[spyder1]

The remaining Pulses, the Sources, the Vi Dacs, the analog components and anything else I may have forgotten. What's going on with these?

Apparently, Larry is focused 100% on "Wave Project." All other IGG campaigns are of no consequence.

 

[Bill2112]

Is LHL out of business? Wouldn't they be legally required to file for bankruptcy and list all the backers as creditors? I ordered a product from an online store that went under before the order shipped. I was listed as a creditor in the court filing. I got something like 25 cents per dollar owed.

Edit: I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly sure LH Labs is in violation of the law. The corporate entity is dissolved due to not filing their taxes. That might mean they are in violation of tax law. Further, you can't simply just walk away if the company has creditors, which is what those with unfilled orders are.

https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/C...&SearchCriteria=LH+Labs&SearchSubType=Keyword

The are hiding behind IGG's Terms of Reference. LHLabs has no money left. Nothing.

 

[VandyMan]

The are hiding behind IGG's Terms of Reference. LHLabs has no money left. Nothing.

Yeah, but they were incorporated in California (and Delaware). California has strong consumer protection laws and those laws may well supersede the IGG terms.

 

[514077]

Apparently, Larry is focused 100% on "Wave Project." All other IGG campaigns are of no consequence.

Sounds like he's focused on avoidance.

 

[bernardperu]

Apparently, Larry is focused 100% on "Wave Project." All other IGG campaigns are of no consequence.

Larry is focused on the Chinese market. I would love to ask him what happened to our USD$6 Million.

 

[Bill2112]

Where did the money go? We've been asking that for ages. Larry refuses to answer....likely because he doesn't know.

 

[bernardperu]

Where did the money go? We've been asking that for ages. Larry refuses to answer....likely because he doesn't know.

I think I got pretty close to the answer and that is why LH Labs offered me money to keep it to myself (I have proof).

 

[VandyMan]

I think I got pretty close to the answer and that is why LH Labs offered me money to keep it to myself (I have proof).

I think we would all like to know, so please share.

However, I suspect the money was spent legitimately for the most part. At one point, they had a staff of 4-5 in California, contractors in China, and were creating PCB and casework prototypes regularly. It is not hard to imagine that they had a pretty high burn rate for a few years. It easily could have been 1-2 million per year.

It sounds like Larry/Gavin took some money out of the business as salary and bonus, but that is to be expected. We may think they over-paid themselves based on what they delivered, but a competitive salary for those roles in California is high. Plus, they did ship a few things (Pulse DACs, bluetooth receiver, etc) and given their incompetence, may have taken a loss on each of those.

While I think they might have committed a crime by not properly disclosing their creditors to the states where their corporation was registered and I think their business practices were unethical and incompetent, I'd like to see proof that they stole the money before I believe it.

 

[stuck limo]

However, I suspect the money was spent legitimately for the most part. At one point, they had a staff of 4-5 in California, contractors in China, and were creating PCB and casework prototypes regularly. It is not hard to imagine that they had a pretty high burn rate for a few years. It easily could have been 1-2 million per year.

It sounds like Larry/Gavin took some money out of the business as salary and bonus, but that is to be expected. We may think they over-paid themselves based on what they delivered, but a competitive salary for those roles in California is high. Plus, they did ship a few things (Pulse DACs, bluetooth receiver, etc) and given their incompetence, may have taken a loss on each of those.

LH and others have touched on this multiple times, but overhead + salaries/bonuses + R&D + whatever else goes into building a product. Then, there was a failed Steam product (phone pairing DAC) that morphed into Wave. Then the marketing team decided to put other manufacturers' headphones and cables into bundles/sales promotions. They hired both in-house R&D engineers, mechanical engineer and ID designers + outside contractors, for more than 8 people working on the project. Add on top of that two technical structure changes which cost money/time/etc., then you have no funds left after all the issues/mismanagement/overhead/etc.

 

[Bill2112]

"you have no funds left after all the issues/mismanagement/overhead/etc."

Please explain the mismanagement part.

The most important takeaway from the new update on delivery:

“We don’t have a formal release time line for that.”

Thanks but no thanks. I still want a refund.

The latest update claims there was "only" about $650K for Wave. This is over a million dollars less than is shown at the Indiegogo page.

The update claims there are "less than 10" remaining configurations; the last chart I saw from LHL showed either 3 or 4 as I recall.

There is a claim that there is a new PCB without some problems of the old PCB, but also that there is yet another "much better" one.

So neither the configurations nor even the PCB appear to be finalized after a claim of many years of work by a substantial but unspecified number of people, and over a million dollars seems to have gone missing somewhere in the meantime.

There was a RC in 2017 that disappeared....just the the beta boards that came after. Who knows how many different designs there were.

[merged]

 

[jdog]

@stuck limo, does Larry or anyone else with Light Harmonic or what's left of LH Labs have any idea what it's going to cost to produce all the Waves that people perked for (even if there is consolidation of many variants into a few)? Your latest update suggests that even if all goes "as planned" for the current PCB, it will be at least October 2019 (? very wishful thinking) before an independent Wave prototype will be produced... And if this prototype meets the expectations of the 5 people who will review it, where does Larry propose to get the money to produce all the Waves he owes the backers?? And please don't tell us again that the money will trickle down from profits earned by Light Harmonic without giving some idea about the profits Light Harmonic is currently turning out. Thanks.

