Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up

[bkb911t]

If your super auto folks, I have been for a decade. I recommend Miele , they are expensive, I got the intro model, but one has access to all internals for cleaning. The brew unit and spouts. If you drink dark roasts and lots of coffee, this is a supreme advantage to access, remove, clean components. I like Jura but you don’t have access, one year, it could be a few, it will gum up no matter what cleaning/descaling tablet procedures one does.
Miele frankly rules dishwashers as well.

Happy JURA user here although you are right about the gumming. Just sent mine in for service. It’s strange that my parents have had the same one for 20 years and no issues…probably something design-wise

 

[Whazzzup]

I think they are right, my a1 Jura I bought 15 years ago had no issues for 8 years. Subsequent models had to be serviced about every two years. I got frustrated, put the ena 4 Jura in our basement kitchen, picked up Meile, I think this unit will last a lifetime…..burr grinder aside, that’s a wearable part

 

[Syan25]

@Whazzzup

Oh you are just a wonderful person. Thanks. I will never get tired of your jubilant comments. Keep them coming...

 

[Paladin79]

The rain finally stopped here and all fallen tree limbs of decent size have been cut into firewood. 52 degrees f with a high of 71, I love the Fall. I need to figure out a better music system for my fire pit area so I hope to work on that soon.

 

[jonathan c]

I need to figure out a better music system for my fire pit area so I hope to work on that soon.

....

....

 

[Ripper2860]

It’s really good to have you here, I enjoy your comments and the cat photos.

You know this is the Internet, right? He can make comments and post cat pics from Germany as well.

 

[golfbravobravo]

Yep. The moment you accept another country’s citizenship, you’re automatically losing your German one.
If you want to keep both, you have to file an application with your German consulate general in which you have to make a case for why you should be permitted to keep both and they’ll decide on a case-by-case basis. Among the reasons that tend to be accepted are owning a business with employees in Germany or if you have to care for sick relatives there.
I couldn’t think of a good enough reason, I don’t intend to ever move back, and I wasn’t in the mood to have my fate decided by some faceless clerk on a power trip. So I didn’t file and just let things take it’s natural course.

At least that’s how it was back in 2017 when I got my American citizenship. I think this might have (finally) changed a year or two after I got mine, but I’m not sure. I quite frankly stopped caring about these things once I got nationalized.

But whether it has since changed or not, the entire policy always felt incredibly petty to me. Like if an entire country is pouting at you like a little child and taking away your passport because you left them.

That's interesting, it would have made it a very hard decision for me if the UK had a similar requirement. I valued my European status and the ability to work and live across Europe. Now I care less, as the ability to vote is removed after 15 years. I didn't vote on principle in domestic matters once I left, but I was also denied a vote on Brexit which DID fundamentally affect me. But the UK bureaucracy gets worse and worse.

I just had a defining moment when the UK refused to renew my British passport - which I have held for well over 50 years, and was a government service passport first issued by the military - as a new law requires submission of a copy of every page of every other passport held. My middle name was omitted form my naturalization certificate, so my US passport only had a first and last name. That fact apparently made me enough of a threat that my passport couldn't be renewed. After six months of to and fro with the UK passport office, I added my middle name on my US passport (a process that was surprisingly straightforward) and am, it seems, no longer a significant threat to the UK.

The only knighthood I would ever receive would be from a condom shop, so a British passport is of limited value, but I keep it in case I do want to spend longer than 90 days in the UK. And to become an American I had to forswear all foreign princes and potentates anyway.

I do wonder if this works in reverse too? Jody's kid's grandfather came here via kinder transport, and that gives them an ability to seek German citizenship which they are investigating. I wonder if they would have to give up their US citizenship if the pursue it.

Cheers

 

[Paladin79]

.... ....

I do like the second option.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

2024 Chapter 9
Like, Well, Duh

Everyone working on the creative side of things has had this experience:

You have a great idea, and you work your butt off to make it perfect. To refine it, to find all the best ways to bring it to another level, to create something you’re Truly Proud Of.

Then you show it off to your friends, and someone says:

“Why didn’t you (insert super-obvious idea that makes it 10,000% better)?”

And then you stand there, blinking as if struck in the head by a 10-lb sledge. And then you start wondering, “Man, I’m the biggest dumbass in Stupid Central. How’d I miss that?”

Yeah.

Cool.

Because sometimes we all need a reality check. Like with Gunnr.

Gunnr started when I had a relatively innocent conversation with a friend about Hel+, and all the wonderful things we did to make it more powerful, more reliable, higher performance, blah blah, woof woof…

And he said, “Well, for gaming, it would be great to have Width and Presence controls on it like Syn, wouldn’t it?”

OH HELL WUT…

Because he was 100% right.

So all that work, all those refinements, all those tweaks…yeah that’s cool, but we ended up where we ended up, which was Dumbassville.

And that’s what started us on what we originally called “Hel Yeah,” and then, later, changed to Gunnr. Because it’s really a different product. Wayyyyyyyy different.

Interested? Read on.

(And no, this won’t just be interesting if you’re into gaming.)

A Collision of Ideas

Here’s the thing: I’d already been thinking about a crazy idea that could improve Hel.

Namely, could we eliminate the need for a second USB for power?

Because having to use a second USB for power was a pain in the ass. I mean, yeah, it’s the way we get more power out of Hel than Fulla, but TWO USB connections? Argh.

So I had this weird idea: what if we could run Hel on a single USB connection at reduced power? Then you could take it anywhere and not have to worry about a USB brick or wall-wart or whatever. And, if you plugged in a wall-wart, you could get full power?

Sounds simple. But taking the rails from +/-5V with a switcher to, say, +/-15V with a linear supply—seamlessly—without any weirdness or driver-exploding stupidity when you plugged in the power supply, because no matter what we said, someone would try it—oh boy that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, right?

But that idea had stuck with me for a while. So when the idea to add Syn-like controls came in, it was a collision of ideas.

I mean, this would be a whole new thing. It would:

• Really be portable, as in you wouldn’t have to carry around a brick to run it
• Give you controls that nobody else had (Width and Presence)
• Allow you to better decode the surround cues in games, and enjoy headphones more like speakers, with a crossfeed-like matrix

That was exciting.

That was totally new.

That was a big deal.

The catch was: it was a totally different product, and nothing would fit.

“Where do you put all the knobs?” Tyler asked, after I explained the idea to him. He was excited about the concept as I was, as he already used a Syn for gaming. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Well, if we lose the switch for input and do autoswitching, maybe,” I told him.

