Since when was DIY expensive in comparison with commercial products? Any commercial product can be obliterated by a much cheaper DIY product.
I don't even know what to say. You obviously haven't seen much DIY. Especially outside the world of headphones.
So just because someone chooses not to waste stupid money, it's not high quality? Many commercial amps have enclosures that cost times more than the internals.
lol what? How does that metaphor even apply to audio equipment?
I don't know what your friends are like, but I know people would be impressed if by self-built gear. What do you think is more impressive to someone who doesn't know anything about audio (and there are many people out there who scoff at audiophiles)?
- I bought an awesome $3k amplifier for my headphone.
- I built a $1k amplifier for my headphone from scratch. It beats products out there costing three times as much. I could have spend a couple more hundred bucks on a case, but I didn't.
Once again, the choices are simple:
- Good looking $3k commercial amp
- "incomplete" looking $2k DIY amp that utterly destroys the $3k commercial amp
- DIY amp stuck in a case that looks even better than the commercial amp for $3k and still utterly destroys the $3k commercial amp
Wouldn't most people choose the second choice? That is what you see and that is where your impressions come from.
So what do commercial makers have that separates them from DIY makers in terms of the quality of enclosures they can produce? Two CNC lathes?