Like recent poster I believe and trust LH Labs will deliver a good product. I researched their company background 3 or 4 years ago before taking the plunge on my first crowd funding venture with them because just at that time my long standing DAP failed and the problem with most has been battery which is irreplaceable so that the idea that Geek Wave would have a replaceable battery appealed enormously.
I suspect they Larry was misled or encouraged by certain individuals who apparently are no longer around. As yes quality products (like university research and dissertations) do take a long time to development and bring to completion. If I may say so I think the problem in misleading came from a belief that more other products could be meshed into the development of the Wave which proved mostly not to be true. So that the situation became messy through a managerial business decision of not understanding fully the audio electronic industry. I trust Larry as his own tone in announcements was quite different. I think Larry may also have been mislead by the possibility of 3d printing which was the rising craze and cannot deliver what it was thought to unless you make a really big investment for metal 3d printing which is quite beyond a small company like LH Labs. I hope for them to remain small and dependable and that each DAP will be thoroughly tested before being shipped out as I certainly cannot afford paying shipping fees back and forth for little fixes as I live far away overseas. I still believe in an old fashioned world where I will pay for quality and expect it to last a lifetime.
To be honest I know very little about audio equipment and engineering, although earlier many years of actual live concert going to the hear the “stars” in Europe has sensitized me to what is good sounding, not apart from my own musical upbringing I abandoned as a troubled teenager - stoopid me.
I am now some 50 years later a retired academic who not only taught but was privy to much of the financial stuff going on at universities and found it hard to talk sense to the so called cookie cutter administrators and academics become Deans and Vice Chancellors, who all had their eye on making money and treated university degrees as products like a one-time sale of cookies over the counter, and forgot about customer loyalty investment and its returns and quality in order to make up for the continual erosion of government funding for a supposedly free education system in a so called democratic system. In other words funds were decreased but expenses rose through cost of living and at the same almost in contradiction the governments put caps on what universities could charge so as to pretend at election time that university education was still a universal right for all at very little cost to the student in pay back later schemes. This encouraged university administrators to do exactly that as was done in the early Geek Wave campaign, to make wild promises about education products they could not fulfill and adopt silly time wasting processes and languages aimed at making the customers the students feel happy. Quality Assurance schemes became elaborate form filling and data collection exercise which employed ever more administrators and ever less teachers and so that the business administrators slowly took over running of education until it has become in many institutions a worthless piece of paper these days. The administrators developed their own rhetoric to prove to the voting public in customer happiness forms that students were doing well when in fact they were being hollowed out with a business minded cancer which killed the real organs of education.
We have seen the ultimate outcomes of this sort of thing in the recent popular label in the media of the Post-Truth Era and exactly what sort of leaders it can throw up world wide.
I hope that Larry can learn from how the Custom Art company has developed, and that we will all be enjoying our electronic listening experiences on that dreadfully named DAP called a “GEEK” Wave (for heaven’s sake what an awful childish name…and they may well do to rename it before comes out so as to make a break with the troubled development history) which are still just a substitute for the real thing. I am not disparaging this as we all like to have wide open and high sound stages that mimic what it is possible to experience in halls with the separation of instruments and to experience a wide dynamic range of every instrument at every pitch. One good thing is that this technology has made it possible for many more to experience music they could not have either because of financial or geographical reasons basically. It could encourage them to seek out the real thing or even learn to play themselves on a real instrument. For all that we owe audio engineers ad developers like Larry a great debt of gratitude.
I hope I have not bored anyone with y essay reminding folk of how reality is being radically restructured in this so called Post Truth World. (I do not and never will get a Facebook, snapchat or whatsapp account, etc.). I spent a lot of my time explaining to student how opinions could be manipulated and fraudulent results be gained which would earn them worthless research degrees.
And I look forward in declining years to still be able to appreciate via the excellent DAP Larry will deliver us to the music I love that keeps me sane in difficulty times and in culturally unfamiliar territories where I worked and to the music which has formed my sense of structured order that is constantly being modulated and transformed but remains order nevertheless.