But it didn’t take much mock-up to see he was right. The traditional Hel form-factor—as in, its less-wide-than-deep profile—simply didn’t work. To get all the controls on it, I’d have to swap it sideways, like a Magni.

Aside: despite this change, the Gunnr chassis is still significantly different than a Magni—in fact, it’s chassis is less tall, has a large top volume control, and shares exactly no stamping die with Magni. It’s it’s own thing.​

But that was only the beginning of the challenges.

As in, adding Syn-like controls—and having the ability to bypass them—added a lot of parts. A LOT of parts. Including fairly pricey parts like film capacitors and extra relays. Gunnr is a significantly more complex product than Hel.

And, at first, I wondered if it would all fit. Hel+ is already pretty full. Gunnr was really pushing the limits of what we could fit in that chassis.

And yeah, for a while, I wondered: is this do-able at all?


The First Hel Yeah

Yes. The first prototype bore the moniker “Hel Yeah.” Which just goes to show that even I prove the adage that you shouldn’t let engineers name things.

Aside: At the same time, I thought about renaming Hel and Fulla to Hek and Hek Yeah, because, well, you know, Texas and all, so it could have been even worse.​

And boy oh boy did I have some misgivings about it. Because the linear supply part of it took up a lot of space, much more than Hel’s old switcher. And the two extra relays needed for a true bypass of the Width and Presence controls ate a ton of space, and took a decent amount of power to run. And the whole logic of doing the Linear Override itself wasn’t super obvious—as in, how do you manage rail voltages that dramatically change from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, when there are a ton of supplies dependent on the main rails?

When I first dropped all the parts on the board in the layout software, it looked daunting. I mean, look at the finished Gunnr board. It’s very full.

But when I started putting it all together, something weird happened…I found a layout with a logical flow from input to output, including all the signal processing in analog and digital, including the quad of big output op-amps, including the linear supply, including the relays, including the logic. Once things were in place, it almost literally came together by itself.

That was a big surprise. And a bit worrying.

Because, in engineering, you quickly find that things that seem too easy usually aren’t easy at all.

Ah well, we’ll see how it goes, I thought, and sent the board out.

Around this time, Evan, one of our techs in Corpus Christi, began assembling prototype boards for us in-house, using a manual stencil and a simple reflow oven. This made the process of getting the Hel Yeah, and later Gunnr prototypes, much faster than sending them out to one of our PCB assemblers.

“Wait a sec,” you say. “I thought you did the boards in-house.”

Well, yes, but when you’re talking high-density boards with 0402 parts and QFN packages, nah not so much. We used to send those out. Now we’re doing them in-house, which speeds up prototyping considerably.

So what happened with the first board?

Well, much to my surprise, after fixing a couple of bonehead mistakes (backwards parts, missing diode, stuff like that), the thing pretty much worked!

What’s more, the -5V switcher we’d chosen for the USB-only supply was the quietest switcher we’d ever used. It was almost impossible to tell when it was running.

And to add to my amazement, the Linear Override idea worked, ah, totally flawlessly and without any drama. As in, you could plug in the linear supply, the rails would instantly go from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, without a blip or blop through the headphones.

Now I was really worried. Because this was too easy. Wayyyy too easy.

Fortunately, some real problems popped up pretty quickly:

• It ran hot when using the linear supply. This was almost entirely due to the linear regulators. They’re simply less efficient than switchers. Not an insurmountable problem, but it did need some on-board heatsinking added. In addition, I decided later to increase the regulated voltage to +/-15V, which makes for more power. Gunnr is significantly more powerful than any version of Hel.
• The Width and presence controls were only working on one channel. This was a board error, easy to fix.
• More seriously, the DAC output was clipped on the +/-4.5V rails. As in, the op-amps doing the I/V conversion and subsequent processing didn’t have enough headroom. Hel Yeah worked fine with the +/-12V from the linear supply, however. This one was a fun one to fix, and the fix results in one of Gunnr’s most curious feature—as in, the output gain increases when you plug in the wall-wart power supply, and decreases when you unplug it.

“Wait, what?” you ask. “Are you saying Gunnr’s volume increases when you plug in the linear supply?”

Yes. That’s exactly it. It’s a pretty cool thing, too. Early listeners are very bemused by it.

“Why would you do that?”

Simple: fixing the clipping-at-low-voltage problem could be done in the typical way, which would be to reduce the gain to the point where it was low enough not to clip with low voltage. But this would decrease the overall performance of the product, even when running higher voltage rails.

So what did we do? We applied a -10dB cut in gain when running on the low voltage rails. When the rails jump, we remove the cut. It’s all done automatically via sensing with the CM6635 USB receiver, which contains a microprocessor powerful enough to do neat tricks like this.

Which means, as far as I know, Gunnr is the one product where you can hear a clear and marked difference when using a linear power supply…

…because it’s quite a bit louder!


The Question of Power

I thought Gunnr was done after another board rev to clear up the residual stupid of the first layout, and some firmware work by C-Media.

Except for one problem. One of our early users was Alex, our operations director here at Schiit. And, one day, he asked, “What about a power switch?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Hel has always had a power switch.”

“Yeah and so?”

“Yeah and so people will probably want to be able to turn this off.”

Argh. I groaned. “Do we have to?”

“What’s the big deal about a switch.”

“Well, first, the thing is full,” I told Alex. “We don’t have space for a regular toggle.”

“Is there another kind of switch that would fit?” he asked

“Sure, but it might not be able to deal with the current. Oh and crap, I need to manage the rails at the same time. With the rail switching it’s gonna be weird.”

But I went a looked. And found a switch. And then threw another fit, because getting it to, well, fit, wasn’t a lot of fun. But eventually it fit.

Done, right?

No.

When we ran the next prototype, it had picked up hum in one channel—hum that wasn’t there before. After chasing everything and replacing parts, I realized—argh, one of the switch traces ran under a signal line, and that switch was carrying unregulated DC. Which had a lot of ripple. Which was enough to cause the hum we saw.

Argh argh! There wasn’t a lot of space on the board, and there weren’t a lot of options for changing the layout around the switch.

But after some cussing, I got it.

Final prototype: no hum!

And that’s how Gunnr ended up being the only Schiit product with a slide switch. At least it’s on the back, where it belongs!


Oversimplification

Sounds like a lot of development for a relatively minor product? Well, it’s not. Not a minor product at all, and I’ve left out a lot of the discussions and details.

