kevin gilmore
Señor Stax. Señor MAXX.
Can Jam '10 Organizer
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2001
- Posts
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A long time ago the VP of massdrop contacted me about making my amplifiers for them. We had a long discussion about pricing etc and I quickly determined that I would loose money, or barely break even for the price point they were shooting for. I was not willing to make the changes to the design to be able to make any money at the price they wanted to sell for.
A patent in the USA has a minimum cost of 960,000. This includes the patent application and the maintenance for the 20 years. Plus there is no way to patent a layout. And lots of other rules. No way schiit would have the money for this. In fact even Nelson Pass stopped patenting stuff because of the price.
Are the boards virtually identical, you bet. Likely that design is actually a 3rd party design sold to both sosolar and arist.
Fact is that many companies including totaldac and soekris and MSB use virtually the same electronic design. Same switches in most
Cases, and everyone seems to use the same fpga. That probably means that there is available purchaseable software from someone
For that chip. R2R ladder dacs are by their nature identical. You really have only 2 versions, sign/magnitude and linear.
holodac is also the same thing with a little extra stuff on it to compensate for the resistors accuracy, and the variations of the switches.
Denafrips and audio-go are also the same thing.
Stuff from China is as others have said stolen and resold unbelievably fast. For example ksa5 clone boards directly copied from my Gerbers.
Also the liquid silver which is an absolutely identical copy of the cavalli liquid gold. And for a stupidly low price. There are so many clones
Of expensive equipment available at low prices. Many Roland amps....
I'm not going to buy this item, I did get the massdrop cavalli Cth and massdrop liquid carbon, and both are completely unacceptable to me for various reasons. But the massdrop of the liquid carbon is much better built than the cavalli original.
I see no reason for massdrop to terminate this item.
A patent in the USA has a minimum cost of 960,000. This includes the patent application and the maintenance for the 20 years. Plus there is no way to patent a layout. And lots of other rules. No way schiit would have the money for this. In fact even Nelson Pass stopped patenting stuff because of the price.
Are the boards virtually identical, you bet. Likely that design is actually a 3rd party design sold to both sosolar and arist.
Fact is that many companies including totaldac and soekris and MSB use virtually the same electronic design. Same switches in most
Cases, and everyone seems to use the same fpga. That probably means that there is available purchaseable software from someone
For that chip. R2R ladder dacs are by their nature identical. You really have only 2 versions, sign/magnitude and linear.
holodac is also the same thing with a little extra stuff on it to compensate for the resistors accuracy, and the variations of the switches.
Denafrips and audio-go are also the same thing.
Stuff from China is as others have said stolen and resold unbelievably fast. For example ksa5 clone boards directly copied from my Gerbers.
Also the liquid silver which is an absolutely identical copy of the cavalli liquid gold. And for a stupidly low price. There are so many clones
Of expensive equipment available at low prices. Many Roland amps....
I'm not going to buy this item, I did get the massdrop cavalli Cth and massdrop liquid carbon, and both are completely unacceptable to me for various reasons. But the massdrop of the liquid carbon is much better built than the cavalli original.
I see no reason for massdrop to terminate this item.
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