I have had terrific deals on eBay on NEW drivers and have also purchased from Speaker City, Parts express and Madisound.
I have mixed and matched (found gems and turds)

http://www.partsexpress.com/
http://www.speakercity.com/
http://www.madisound.com/

 

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showd...number=290-302

This is the stuff I'm talking about.

Ok, install is 90% but after that, is a 10 dollar driver really going to preform as well as say a 500 dollar set of Focal Polyglass?

Also...not to stray off topic but, is there an advantage to a sheilded driver in a car? It's useful in home audio but is it going to make any difference in the preformance in-car?

 

There is much more to that speaker than just a $45.00 super tweeter.
Lets count the drivers shall we:
1 10" sub (in a sealed enclosure tuned to 15hz)
1 8" Midbass
1 2" midrange
1 1" tweeter
1 3/4" supertweeter

So thats 5 drivers, a hell of alot of wood (keep in mind these are not your standard glued and screwed mdf boxes) and one complex crossover system.

Sure you could buy 1 of those 5 drivers for $45.00 (and I am sure Totem gets them for much cheaper) - yet how much do you think the rest of the drivers cost?

Sure it may be easy to order raw drivers - but then what do you do with them?
There is a reason speakers cost sooo much money even though raw drivers don't.

Of course the price also unfortunatly reflects what the market will pay.

Back to your original question...yes you can get very good raw drivers for cheap. Just make sure you spend some time researching the enclosure and crossover design (even if you go active you must still crossover properly).

And no, I see no benifit to using sheilded drivers - unless you have a CRT TV mounted next to your kick panels...

 

So true.


As for what I think the rest of the drivers cost?...well lets see....they use a Dyn driver and a Scan, so you do the math...I'm not sure what the sub driver is though.