Like how I insisted that we had to have a Width and Presence bypass, even though they are so transparent that the THD and S/N don’t change at all when they are switched in, and are at almost a -110dB level.

Or the tweaking of Width and Presence based on how our early listeners were using it (it’s not exactly the same as Syn).

Or the silly discussion we had about providing a center channel output (no, no, please no, one Syn is enough).

Bottom line, I can’t document everything about this in 100% detail, because you’d be looking at a 10,000 word chapter. And you’d probably be asleep.


Last Minute Crazy

One thing I need to put in here, though, is the stark difference between “should” and “is.”

As in, Gunnr went through multiple rounds of prototype. All worked without issue, except for the various boneheaded mistakes on the board. None had a problem with basic functionality, like headphone output or microphone input.

So, you’d expect when we got the first articles from the production PCB house, they’d be fine too, right? I mean, the design was proven. What could go wrong?

Mic input: HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I mean, unusable hiss. Plus garbled audio.

“Oh yeah, this will be simple,” I thought. “They used the wrong op-amp, or it’s in backwards, or I screwed up a resistor value…half an hour and we’ll be up and running.”

Except the op-amp was fine.

The resistors were fine.

The voltages were fine.

This made no sense. Hell, we had a hand-built prototype with the EXACT SAME BOARD LAYOUT AND PARTS and it worked fine!

Two days later, I still hadn’t found it.

This was…insanely frustrating (actually, insert X-rated words in copious amounts here to really understand how I felt about this—to quote Evan, if I was the protagonist in Dr. Stone, the show would be about 90% bleeped).

I mean, the microphone input is something we’ve literally done hundreds of thousands of. With the same parts. In multiple generations of Fulla, Hel, and now Gunnr. It’s super-simple. There’s a bias circuit for the electret mic, an op-amp for gain, a TI analog-to-digital converter, and it’s all run by the C-Media USB input receiver.

Now, we’ve seen glitches before, usually caused by wrong caps (it’s a bit picky about coupling caps in a way not explained in the datasheet), or noisy grounds (sometimes the wrong inductors can get in into a weird place where there’s several hundred mV of high-frequency hash on a supposedly “isolated” ground).

But the caps were the same as we use in Hel, and the grounds were clean.

And the bias circuit was at the right voltage.

The op-amp wasn’t oscillating, and it was the right gain.

Heck, the analog signal looked fine all the way up to the TI ADC. I mean, exactly the same on the working hand-built prototype, and the non-working production boards.

Oh and the ADC had the right clocks from the C-Media receiver, and was outputting data to it…everything seemed totally fine.

Insanely.

Frustrating!

“The datasheet shows the ADC with a 5V analog supply and a 3.3V digital supply,” Stephan told me, on the morning of the third day in. “But you’re using 3.3V on both.”

“Yeah,” I said, frustrated. “It’s fine. The datasheet specs min and max voltages for both, and 3.3V is fine on the analog side.”

“Yeah, but they show it with 5V—” Stephan began.

“That’s just an example. The datasheet says you can reduce it below 5V, and the performance will be largely unaffected.”

Stephan nodded, but seemed unsatisfied. “You run Fulla and Hel at 5V, though.”

“Yeah, but I’ve run all the Gunnr protos at 3.3V, and they all work.”

That was something Stephan couldn’t argue with, so we left it at that. I literally ground apart a first article board and one of our internal samples, thinking maybe they’d flipped the internal layers.

​

Aside: flipping the internal layers sounds trivial, but it might not be. On a 4-layer board, you have a very thin membrane separating the top and first inner layer, then a thick core, then the bottom inner layer, then the bottom layer. Flip them and you can have traces sitting on top of other traces, which can cause issues.​

But in the end, nope, not flipped. Both were the same.

A bit desperately, we decided to build another proto in-house to see if there was something in assembly, and joked about the color difference (green prototype vs red production) causing a problem.

But Stephan’s comment bothered me. I mean, it couldn’t be the 5V thing, could it? Our prototype Gunnrs ran fine on 3.3V.

But maybe it was an edge case. Maybe it only kinda-sorta worked.

So I ran a wire to the 5V supply and handed it to Stephan, saying, “See if this works.”

30 seconds later, he called out, “Works fine!”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “No noise?”

“No noise.”

“And the mic actually works?”

“The mic actually works,” he confirmed.

I did another wire hack. That board worked too.

Four boards hacked, 4 working boards.

After some new, hopefully creative cusswords were uttered, I was both thrilled and irritated. Irritated because this meant we had to throw away literally an entire run of boards (but not stuffed boards, at least) and make a change to run the microphone input from 5V. This also meant we had to re-qualify the whole product, to make sure that didn’t cause problems elsewhere.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. This is a bit of both. But at least we didn’t find out about it from the customers.


Getting the Hel Outta Here

So how does Gunnr compare to Hel+? Let’s break it down.

• More performance. Gunnr does 2W into 32 ohms, Hel+ managed 1.5W. Both are -110dB THD+N class devices, but Gunnr is also running on +/-15V rather than +/-12V when you use the wall-wart, so it has more headroom inherently.
• More control. Hel has 3 gain levels, an input select, and a volume knob. Gunnr adds Width (widen or narrow the soundstage) and Presence (bring voices closer or move them farther away), as well as the capability to bypass Width and Presence entirely.
• More flexibility. Want to take Gunnr with you? Leave the wall-wart and run it with just one USB cable to your computer or tablet. As a true single-cable device, it’s a lot more flexible. With the wall-wart, it delivers more power and performance.

Beyond that, Gunnr replaces Hel+ in the lineup as our premium gaming product. Sure, you can use it for music or podcasting or whatever as well, but it’s a serious product for serious gaming. No Bluetooth here—and also no lag, no dropouts, nothing to get in the way of your game.

And yeah, I know, some of you are saying, “Well Bluetooth is getting pretty good.”

Yeah. There’s pretty good, and there’s serious. When they start winning competitive gaming tournaments with Bluetooth, get back to us.

Until then, there’s Gunnr. The most powerful, flexible, serious gaming device on the planet.

We hope you enjoy!

 

[Paladin79]

You know this is the Internet, right? He can make comments and post cat pics from Germany as well.

Yeah but would he have easy access to products just a mile down the road? Would he also have been as aware of Schiit products had he not moved here?

 

[jonathan c]

Yeah but would he have easy access to select Head-Fi participants just a few states down the road? ....

