Care to expand on how those mids warrant the price compared to the SB Acoustic line of speakers? Details on motor technology and such would be a plus if you're trying to market these as high quality speakers.
It's probably in the suspension. A stiffer suspension to work in an IB setup, like the factory location in a door, while maintaining good efficiency & the characteristics of the home audio equivalent isn't easy. Likewise, the materials used will have to be able to cope with a hot/cold, dry/wet, & vibration prone environment that's in a car. Furthermore, the car environment is a noisy one and these speaker will have to withstand a lot more power to overcome normal road noise, which the home audio equivalents are not.
Basically, they have to toughen up the home audio version without losing any fidelity.
This is why there are $1,000+ speakers on the market and it's why most, if not all, sound phenomenal while being very durable. I'm not speaking on Arc's behalf, I've never seen/heard them, but in my dealings with higher end car electronics I understand where these premium prices come from. I also expect the component set, with passives, to be right around $1k and in-line with the likes of the higher end speakers sets on the market. The uber-premium $2-3k drivers are more of a halo product and/or experiment. Those manufacturers do not expect to sell lots of those sets, maybe a dozen, but they do expect having such products in their lineup to help drive customers into their lower-end "bread and butter" speakers. It makes an awareness and gives customers the perception of having something tied to a very exclusive and advanced product.
Not quite as simple as "it's overpriced".
Even so, if a dealer has a $1k set of Arc components on their display you'd be surprised at how that can be used as a selling tool to move their lower lines. Most manufacturers, even outside of the world of audio, have done something like this is the past.
