I certainly appreciate the conversation going on here. Many thanks on all of your perspectives.
A few comments from my perspective and experience:
I used the new sapphire cantilever in the Astrion design (correctly identified as a new offering from Namiki Jewel) instead of a Boron cantilever because corporate legal was seriously concerned about the toxicity of Boron and potential product liability. Today, there are a number of products with Boron cantilevers and just as we technically argued with the legals back then, there have been no issues with the material. Boron, indeed, is very toxic when machined, the dust of the machining process can be inhaled and is quite dangerous. But solid pieces, even as small as little cantilever rods do not present a rational hazard. Technically, the stiffness of the two materials, Boron and Sapphire, are substantially similar. Stiffness for translation of the motion from the driven diamond tip to the pivot in the cartridge without some bending inducing loss of motion or phase effects in the motional translation are indistinguishable. And at least at that time, the price differential was negligible as well. Industrial sapphire is a very mature technology and well down its price curve. If a design accommodated replaceable styli, then it would be interesting to make the same design available with both cantilever materials and let users try and select one or the other if they could discern an acoustic difference or preference.
Market volume and pricing is a very different trade space today than it was back in the early 80s. While I was at ADC, we manufactured ~ 11,000 phonograph cartridges PER DAY. And we were the third largest behind Shure and Audio Technica. The total industry output at the peak was ~ 40,000/day. I never figured out where they were all going. Eventually assumed they were being shoveled off the back of ships to feed north sea whales. Today, there really isn't the volume to support the investment in capital equipment and tooling like there was then. Those companies which have survived to today from that era are undoubtedly surviving on old tooling designs. Or, like Ortofon, are trying to transition to next gen manufacturing approaches similar to 3D printing. Without question, any design I would do today would have to account for low tooling investment in the traditional sense. This argues for the more custom, hand-built and therefore more expensive end of the market. And of course, that reduces the volume further pushing the ROI equation ever further into higher pricing regimes. It will take some real creativity to keep pricing in that $250-500 range while minimizing tooling investment. Ahhh, the age old question of market price elasticity! The more things change, the more the fundamentals stay the same.
Thanks guys, the conversation is indeed most stimulating. I hesitate to say how my thoughts on doing this are progressing but I will say that the effort continues in both design and market analysis.
But I am pretty decent at marketing. It's also a vastly different world out there in that regard. Your business is literally world-wide as soon as you 'open the door'. You'll probably save on the 'brick and mortar' aspect of it all if you can do it out of your home. Even with packaging - you could even 'brown bag it' (generic boxes rather than fancy printed containers with plastic inserts and such which could cut costs down further. Lots of things like that can help the overhead costs.