FTFY....[Reg. TM; © bcowen: 2021].

 

[Ripper2860]

Yeah but would he have easy access to products just a mile down the road? Would he also have been as aware of Schiit products had he not moved here?

If by 'products' you mean, beer and schnitzel, then I suspect he would have been within a mile of many good 'products'. On point 2, we have quite a few non-US persons here that somehow became aware of Schiit, so I suspect ACP would have found his way to us one way or another.

** We were on the receiving end of a ransomware attack, so I'm taking a few minutes to blow off steam by being a smart-arse. Yestrday was containmnet. Today starts recovery and forensics. Fun days ahead.

 

[Bowmoreman]

2024 Chapter 9
Like, Well, Duh

Everyone working on the creative side of things has had this experience:

You have a great idea, and you work your butt off to make it perfect. To refine it, to find all the best ways to bring it to another level, to create something you’re Truly Proud Of.

Then you show it off to your friends, and someone says:

“Why didn’t you (insert super-obvious idea that makes it 10,000% better)?”

And then you stand there, blinking as if struck in the head by a 10-lb sledge. And then you start wondering, “Man, I’m the biggest dumbass in Stupid Central. How’d I miss that?”

Yeah.

Cool.

Because sometimes we all need a reality check. Like with Gunnr.

Gunnr started when I had a relatively innocent conversation with a friend about Hel+, and all the wonderful things we did to make it more powerful, more reliable, higher performance, blah blah, woof woof…

And he said, “Well, for gaming, it would be great to have Width and Presence controls on it like Syn, wouldn’t it?”

OH HELL WUT…

Because he was 100% right.

So all that work, all those refinements, all those tweaks…yeah that’s cool, but we ended up where we ended up, which was Dumbassville.

And that’s what started us on what we originally called “Hel Yeah,” and then, later, changed to Gunnr. Because it’s really a different product. Wayyyyyyyy different.

Interested? Read on.

(And no, this won’t just be interesting if you’re into gaming.)



A Collision of Ideas

Here’s the thing: I’d already been thinking about a crazy idea that could improve Hel.

Namely, could we eliminate the need for a second USB for power?

Because having to use a second USB for power was a pain in the ass. I mean, yeah, it’s the way we get more power out of Hel than Fulla, but TWO USB connections? Argh.

So I had this weird idea: what if we could run Hel on a single USB connection at reduced power? Then you could take it anywhere and not have to worry about a USB brick or wall-wart or whatever. And, if you plugged in a wall-wart, you could get full power?

Sounds simple. But taking the rails from +/-5V with a switcher to, say, +/-15V with a linear supply—seamlessly—without any weirdness or driver-exploding stupidity when you plugged in the power supply, because no matter what we said, someone would try it—oh boy that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, right?

But that idea had stuck with me for a while. So when the idea to add Syn-like controls came in, it was a collision of ideas.

I mean, this would be a whole new thing. It would:

• Really be portable, as in you wouldn’t have to carry around a brick to run it
• Give you controls that nobody else had (Width and Presence)
• Allow you to better decode the surround cues in games, and enjoy headphones more like speakers, with a crossfeed-like matrix

That was exciting.

That was totally new.

That was a big deal.

The catch was: it was a totally different product, and nothing would fit.

“Where do you put all the knobs?” Tyler asked, after I explained the idea to him. He was excited about the concept as I was, as he already used a Syn for gaming. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Well, if we lose the switch for input and do autoswitching, maybe,” I told him.

But it didn’t take much mock-up to see he was right. The traditional Hel form-factor—as in, its less-wide-than-deep profile—simply didn’t work. To get all the controls on it, I’d have to swap it sideways, like a Magni.

Aside: despite this change, the Gunnr chassis is still significantly different than a Magni—in fact, it’s chassis is less tall, has a large top volume control, and shares exactly no stamping die with Magni. It’s it’s own thing.​

But that was only the beginning of the challenges.

As in, adding Syn-like controls—and having the ability to bypass them—added a lot of parts. A LOT of parts. Including fairly pricey parts like film capacitors and extra relays. Gunnr is a significantly more complex product than Hel.

And, at first, I wondered if it would all fit. Hel+ is already pretty full. Gunnr was really pushing the limits of what we could fit in that chassis.

And yeah, for a while, I wondered: is this do-able at all?


The First Hel Yeah

Yes. The first prototype bore the moniker “Hel Yeah.” Which just goes to show that even I prove the adage that you shouldn’t let engineers name things.

Aside: At the same time, I thought about renaming Hel and Fulla to Hek and Hek Yeah, because, well, you know, Texas and all, so it could have been even worse.​

And boy oh boy did I have some misgivings about it. Because the linear supply part of it took up a lot of space, much more than Hel’s old switcher. And the two extra relays needed for a true bypass of the Width and Presence controls ate a ton of space, and took a decent amount of power to run. And the whole logic of doing the Linear Override itself wasn’t super obvious—as in, how do you manage rail voltages that dramatically change from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, when there are a ton of supplies dependent on the main rails?

When I first dropped all the parts on the board in the layout software, it looked daunting. I mean, look at the finished Gunnr board. It’s very full.

But when I started putting it all together, something weird happened…I found a layout with a logical flow from input to output, including all the signal processing in analog and digital, including the quad of big output op-amps, including the linear supply, including the relays, including the logic. Once things were in place, it almost literally came together by itself.

That was a big surprise. And a bit worrying.

Because, in engineering, you quickly find that things that seem too easy usually aren’t easy at all.

Ah well, we’ll see how it goes, I thought, and sent the board out.

Around this time, Evan, one of our techs in Corpus Christi, began assembling prototype boards for us in-house, using a manual stencil and a simple reflow oven. This made the process of getting the Hel Yeah, and later Gunnr prototypes, much faster than sending them out to one of our PCB assemblers.

“Wait a sec,” you say. “I thought you did the boards in-house.”

Well, yes, but when you’re talking high-density boards with 0402 parts and QFN packages, nah not so much. We used to send those out. Now we’re doing them in-house, which speeds up prototyping considerably.

So what happened with the first board?

Well, much to my surprise, after fixing a couple of bonehead mistakes (backwards parts, missing diode, stuff like that), the thing pretty much worked!

What’s more, the -5V switcher we’d chosen for the USB-only supply was the quietest switcher we’d ever used. It was almost impossible to tell when it was running.

