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Originally Posted by estreeter /img/forum/go_quote.gif
And its my sincere hope that Jason is about to do exactly what he threatened to do when folk asked him why he would release something which will undoubtedly cannibalize sales of his earlier products: blow everything else NuForce has released (under the Icon product line, at least) out of the water.
Wild, totally speculative *hype*, no question, but I'm counting the days. When someone exceeds expectations at a given price point, your expectations go up a few notches when they raise the price point on their new toy - at least mine do.
Bring - it - on.
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We have been following our strategy since 2005! It happened with our high-end amplifier (hey, we actually own several US patents) and other high-end products too. Our $1450 CDP-8 (just released) sounded better than a famous world class reference quality CDP priced at $7000.
It is the philosophy that if you don't kill your own products, someone else will do it for you. It is compete or die mindset.
How do we make the best value for money products? There are several "secrets":
1) Know the entire supplier network well. For example, we heard about a famous volume control cost a lot of money (it is used in some very expensive products that cost thousands of $). So we dig around and found the supplier that makes the critical parts, the volume control pot. And we buy a lot of them! So your $99 uDAC uses some serious high-end parts. This is not easy. You got to KNOW the supplier network and due to potential conflict, most of them will not tell you. So your supplier has to trust you and some of his supplier friends have to trust him etc. There is nothing illegal about what we're doing but supplier usually tries to protect their customer.
2) Keep up to date with technology. Chips companies constantly come up with new stuff. Again, if you have good contacts, you get to see the best stuff before everyone find out. We evaluated several DACs and found out that ESS 9022 Sabre DAC has the best performance for this price range. Hey, ESS Tech's engineers were surprised that we can make their chip sounded so good (uDAC was displayed at their showroom at CES). This is not surprising. There is a lot of know-how involved. You can't just put together the best spec and most expensive parts and expect to have the best sounding product.
3) Don't be greedy. Keep margin low, spread cost amount several products. If we think that a $99 product can't use the same top of the line volume pot as our much more expensive products, then we don't have the buying power to push cost down.
4) Don't hold back. A supplier of our CDP-8 told us something like "the clocking scheme that you are using is over killed, it is only used in very expensive players costly a few times more than your target price. The traditional thinking is that you have to hold back so that you can come up with a more expensive model later. Our approach is different. We have a target list price, our target cost. As long as it is within the cost, go make the damn best product possible. We could have sold uDAC at $149, perhaps with a larger chassis and some extra capacitors to make it look "expensive" and bigger. But $99 would be more affordable and keep it below the magic $100 psychological price point
. I am cheap, and I want to be able to carry a good sounding uDAC in my laptop bag. So the decision was easy. I would want to pay $99 (NOT can we get away with selling at $149) so we sell it at $99