 

[Bill2112]

@stuck limo, does Larry or anyone else with Light Harmonic or what's left of LH Labs have any idea what it's going to cost to produce all the Waves that people perked for (even if there is consolidation of many variants into a few)? Your latest update suggests that even if all goes "as planned" for the current PCB, it will be at least October 2019 (? very wishful thinking) before an independent Wave prototype will be produced... And if this prototype meets the expectations of the 5 people who will review it, where does Larry propose to get the money to produce all the Waves he owes the backers?? And please don't tell us again that the money will trickle down from profits earned by Light Harmonic without giving some idea about the profits Light Harmonic is currently turning out. Thanks.

Larry doesn't have the money for production. Jarek has stated that anything to be produced will be done so as Light Harmonic gets funding. There is no other cash.

 

[judmarc]

LH and others have touched on this multiple times, but overhead + salaries/bonuses + R&D + whatever else goes into building a product. Then, there was a failed Steam product (phone pairing DAC) that morphed into Wave. Then the marketing team decided to put other manufacturers' headphones and cables into bundles/sales promotions. They hired both in-house R&D engineers, mechanical engineer and ID designers + outside contractors, for more than 8 people working on the project. Add on top of that two technical structure changes which cost money/time/etc., then you have no funds left after all the issues/mismanagement/overhead/etc.

As with many things in this saga, there have been multiple varying statements about this. The funds for the "failed" version (I believe more than the amount originally solicited for the campaign) were rolled over into the new campaign, which was funded far above the requested amount. For anyone who understands the economics of production, this means it becomes cheaper to produce the product: You have both fixed and variable costs, and more funding means more items, in turn meaning the fixed costs represent a smaller share of the cost of each item.

Nevertheless, LH has stated he realized very early on that producing the Wave would lose money. In a situation of overfunding and thus proportionally smaller fixed costs, this means the original product planning was extremely poor - rather hard to accomplish for a small consumer electronics item.

Once realizing so early that actually providing the item would be a money loser, the obvious next step was to provide refunds, since this would be less costly and much quicker than production. Instead we are told LHL did the opposite, ramping up development efforts at greater cost than previously planned; efforts which produced precisely nothing, though that isn't what updates related at the time. We were provided ever-evolving ship dates rather than being told this large expensive team was utterly unsuccessful at designing anything that worked - which surely would have been evident internally rather quickly.

In an environment where items of comparable or greater sophistication were prodiced in far less time at lower cost to backers or purchasers (Pono and the Dragonfly series come to mind immediately - I'm sure people can think of others), none of this - that Wave would be a money loser to produce after being overfunded; that it was known to be a money loser to produce, so the response was to throw more money into production; that a large expensive team was utterly unable to get to even a working prototype stage for a not unusually sophisticated item in this space (portable consumer audio electronics) in several years' time - makes sense or hangs together for me as a coherent explanation.

 

[Bill2112]

As with many things in this saga, there have been multiple varying statements about this. The funds for the "failed" version (I believe more than the amount originally solicited for the campaign) were rolled over into the new campaign, which was funded far above the requested amount. For anyone who understands the economics of production, this means it becomes cheaper to produce the product: You have both fixed and variable costs, and more funding means more items, in turn meaning the fixed costs represent a smaller share of the cost of each item.

Nevertheless, LH has stated he realized very early on that producing the Wave would lose money. In a situation of overfunding and thus proportionally smaller fixed costs, this means the original product planning was extremely poor - rather hard to accomplish for a small consumer electronics item.

Once realizing so early that actually providing the item would be a money loser, the obvious next step was to provide refunds, since this would be less costly and much quicker than production. Instead we are told LHL did the opposite, ramping up development efforts at greater cost than previously planned; efforts which produced precisely nothing, though that isn't what updates related at the time. We were provided ever-evolving ship dates rather than being told this large expensive team was utterly unsuccessful at designing anything that worked - which surely would have been evident internally rather quickly.

In an environment where items of comparable or greater sophistication were prodiced in far less time at lower cost to backers or purchasers (Pono and the Dragonfly series come to mind immediately - I'm sure people can think of others), none of this - that Wave would be a money loser to produce after being overfunded; that it was known to be a money loser to produce, so the response was to throw more money into production; that a large expensive team was utterly unable to get to even a working prototype stage for a not unusually sophisticated item in this space (portable consumer audio electronics) in several years' time - makes sense or hangs together for me as a coherent explanation.

This is a very good post. However, LHL did announce a release candidate in Sept of 2017....so they had something....unless it was not true. If what you assert is true that they chose this continue instead of refunding, then this is also on IGG as well...no oversight and no caring about backers. Obviously they had no internal controls as it is evident they have no idea where the money went....including to "normal" sales bonuses and salaries.

It could also be the case the everyone and every transaction was paid in cash, thus the planning and cash issues....if there are no records there can be no planning.

[merged]

 

[judmarc]

If they truly had something in a condition we would normally think of as a "release candidate" in September 2017 (fully operational, a few last bugs to be worked out) and couldn't get it into production in the intervening two years, that tells you (1) how close it really was to a working model, (2) a lot about an organization that can't get a fully operational release candidate into production in 2 years, or (3) both.

Remember also:

- This was 2 years after the first projected ship date, if I remember correctly.

- For at least one other failed LHL crowdfunding project, backers were asked to pay for imminent shipment of products that never shipped (or, apparently, were even produced).