And to add to my amazement, the Linear Override idea worked, ah, totally flawlessly and without any drama. As in, you could plug in the linear supply, the rails would instantly go from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, without a blip or blop through the headphones.

Now I was really worried. Because this was too easy. Wayyyy too easy.

Fortunately, some real problems popped up pretty quickly:

• It ran hot when using the linear supply. This was almost entirely due to the linear regulators. They’re simply less efficient than switchers. Not an insurmountable problem, but it did need some on-board heatsinking added. In addition, I decided later to increase the regulated voltage to +/-15V, which makes for more power. Gunnr is significantly more powerful than any version of Hel.
• The Width and presence controls were only working on one channel. This was a board error, easy to fix.
• More seriously, the DAC output was clipped on the +/-4.5V rails. As in, the op-amps doing the I/V conversion and subsequent processing didn’t have enough headroom. Hel Yeah worked fine with the +/-12V from the linear supply, however. This one was a fun one to fix, and the fix results in one of Gunnr’s most curious feature—as in, the output gain increases when you plug in the wall-wart power supply, and decreases when you unplug it.

“Wait, what?” you ask. “Are you saying Gunnr’s volume increases when you plug in the linear supply?”

Yes. That’s exactly it. It’s a pretty cool thing, too. Early listeners are very bemused by it.

“Why would you do that?”

Simple: fixing the clipping-at-low-voltage problem could be done in the typical way, which would be to reduce the gain to the point where it was low enough not to clip with low voltage. But this would decrease the overall performance of the product, even when running higher voltage rails.

So what did we do? We applied a -10dB cut in gain when running on the low voltage rails. When the rails jump, we remove the cut. It’s all done automatically via sensing with the CM6635 USB receiver, which contains a microprocessor powerful enough to do neat tricks like this.

Which means, as far as I know, Gunnr is the one product where you can hear a clear and marked difference when using a linear power supply…

…because it’s quite a bit louder!


The Question of Power

I thought Gunnr was done after another board rev to clear up the residual stupid of the first layout, and some firmware work by C-Media.

Except for one problem. One of our early users was Alex, our operations director here at Schiit. And, one day, he asked, “What about a power switch?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Hel has always had a power switch.”

“Yeah and so?”

“Yeah and so people will probably want to be able to turn this off.”

Argh. I groaned. “Do we have to?”

“What’s the big deal about a switch.”

“Well, first, the thing is full,” I told Alex. “We don’t have space for a regular toggle.”

“Is there another kind of switch that would fit?” he asked

“Sure, but it might not be able to deal with the current. Oh and crap, I need to manage the rails at the same time. With the rail switching it’s gonna be weird.”

But I went a looked. And found a switch. And then threw another fit, because getting it to, well, fit, wasn’t a lot of fun. But eventually it fit.

Done, right?

No.

When we ran the next prototype, it had picked up hum in one channel—hum that wasn’t there before. After chasing everything and replacing parts, I realized—argh, one of the switch traces ran under a signal line, and that switch was carrying unregulated DC. Which had a lot of ripple. Which was enough to cause the hum we saw.

Argh argh! There wasn’t a lot of space on the board, and there weren’t a lot of options for changing the layout around the switch.

But after some cussing, I got it.

Final prototype: no hum!

And that’s how Gunnr ended up being the only Schiit product with a slide switch. At least it’s on the back, where it belongs!


Oversimplification

Sounds like a lot of development for a relatively minor product? Well, it’s not. Not a minor product at all, and I’ve left out a lot of the discussions and details.

Like how I insisted that we had to have a Width and Presence bypass, even though they are so transparent that the THD and S/N don’t change at all when they are switched in, and are at almost a -110dB level.

Or the tweaking of Width and Presence based on how our early listeners were using it (it’s not exactly the same as Syn).

Or the silly discussion we had about providing a center channel output (no, no, please no, one Syn is enough).

Bottom line, I can’t document everything about this in 100% detail, because you’d be looking at a 10,000 word chapter. And you’d probably be asleep.


Last Minute Crazy

One thing I need to put in here, though, is the stark difference between “should” and “is.”

As in, Gunnr went through multiple rounds of prototype. All worked without issue, except for the various boneheaded mistakes on the board. None had a problem with basic functionality, like headphone output or microphone input.

So, you’d expect when we got the first articles from the production PCB house, they’d be fine too, right? I mean, the design was proven. What could go wrong?

Mic input: HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I mean, unusable hiss. Plus garbled audio.

“Oh yeah, this will be simple,” I thought. “They used the wrong op-amp, or it’s in backwards, or I screwed up a resistor value…half an hour and we’ll be up and running.”

Except the op-amp was fine.

The resistors were fine.

The voltages were fine.

This made no sense. Hell, we had a hand-built prototype with the EXACT SAME BOARD LAYOUT AND PARTS and it worked fine!

Two days later, I still hadn’t found it.

This was…insanely frustrating (actually, insert X-rated words in copious amounts here to really understand how I felt about this—to quote Evan, if I was the protagonist in Dr. Stone, the show would be about 90% bleeped).

I mean, the microphone input is something we’ve literally done hundreds of thousands of. With the same parts. In multiple generations of Fulla, Hel, and now Gunnr. It’s super-simple. There’s a bias circuit for the electret mic, an op-amp for gain, a TI analog-to-digital converter, and it’s all run by the C-Media USB input receiver.

Now, we’ve seen glitches before, usually caused by wrong caps (it’s a bit picky about coupling caps in a way not explained in the datasheet), or noisy grounds (sometimes the wrong inductors can get in into a weird place where there’s several hundred mV of high-frequency hash on a supposedly “isolated” ground).

But the caps were the same as we use in Hel, and the grounds were clean.

And the bias circuit was at the right voltage.

The op-amp wasn’t oscillating, and it was the right gain.

Heck, the analog signal looked fine all the way up to the TI ADC. I mean, exactly the same on the working hand-built prototype, and the non-working production boards.

Oh and the ADC had the right clocks from the C-Media receiver, and was outputting data to it…everything seemed totally fine.

Insanely.

Frustrating!

“The datasheet shows the ADC with a 5V analog supply and a 3.3V digital supply,” Stephan told me, on the morning of the third day in. “But you’re using 3.3V on both.”

“Yeah,” I said, frustrated. “It’s fine. The datasheet specs min and max voltages for both, and 3.3V is fine on the analog side.”

“Yeah, but they show it with 5V—” Stephan began.

