When talking to people about this item, we often hear... "Perception? Odd name for a hub." Here is the story.  We do all our own wheelbuilding at SpeedCific.  For years we've been frustrated by the vast pricing gap between mass-market Shimano™  hubs and high-performance aftermarket brands.  It has always required a huge jump in price to get any significant improvement in performance over Dura-Ace™.  After talking to a number of manufacturers about this issue, we discovered that the primary factor dictating the pricing of aftermarket hubs is not actual cost, but consumer perception based on price.  In other words, unless a manufacturer sets their MSRP sky-high, consumers won't think their product is as good as all the other hubs that also cost a fortune. 

We are not convinced that all cycling consumers are incapable of looking past a price tag and intelligently comparing features.  The "who can charge the most" competition also has very serious drawbacks for both dealers and consumers.  For bike shops, this has made it next-to-impossible for them to build their own wheels. Mail order vendors routinely sell Shimano™ hubs below dealer cost. Any superior aftermarket hub set is so expensive one is usually able to make more money selling pre-made wheels.  Instead of being able to focus on workmanship and customization, the bike shop is reduced to selling the exact same pre-built products everyone else offers and simply competing on price alone.

For consumers, this means that they lose access to custom built wheels and are forced to select "one size fits most" pre-built products.  The goal of our Perception hub set is quite simply to offer a product with clearly superior performance to the best mass-market hubs at a comparable price.  We figure a certain group of performance-oriented consumers are knowledgeable enough to look at features and not be wowed by price tags alone. These are the same folks who understand the superiority of custom wheels.