[StanD]

The circuit boards are fine. Our board house washes all of our boards in water after they do the wave soldering. Spray from the sprinkler won't hurt them at all. Tony will clean them up, test them, and have them back out on the line in no time. If they had been plugged in and powered up when they got wet, then it would have been a very bad day. One of the first things I did after completing my personal cranial-rectal inversion was to turn off the power in the building.

Well Jason thought you were level headed, turning off the power prevented putting in some for hire adverts.

 

[tigon_ridge]

  There's a guy named Rafe Esquith who teaches 5th grade in an inner city LA CA school.  He's won all sorts of awards, taking kids who are tremendously at risk and having them do Shakespeare (the Royal Shakespeare Company now comes over from England to attend performances) and bust all the averages for testing and achievement at his school.  He's published several books, had documentaries made about him, been recognized by Presidents, etc.
 
So I heard this interview with him, and the host asked what motivated him to put in the time and work and money he constantly does to achieve these results, when with his talents he could probably be doing pretty much anything he wanted.  I expected the usual stuff about the power of love for his kids.
 
His answer?  "Anger."  Yeah, anger.  He said he just resented the heck out of the fact that his kids and the school were so disadvantaged; that no one cared enough to do anything about it; and he just figured by God, he was gonna show them.  Great stuff.  Maybe the first time in my life I've had a big grin on my face listening to someone talk about how angry they were.  Interesting what can make a great teacher.

And there was the legendary Jaime Escalante who single-handedly introduced the AP Calculus curriculum to a miserably failing high school, saving it, and leaving behind a legacy of many students passing the Advanced Placement exams at that school, even over a decade after he'd quit teaching there. The school went from hopeless to producing about 100 AP Calc students per year; the vast majority of them passing their Calc AB or BC exams. That doesn't even include the AP exams from other subjects, which were only introduced into the school curricula inspired by the success of the Calculus AP program. Citing Wiki, "In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570." Unfortunately, school politics and pettiness made Jaime ragequit his teaching position. They also refused to expand the school's number of Calc classes. Escalante's program was so popular among students, the students were willing to be crammed into his 2 classrooms of over 50 total students! It is unfortunate that rare, fantastic stories like these aren't as widely known as they deserve to be.

 

[audioholik]

 

• Lokis. Oh darn, DSD suffers another blow. But perhaps we should ask why there were a ton of Lokis up on the top rack, boxed and ready to go. The brutally honest reason? Because they don’t move, even if we put Ex-Lax in the boxes. Lokis are a painfully slow seller. On the other hand, the DSD furore has not put a dent in the increasing sales of our other DACs, hence Mike’s recent pronouncement that we won’t be doing much more with that, unless Sony opens its vaults for real and we suddenly have 4000 albums to choose from, and not at $45 each—which Mike and I think is about as probable as Neil Young personally delivering a palletload of Ponos to me before I finish writing this.

 
The problem with the Loki was that it could not support higher DSD sampling rates than 64x, whereas most of other DSD DACs on the market already offered that capability (not to mention could also play PCM). That made the loki a non-starter for me, and evidently many others. That being said, an affordable 2x or 4x Schiit Tube DSD DAC would be a very different animal in my book:
 
2x and/or 4x DSD support - check
 
Tube analog stage - check
 
Affordable price tag - check
 
what's not to like? a great alternative to $2k+ PCM DACs.
 
Why spend $2k+ on a PCM DAC when I could easily upsample 44.1/96k PCM files to 2x or 4x DSD and achieve audio nirvana on the Schiit Tube DSD DAC sold at a fraction of the cost of a traditional pcm dac?

 

[Armaegis]

So Schiit makes a dac to handle a rare format, which sells poorly. So clearly the solution is to make an even more expensive dac (which from empirical evidence from their products line results in lower net profits) to handle and an even rarer format...

 

[SoupRKnowva]

Here comes the excuse brigade, not realize how small of a market actually cares about DSD. It's a fad. Amongst a niche. It's a niche of a niche. Not worth caring about.

 

[audioholik]

  So Schiit makes a dac to handle a rare format, which sells poorly. So clearly the solution is to make an even more expensive dac (which from empirical evidence from their products line results in lower net profits) to handle and an even rarer format...

You missed my point. All pcm files can be upsampled to 2x or 4x DSD. And with the Schiit Tube DAC capable of handling such stream, the product would be very tempting indeed.
 
Take note that Mytek has already sold more 3000 units of its 192-DSD DAC, iFi/AMR has been churning out successful DSD devices for some time now. But they are capable of playing DSD at higher rates than the Loki and are also backwards compatible with PCM. 

 

[fenderf4i]

I do agree, if it supported DSD128, I would have purchased one a long time ago.

 

[daerron]

Jason, I'd suggest replacing the water sprinkling system with a gas extinguishing one. Should be a great incentive to be more careful with that forklift! 

 I used to work in a lab full of Halon canisters to save sensitive electronics. Apparently Halon is not dangerous, but you definitely don't want to be the person attempting to find out.

 

[madwolfa]

I do agree, if it supported DSD128, I would have purchased one a long time ago.

 
Yep, you and your friend... M-kay. Huge market indeed...

 

[madwolfa]

  And with the Schiit Tube DAC capable of handling such stream, the product would be very tempting indeed.

 
Schiit told many times they wouldn't do a tube DAC. What's the point? And what is exactly tempting in it for a relatively mass market?

 

[audioholik]

I do agree, if it supported DSD128, I would have purchased one a long time ago.

 
Same here. If it were a Tube DSD128 DAC, it would make my choice even easier.

 

[audioholik]

   
Schiit told many times they wouldn't do a tube DAC. What's the point? 

Why? Schiit already produces tube amps, right?
 
The point would be to bring Tube DSD 2x or 4x quality to audiophiles on the budget..... Tube DSD DACs like the one from Lampizator are praised for their SQ, but they cost a lot of money. 
 
"So what does the Lampi Level 4 DAC sound like? In a word, wonderful. This is a very quiet DAC in terms of its noise floor which allows the music to emerge out of a very black background. The Level 4 DAC has very good dynamics, tonal shading, and it doesn't emphasize any part of the frequency spectrum across the audio band when playing back DSD. The Lampi has a definite high frequency purity about it. The Lampi is very fast and dynamic and again, you would never guess it uses tubes."
 
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue73/lampizator.htm

 

[madwolfa]

  Why? Schiit already produces tube amps, right?

 
Amps ain't DACs.

 

[fenderf4i]

Yep, you and your friend... M-kay. Huge market indeed...

lol. I'm just telling it like it is.

 

[SoupRKnowva]

Amps ain't DACs.

Plus a million