“That’s just an example. The datasheet says you can reduce it below 5V, and the performance will be largely unaffected.”

Stephan nodded, but seemed unsatisfied. “You run Fulla and Hel at 5V, though.”

“Yeah, but I’ve run all the Gunnr protos at 3.3V, and they all work.”

That was something Stephan couldn’t argue with, so we left it at that. I literally ground apart a first article board and one of our internal samples, thinking maybe they’d flipped the internal layers.

​

Aside: flipping the internal layers sounds trivial, but it might not be. On a 4-layer board, you have a very thin membrane separating the top and first inner layer, then a thick core, then the bottom inner layer, then the bottom layer. Flip them and you can have traces sitting on top of other traces, which can cause issues.​

But in the end, nope, not flipped. Both were the same.

A bit desperately, we decided to build another proto in-house to see if there was something in assembly, and joked about the color difference (green prototype vs red production) causing a problem.

But Stephan’s comment bothered me. I mean, it couldn’t be the 5V thing, could it? Our prototype Gunnrs ran fine on 3.3V.

But maybe it was an edge case. Maybe it only kinda-sorta worked.

So I ran a wire to the 5V supply and handed it to Stephan, saying, “See if this works.”

30 seconds later, he called out, “Works fine!”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “No noise?”

“No noise.”

“And the mic actually works?”

“The mic actually works,” he confirmed.

I did another wire hack. That board worked too.

Four boards hacked, 4 working boards.

After some new, hopefully creative cusswords were uttered, I was both thrilled and irritated. Irritated because this meant we had to throw away literally an entire run of boards (but not stuffed boards, at least) and make a change to run the microphone input from 5V. This also meant we had to re-qualify the whole product, to make sure that didn’t cause problems elsewhere.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. This is a bit of both. But at least we didn’t find out about it from the customers.


Getting the Hel Outta Here

So how does Gunnr compare to Hel+? Let’s break it down.

• More performance. Gunnr does 2W into 32 ohms, Hel+ managed 1.5W. Both are -110dB THD+N class devices, but Gunnr is also running on +/-15V rather than +/-12V when you use the wall-wart, so it has more headroom inherently.
• More control. Hel has 3 gain levels, an input select, and a volume knob. Gunnr adds Width (widen or narrow the soundstage) and Presence (bring voices closer or move them farther away), as well as the capability to bypass Width and Presence entirely.
• More flexibility. Want to take Gunnr with you? Leave the wall-wart and run it with just one USB cable to your computer or tablet. As a true single-cable device, it’s a lot more flexible. With the wall-wart, it delivers more power and performance.

Beyond that, Gunnr replaces Hel+ in the lineup as our premium gaming product. Sure, you can use it for music or podcasting or whatever as well, but it’s a serious product for serious gaming. No Bluetooth here—and also no lag, no dropouts, nothing to get in the way of your game.

And yeah, I know, some of you are saying, “Well Bluetooth is getting pretty good.”

Yeah. There’s pretty good, and there’s serious. When they start winning competitive gaming tournaments with Bluetooth, get back to us.

Until then, there’s Gunnr. The most powerful, flexible, serious gaming device on the planet.

We hope you enjoy!

My youngest son NEEDS Gunnr! Neat. Always like the “engineering saga”, gives me flashbacks… (with all the concomitant shudders appurtenant thereto…)

 

[adydula]

2024 Chapter 9
Like, Well, Duh

Everyone working on the creative side of things has had this experience:

You have a great idea, and you work your butt off to make it perfect. To refine it, to find all the best ways to bring it to another level, to create something you’re Truly Proud Of.

Then you show it off to your friends, and someone says:

“Why didn’t you (insert super-obvious idea that makes it 10,000% better)?”

And then you stand there, blinking as if struck in the head by a 10-lb sledge. And then you start wondering, “Man, I’m the biggest dumbass in Stupid Central. How’d I miss that?”

Yeah.

Cool.

Because sometimes we all need a reality check. Like with Gunnr.

Gunnr started when I had a relatively innocent conversation with a friend about Hel+, and all the wonderful things we did to make it more powerful, more reliable, higher performance, blah blah, woof woof…

And he said, “Well, for gaming, it would be great to have Width and Presence controls on it like Syn, wouldn’t it?”

OH HELL WUT…

Because he was 100% right.

So all that work, all those refinements, all those tweaks…yeah that’s cool, but we ended up where we ended up, which was Dumbassville.

And that’s what started us on what we originally called “Hel Yeah,” and then, later, changed to Gunnr. Because it’s really a different product. Wayyyyyyyy different.

Interested? Read on.

(And no, this won’t just be interesting if you’re into gaming.)



A Collision of Ideas

Here’s the thing: I’d already been thinking about a crazy idea that could improve Hel.

Namely, could we eliminate the need for a second USB for power?

Because having to use a second USB for power was a pain in the ass. I mean, yeah, it’s the way we get more power out of Hel than Fulla, but TWO USB connections? Argh.

So I had this weird idea: what if we could run Hel on a single USB connection at reduced power? Then you could take it anywhere and not have to worry about a USB brick or wall-wart or whatever. And, if you plugged in a wall-wart, you could get full power?

Sounds simple. But taking the rails from +/-5V with a switcher to, say, +/-15V with a linear supply—seamlessly—without any weirdness or driver-exploding stupidity when you plugged in the power supply, because no matter what we said, someone would try it—oh boy that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, right?

But that idea had stuck with me for a while. So when the idea to add Syn-like controls came in, it was a collision of ideas.

I mean, this would be a whole new thing. It would:

• Really be portable, as in you wouldn’t have to carry around a brick to run it
• Give you controls that nobody else had (Width and Presence)
• Allow you to better decode the surround cues in games, and enjoy headphones more like speakers, with a crossfeed-like matrix

That was exciting.

That was totally new.

That was a big deal.

The catch was: it was a totally different product, and nothing would fit.

“Where do you put all the knobs?” Tyler asked, after I explained the idea to him. He was excited about the concept as I was, as he already used a Syn for gaming. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Well, if we lose the switch for input and do autoswitching, maybe,” I told him.

But it didn’t take much mock-up to see he was right. The traditional Hel form-factor—as in, its less-wide-than-deep profile—simply didn’t work. To get all the controls on it, I’d have to swap it sideways, like a Magni.

Aside: despite this change, the Gunnr chassis is still significantly different than a Magni—in fact, it’s chassis is less tall, has a large top volume control, and shares exactly no stamping die with Magni. It’s it’s own thing.​

But that was only the beginning of the challenges.

