I think one of the biggest problems with the Sierra-2 is the selling price being too low. Folks have been trained to equate sticker price with quality. So it's quite natural that people are comparing the Sierra-2 to other speakers that sell for around $1500/pair.
But those aren't really appropriate competition in terms of parts quality, sound quality, or how much it cost to make the speakers. That's the price that people ought to be more concerned about; if two pairs of speakers both cost $1000 to actually manufacture, but one has a selling price of $1500/pair while the other has a selling price of $5000/pair, why would we then assume that the $5000/pair speakers magically became better? They didn't, obviously; the selling price is arbitrary. I could take a pair of speakers that cost $1000 to manufacture and charge $10,000, and a whole bunch of people would now swear up and down that they're better than the $5000/pair speakers - just because of the psychology of pricing.
So Ascend's greatest flaw is charging such a small profit margin that it has people comparing the Sierra-2 to speakers that cost much less than the Sierra-2 to actually manufacture. If you're looking at other ID brands, a lot of the honestly more comparable speakers will be up in the $2500/pair range. Not all of them - there exist other ID brands that are also charging very small profit margins. But just in a more general "how do these compare?" sense, that's more the sort of price that other ID brands would charge for speakers that cost as much to make as the Sierra-2. If you're looking at retail store brands, it's more like $5000/pair or more. Again, not
always. But just in terms of mindset and what sort of real cost of manufacturing and expected results in return.
So when you look at it that way, you quickly realize what a remarkable bargain the Sierra-2 really are! That's why so many of us have clambered to buy them as quickly as we could! But for the majority of people, the price is actually a bit of a problem. They cannot reconcile that two pairs of speakers both selling for around the same price could be largely different in performance. But we ought to stop thinking in terms of price classes set by the selling price, and instead, focus on price classes set by how much it cost to
make the speakers. Of course, no brands really publicly share that information, so it's not the public's fault! All we have easy access to are the retail and "street" prices. So of course that's what we use for comparison. So that's why I mention the $2500/pair and $5000/pair figures. If we're forced to use selling prices, then those are the more appropriate "price brackets" for the Sierra-2 in the ID and retail store markets, respectively. Think of them that way, and you'll better understand why I would personally say that the Sierra-2 are a cut above the other speakers in this comparison thread here