Hey all,
I may or may not have a chapter by the end of the week, so I thought I'd give a little better summary of what happened at Newport, our thoughts on speakers, and what's coming.
First, the reason there are fewer chapters is that I'm BUSY. There are a LOT of prototypes flying around the shop at the moment (not literally--we're not going to suddenly start making drones), and some of them are pretty complex. And some of them will be a big surprise (beyond what I've hinted at.) So I'm more than usually occupied with testing, debugging, refining, etc.
With respect to the show, or TheShow, I'm glad we went. For the one day I was there, I noticed several things:
1. Our room: always packed. Other rooms on the floor: not so much. Could this be because our system was 1/10 to 1/20 the price of the others? Yeah, there you go. To the other guys ignoring the elephant in the room: that's a hint.
2. People seemed genuinely surprised that Schiit could "behave" and present well, like a normal audio company. About 99.9% of this I have to credit to Jim Salk, who manned the playlist through his own streamer.
3. Our room sounded amazing--easily in the top 10 rooms I heard, ever. This, despite the fact it was NOT covered in acoustic foam, bass traps, and other, more, ahem, "physically improbable, but overpriced" tuning devices. Again, the credit here is to the Salk speakers, which seem to be very forgiving in terms of setup. We're getting a set for the listening room at Schiit (yes, we're adding a dedicated listening room, as we continue to expand.)
4. The other busy rooms also skewed inexpensive--try to get into the Elac room...it was impossible. Again, hint hint.
5. Among the 2-channel crowd, only about 50% know who we are...which isn't really surprising, since we've concentrated mainly on headphone and desktop stuff until now.
So yes, it was very well worth going, and I'm looking forward to the next show, where we can (hopefully) rectify the inequity between electronics cost and speaker cost. The Salk speakers were $2900. Our stack was $4000. I'd much rather see the stack at a lower cost than the speakers. Much lower. And with more power. A lot more power. And a remote. Yes, those are all hints.
At the same time, if anyone thinks we're taking our eye off the ball on the desktop side, weeeeeelllllll...I'd say, there's still a whole summer--and a lot of year--left.
All the best,
Jason