As in, adding Syn-like controls—and having the ability to bypass them—added a lot of parts. A LOT of parts. Including fairly pricey parts like film capacitors and extra relays. Gunnr is a significantly more complex product than Hel.

And, at first, I wondered if it would all fit. Hel+ is already pretty full. Gunnr was really pushing the limits of what we could fit in that chassis.

And yeah, for a while, I wondered: is this do-able at all?


The First Hel Yeah

Yes. The first prototype bore the moniker “Hel Yeah.” Which just goes to show that even I prove the adage that you shouldn’t let engineers name things.

Aside: At the same time, I thought about renaming Hel and Fulla to Hek and Hek Yeah, because, well, you know, Texas and all, so it could have been even worse.​

And boy oh boy did I have some misgivings about it. Because the linear supply part of it took up a lot of space, much more than Hel’s old switcher. And the two extra relays needed for a true bypass of the Width and Presence controls ate a ton of space, and took a decent amount of power to run. And the whole logic of doing the Linear Override itself wasn’t super obvious—as in, how do you manage rail voltages that dramatically change from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, when there are a ton of supplies dependent on the main rails?

When I first dropped all the parts on the board in the layout software, it looked daunting. I mean, look at the finished Gunnr board. It’s very full.

But when I started putting it all together, something weird happened…I found a layout with a logical flow from input to output, including all the signal processing in analog and digital, including the quad of big output op-amps, including the linear supply, including the relays, including the logic. Once things were in place, it almost literally came together by itself.

That was a big surprise. And a bit worrying.

Because, in engineering, you quickly find that things that seem too easy usually aren’t easy at all.

Ah well, we’ll see how it goes, I thought, and sent the board out.

Around this time, Evan, one of our techs in Corpus Christi, began assembling prototype boards for us in-house, using a manual stencil and a simple reflow oven. This made the process of getting the Hel Yeah, and later Gunnr prototypes, much faster than sending them out to one of our PCB assemblers.

“Wait a sec,” you say. “I thought you did the boards in-house.”

Well, yes, but when you’re talking high-density boards with 0402 parts and QFN packages, nah not so much. We used to send those out. Now we’re doing them in-house, which speeds up prototyping considerably.

So what happened with the first board?

Well, much to my surprise, after fixing a couple of bonehead mistakes (backwards parts, missing diode, stuff like that), the thing pretty much worked!

What’s more, the -5V switcher we’d chosen for the USB-only supply was the quietest switcher we’d ever used. It was almost impossible to tell when it was running.

And to add to my amazement, the Linear Override idea worked, ah, totally flawlessly and without any drama. As in, you could plug in the linear supply, the rails would instantly go from +/-4.5V to +/-12V, without a blip or blop through the headphones.

Now I was really worried. Because this was too easy. Wayyyy too easy.

Fortunately, some real problems popped up pretty quickly:

• It ran hot when using the linear supply. This was almost entirely due to the linear regulators. They’re simply less efficient than switchers. Not an insurmountable problem, but it did need some on-board heatsinking added. In addition, I decided later to increase the regulated voltage to +/-15V, which makes for more power. Gunnr is significantly more powerful than any version of Hel.
• The Width and presence controls were only working on one channel. This was a board error, easy to fix.
• More seriously, the DAC output was clipped on the +/-4.5V rails. As in, the op-amps doing the I/V conversion and subsequent processing didn’t have enough headroom. Hel Yeah worked fine with the +/-12V from the linear supply, however. This one was a fun one to fix, and the fix results in one of Gunnr’s most curious feature—as in, the output gain increases when you plug in the wall-wart power supply, and decreases when you unplug it.

“Wait, what?” you ask. “Are you saying Gunnr’s volume increases when you plug in the linear supply?”

Yes. That’s exactly it. It’s a pretty cool thing, too. Early listeners are very bemused by it.

“Why would you do that?”

Simple: fixing the clipping-at-low-voltage problem could be done in the typical way, which would be to reduce the gain to the point where it was low enough not to clip with low voltage. But this would decrease the overall performance of the product, even when running higher voltage rails.

So what did we do? We applied a -10dB cut in gain when running on the low voltage rails. When the rails jump, we remove the cut. It’s all done automatically via sensing with the CM6635 USB receiver, which contains a microprocessor powerful enough to do neat tricks like this.

Which means, as far as I know, Gunnr is the one product where you can hear a clear and marked difference when using a linear power supply…

…because it’s quite a bit louder!


The Question of Power

I thought Gunnr was done after another board rev to clear up the residual stupid of the first layout, and some firmware work by C-Media.

Except for one problem. One of our early users was Alex, our operations director here at Schiit. And, one day, he asked, “What about a power switch?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Hel has always had a power switch.”

“Yeah and so?”

“Yeah and so people will probably want to be able to turn this off.”

Argh. I groaned. “Do we have to?”

“What’s the big deal about a switch.”

“Well, first, the thing is full,” I told Alex. “We don’t have space for a regular toggle.”

“Is there another kind of switch that would fit?” he asked

“Sure, but it might not be able to deal with the current. Oh and crap, I need to manage the rails at the same time. With the rail switching it’s gonna be weird.”

But I went a looked. And found a switch. And then threw another fit, because getting it to, well, fit, wasn’t a lot of fun. But eventually it fit.

Done, right?

No.

When we ran the next prototype, it had picked up hum in one channel—hum that wasn’t there before. After chasing everything and replacing parts, I realized—argh, one of the switch traces ran under a signal line, and that switch was carrying unregulated DC. Which had a lot of ripple. Which was enough to cause the hum we saw.

Argh argh! There wasn’t a lot of space on the board, and there weren’t a lot of options for changing the layout around the switch.

But after some cussing, I got it.

Final prototype: no hum!

And that’s how Gunnr ended up being the only Schiit product with a slide switch. At least it’s on the back, where it belongs!


Oversimplification

Sounds like a lot of development for a relatively minor product? Well, it’s not. Not a minor product at all, and I’ve left out a lot of the discussions and details.

Like how I insisted that we had to have a Width and Presence bypass, even though they are so transparent that the THD and S/N don’t change at all when they are switched in, and are at almost a -110dB level.

Or the tweaking of Width and Presence based on how our early listeners were using it (it’s not exactly the same as Syn).

Or the silly discussion we had about providing a center channel output (no, no, please no, one Syn is enough).

