Pie-in-the-sky, if you could have anything, product suggestion thread. - Page 5

You aren't far from our thinking at the moment. One conclusion we've come to is that as headphone amps get more fully featured, they really become "Desktop Audio Control Centers." Really more like a pre-amp with a good headphone jack than a pure headphone amp. Certainly, straight up headphone amps aren't going to go away, but I think that there is a strong likelyhood of seeing more and more of the desktop pre-amps as time goes on.

On you're above comment: it sounds pretty good to me. But, really, a phono stage. Are these things really mostly used on a desktop, if so, aren't you afraid of bumping your turntable in an office-like environment? Do people really give up space next to their desks for a turntable? I've been convinced of the eventuality of a phonostage (HEY! these things take years folks; settle down), but I'm skeptical of how many we'd sell. Tell me what you think, folks, I'm all ears.

<edit> Also, I keep wondering if people wouldn't really want the DAC separate if it had significant and numerous digital input capabilities. Then just use a headphone amp with two inputs---one for the DAC and one for an analog input.

No, it's not a bad idea. There's this terrible issue of not being able to afford to do everything. I think I'd rather see a Hard Disk based player first as you can rip stuff from a computer to the drive and then just play it off the hard drive player. Saddly, I can't do any of this in a hurry. I suppose I could say that in ten years we'll probably have a whole slew of stuff like that, it's not very satisfying though.

Nothing's out of the question if you're talking about ten years down the road. The tough question is how to keep rolling out product that people will want to buy and continue to make the line look complete and cohesive.

Also, talking about the future here is a bit of a tap dance: I am looking for expressions of what people want and want to encourage folks to talk about things they'd like to see. OTOH, I really don't want to queer current sales with talk of future product, or frustrate people with timelines that are as long as the necessarily are, or give the impression that the popularity of an idea is what will make it go into production. Some products (DAP, CD player) will take significant developement effort ($) and are a bit risky in that regard. Some products (DAC) are less developement intensive, but might not fit well into the current lineup. Some product are relatively easy (phono stage) but might not sell well. And all the while, every time we release a product it has to make sense in the contex of the rest of the line.

At the moment we're focussing on taking the final steps to get the new Micros and portables into the lineup. Then our speaker stands and class-D amps will come out. At that point, we've got a pretty full-on solution for the desktop environment in terms of the pre-amp and backend of the system. The problem is that we really can't overly rely on sales of a full-blown system on people's desktop. While we think it will sell quite well, we have to continue service all our potential customers, so we do this round-robin thing where we kind of rotate between high-end, virsatile perfomance desktop, and portable listening applications. My belief is that we need to crank out a couple of killer headphone amps for the purist blood out there. (The HA-2 replacement amp is one, the other I can't talk about, but is at least 1 1/2 years away.) Then do some work on the small portable front. Then comeback to the desktop environment. Of course, it doesn't really happen as linearly as that, but you get the idea.

So sorry for this long post that doesn't really say much. I told you that I've got to tap dance a bit here. But just because I can't say too much too strongly, or that there might be apparent contradictions in what I say, doesn't mean I'm not listening very intently or trying to tell you as much as I can. It's just that I'm not entirely sure of what's going to happen (in part because your comments here effect and change what we think), and gets a bit befuddled due to the need for some confidentiality. I can tell you I'm being as honest as I can at the moment that I'm speaking, but it's just honest speculation for the most part.