutionary new tech that will massively disrupt the market, your probably missing something.
It’s $5000 Canadian, so something along the lines of $1250 American right? Or €683 right?
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Is he canadian? He probably meant USD, though.
LoL! I just multiply USD by 1.5x to get a CAD figure…though currently it’s been as good as 1.33x.
According to Google right now 5000 CAD is 4115,85$ USD 
(Man it’s going up – it was 0.74 in June last year and now it’s 0.82).
Topping just announced D90SE. Just a D90 with ES9038.
$5000 “giant killers”…
That’s beyond my price range for a car, let alone speakers, but something’s funny with that.
The thing about speakers is, like @Polygonhell said, you’re either bringing something new to market, or blowing smoke.
The thing is speakers are a weird market. Tuning is key. Headphones and IEMs can be tuned relatively easily compared to speakers. Cabinet size, interior, materials, drivers, driver arrangement, and the biggest hurdle is the crossover (or refinement of cabinet design for full-range drivers). Drivers, wood, and components in high-end speakers can be rather cheap if you start pricing things out. Some multi thousand dollar speakers have $100-400 worth of components in them. But it all comes down to tuning.
This is what made Andrew Jones x Pioneer stuff so amazing. Cheap, but tuning was on point despite the cheaper materials. And then ELAC with AJ again. The profit margins are slim (especially counting astronomical storage, manufacturing, and shipping costs), but these speakers can rock with cheaper components.
When I hear of a influencer/indie-designer producing their own speakers… even with partnership with a smaller brand, and they’re saying “my speakers will sound X-better than…” smells fishy. The big brands know what they’re doing, the boutique brands do their amazing shit… so what small fish could rock the industry so much? I wonder.
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I have never in my life heard any 5k speaker that could even dream to compete with anything I’ve heard that’s 50k+, so yeah I would just ignore that. Cool if he makes a nice sounding speaker for the price point, but don’t expect anything near what he is claiming as I could almost guarantee you will not be getting that (goes for any manufacturer that would make that claim, not just NBT), but I’m sure most reasonable people already figured that lol
And an extra price increase too, thanks topping
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Back during the turn of the century, when details about the Segway were being hinted at, one of the things I recall they were saying as part of the hype was… you ready for this?
“It’s going to fundamentally change the way cities are designed” 
I’m sure there would have been a Kickstarter for it as well, but hell, it was the turn of the century, the internet as we know it was just starting to come into its own. And cities still look the same.
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Fun fact: I bought Elac B5’s (now sold as Elac Primas) a few months ago. I don’t like the tuning at all. Tuning is also… 100% subjective.
Meanwhile there’s the SU-8s with a new ESS chipset and MQA for the same price as the SU-8. 
I want one of their new electric go-karts. 
This isn’t to argue, totally agree with subjectivity. 
But when someone is selling a pair of speakers for $5000… subjectivity kinda goes out the window. $300 speakers not to taste? Cool, different strokes. $5000 speakers? Someone royally fucked up.
It’s like buying sports cars. An inexpensive sports car like a Miata is fun for the price you pay. But if you’re spending 10-15X as much for a Ferrari, shit better be on-point.
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I mean I’ve seen enough here to know there’s also 5K$ dacs (50K dacs actually), 5K amps, 5K headphones and even 5K iems. There’s also 5K bottles of wine and 5K rings and… whatever.
If someone believes it’s worth 5K there’s going to be a sale. 
Christ that’s how much I paid for my whole 90 stack…
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A weird market? For sure, the whole consumer audio industry is a weird market. However, I cannot agree with the second statement… even though I personally would like if that was the case. In theory (to a consumer), the tuning is the key. In practice, finesse is key.
Think about it. How are you going to convince and individual to pay you thousands, tens of thousands of US dollars for a loudspeaker? Tuning? Errrrrr — nop. By finessing. Whether that’s through design, marketing jargon which uses terminology that the buyer doesn’t even understand but it fascinates him/her.
It’s the same concept as “Sell me this pen”. You will not sell the pen by saying how good it writes. Add some exotic material, put a designer name behind it, use big words, and boom, the pen is sold.
Bitter truth, but it’s the truth none the less.
Yes, of course you will have to make sure that the speaker sounds good if you are selling it for tens of thousands of dollars, but you will have a hard time selling it just based on the tuning.
And then, of course, you have the psychology. By nature people will have an assumption that the speaker costing tens of thousands of dollar sounds better than something of a couple thousand dollars. But that’s a whoooole other topic =)
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I think that people buying exotic sports cars care more about how it holds its value. I think they buy it as an investment rather than a car for driving — though there are people that are so rich that they buy expensive cares purely for the thrill and fun of driving them.
What seems like a lot of money to us, normal people, is like a sugar candy to the super rich. The richest people don’t think twice about buying something for enjoyment, even if it costs millions of dollars. They don’t look at it from the same perspective as us.
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Blon Prometheus BL-A8 has been released today. It’s the most expensive BLON iem yet at $79.99.
do you have a link?