Bottom line, I can’t document everything about this in 100% detail, because you’d be looking at a 10,000 word chapter. And you’d probably be asleep.


Last Minute Crazy

One thing I need to put in here, though, is the stark difference between “should” and “is.”

As in, Gunnr went through multiple rounds of prototype. All worked without issue, except for the various boneheaded mistakes on the board. None had a problem with basic functionality, like headphone output or microphone input.

So, you’d expect when we got the first articles from the production PCB house, they’d be fine too, right? I mean, the design was proven. What could go wrong?

Mic input: HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I mean, unusable hiss. Plus garbled audio.

“Oh yeah, this will be simple,” I thought. “They used the wrong op-amp, or it’s in backwards, or I screwed up a resistor value…half an hour and we’ll be up and running.”

Except the op-amp was fine.

The resistors were fine.

The voltages were fine.

This made no sense. Hell, we had a hand-built prototype with the EXACT SAME BOARD LAYOUT AND PARTS and it worked fine!

Two days later, I still hadn’t found it.

This was…insanely frustrating (actually, insert X-rated words in copious amounts here to really understand how I felt about this—to quote Evan, if I was the protagonist in Dr. Stone, the show would be about 90% bleeped).

I mean, the microphone input is something we’ve literally done hundreds of thousands of. With the same parts. In multiple generations of Fulla, Hel, and now Gunnr. It’s super-simple. There’s a bias circuit for the electret mic, an op-amp for gain, a TI analog-to-digital converter, and it’s all run by the C-Media USB input receiver.

Now, we’ve seen glitches before, usually caused by wrong caps (it’s a bit picky about coupling caps in a way not explained in the datasheet), or noisy grounds (sometimes the wrong inductors can get in into a weird place where there’s several hundred mV of high-frequency hash on a supposedly “isolated” ground).

But the caps were the same as we use in Hel, and the grounds were clean.

And the bias circuit was at the right voltage.

The op-amp wasn’t oscillating, and it was the right gain.

Heck, the analog signal looked fine all the way up to the TI ADC. I mean, exactly the same on the working hand-built prototype, and the non-working production boards.

Oh and the ADC had the right clocks from the C-Media receiver, and was outputting data to it…everything seemed totally fine.

Insanely.

Frustrating!

“The datasheet shows the ADC with a 5V analog supply and a 3.3V digital supply,” Stephan told me, on the morning of the third day in. “But you’re using 3.3V on both.”

“Yeah,” I said, frustrated. “It’s fine. The datasheet specs min and max voltages for both, and 3.3V is fine on the analog side.”

“Yeah, but they show it with 5V—” Stephan began.

“That’s just an example. The datasheet says you can reduce it below 5V, and the performance will be largely unaffected.”

Stephan nodded, but seemed unsatisfied. “You run Fulla and Hel at 5V, though.”

“Yeah, but I’ve run all the Gunnr protos at 3.3V, and they all work.”

That was something Stephan couldn’t argue with, so we left it at that. I literally ground apart a first article board and one of our internal samples, thinking maybe they’d flipped the internal layers.

​

Aside: flipping the internal layers sounds trivial, but it might not be. On a 4-layer board, you have a very thin membrane separating the top and first inner layer, then a thick core, then the bottom inner layer, then the bottom layer. Flip them and you can have traces sitting on top of other traces, which can cause issues.​

But in the end, nope, not flipped. Both were the same.

A bit desperately, we decided to build another proto in-house to see if there was something in assembly, and joked about the color difference (green prototype vs red production) causing a problem.

But Stephan’s comment bothered me. I mean, it couldn’t be the 5V thing, could it? Our prototype Gunnrs ran fine on 3.3V.

But maybe it was an edge case. Maybe it only kinda-sorta worked.

So I ran a wire to the 5V supply and handed it to Stephan, saying, “See if this works.”

30 seconds later, he called out, “Works fine!”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “No noise?”

“No noise.”

“And the mic actually works?”

“The mic actually works,” he confirmed.

I did another wire hack. That board worked too.

Four boards hacked, 4 working boards.

After some new, hopefully creative cusswords were uttered, I was both thrilled and irritated. Irritated because this meant we had to throw away literally an entire run of boards (but not stuffed boards, at least) and make a change to run the microphone input from 5V. This also meant we had to re-qualify the whole product, to make sure that didn’t cause problems elsewhere.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. This is a bit of both. But at least we didn’t find out about it from the customers.


Getting the Hel Outta Here

So how does Gunnr compare to Hel+? Let’s break it down.

• More performance. Gunnr does 2W into 32 ohms, Hel+ managed 1.5W. Both are -110dB THD+N class devices, but Gunnr is also running on +/-15V rather than +/-12V when you use the wall-wart, so it has more headroom inherently.
• More control. Hel has 3 gain levels, an input select, and a volume knob. Gunnr adds Width (widen or narrow the soundstage) and Presence (bring voices closer or move them farther away), as well as the capability to bypass Width and Presence entirely.
• More flexibility. Want to take Gunnr with you? Leave the wall-wart and run it with just one USB cable to your computer or tablet. As a true single-cable device, it’s a lot more flexible. With the wall-wart, it delivers more power and performance.

Beyond that, Gunnr replaces Hel+ in the lineup as our premium gaming product. Sure, you can use it for music or podcasting or whatever as well, but it’s a serious product for serious gaming. No Bluetooth here—and also no lag, no dropouts, nothing to get in the way of your game.

And yeah, I know, some of you are saying, “Well Bluetooth is getting pretty good.”

Yeah. There’s pretty good, and there’s serious. When they start winning competitive gaming tournaments with Bluetooth, get back to us.

Until then, there’s Gunnr. The most powerful, flexible, serious gaming device on the planet.

We hope you enjoy!

Now we see into the mind of Jason Stoddard!!
Amazing...
Congrats on the new product!!
Always thinking out of the box!
Awesome!!

Give us more!!
Alex
:>)

 

[Paladin79]

If by 'products' you mean, beer and schnitzel, then I suspect he would have been within a mile of many good 'products'. On point 2, we have quite a few non-US persons here that somehow became aware of Schiit, so I suspect ACP would have found his way to us one way or another.

** We were on the receiving end of a ransomware attack, so I'm taking a few minutes to blow off steam by being a smart-arse. Yestrday was containmnet. Today starts recovery and forensics. Fun days ahead.

You can parse, you can suspect, but you might want to spell check as well. later