Chapter 37:
The Value of Diversions
Going into 2014, we had plenty of stuff to keep us busy—the ongoing decrapification of the Ragnarok firmware, DAC choices and programming for Yggy, and the planned introduction of both the Valhalla 2 and Lyr 2 as the main features.
On top of that, too, I had a few new ideas on the burner, including one with four variations—one of which became Fulla. Mike was playing with a phono stage that would become Mani. Neither of these products had firm release dates, but we were thinking, “Well, these are probably going to be 2014 products, too.”
So, yeah, tons to do. Definitely no shortage of engineering work. But…
…I always get ideas.
…and Mike always gets ideas.
And there’s usually a few things that, well, just happen from them. This chapter is a story of two of these ideas: SYS and Modi Optical.
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda
“Oh snore,” you might be saying. “Not exactly groundbreaking stuff there.”
Well, maybe not. But, you know what? Both products are interesting in their own right, but they’re also more interesting as a signpost to how we work. It also illustrates the “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda” dilemma that many companies have. If you start your own business, you’ll come up against this—maybe even before you sell a single product.
The original Asgard and Valhalla are perfect examples of this. If we’d had unlimited start-up funds (or at least much larger), the original Asgard and Valhalla may have been made in custom extruded cases with a very large extrusion profile (coulda, woulda.)
Of course, if we had done that, we would have ended up with a product that was very difficult to finish, perhaps stuck in a non-ideal form factor, possibly with extrusion consistency problems (large extrusions aren’t always exactly to print—they warp and curve.) This might have put us back 6 months, 12 months, or even more from the introduction date we hit.
So, even if we coulda, woulda done it, it might not be something we shoulda done. Being able and inclined to do something one way (and having the wherewithal to do it) might have actually been bad for us.
“Wait a moment!” you might be saying. “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
Well, there’s no reason you should. I came up with the Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda thing only after doing this for a long time. It’s not a management thing they teach in business school.
But I bet it’s something many engineers know on a gut level.
So, let’s break it down:
Shoulda. This is something you should do, even if you have to wait to do it right, or at all. The challenge is seeing what you shoulda done, before you go off and launch a product. Some things are very obvious (high reliability), some are not so obvious (a specific feature, like gain switching), and some only become apparent after the fact or due to changes in the ancillary or competitive environment. But if you know you should do something, do it—even if it impacts timeline or budget.
Woulda. Here’s conditional one. “Woulda” is something that you would do, if you had more resources. A perfect example is Magni. We woulda done something like Magni to start—an amp at a price point much less than the original Asgard—if we had the resources to do high-volume surface-mount production at the time. This one’s a judgment call. Do you wait until you find the investment (or natural growth) to do something you would do if you could? Or do you launch, grow, and bring it in later?
Coulda. Here’s the dangerous one. You coulda done lots of things. You coulda made the Asgard anodized gold, or added a bunch of switches on the front to do fancy things (and made up crazy names for them), or put it in a fancy retail box, or had 16 variations with different performance levels, or offered custom finishes, or put it in a rhomboid enclosure machined out of a solid block of aluminum. But all of these things affect price, complexity, reliability, and serviceability. Just because you coulda done something, doesn’t mean you shoulda.
So how do you tell the difference between a “shoulda” and a “coulda?” Again, I don’t have a 100% perfect algorithm for doing this. A lot of it is strictly gut. A more generalized way of sorting might be that “shouldas” are usually fairly simple and straightforward, and don’t lead to huge complexity in design, manufacturing, sales, or service. “Couldas” are more complex, ideologically based, design-centric, and can have big impacts on complexity of all of the above.
Examples of shouldas:
- High reliability
- High performance
- Easy to manufacture
- Easy to service
- Simple to understand and use
- Good versatility
- Good documentation
Examples of wouldas:
- Using specific technologies or techniques with high step-in cost or high set-up commitment to:
- Enhance performance
- Reduce manufacturing cost
- Streamline production
- Improve reliability
- Enhance traceability
- Increase volume manufacturing to reduce cost
- Employ high-volume techniques only available at certain operating levels
Examples of couldas:
- Make it look like a spaceship
- Have switches glow and pulse with soft blue light
- Offer 12 different finishes with custom engraving
- Mandate for “unibody” design
- Eliminate all exposed fasteners
- Sealed for life!
- 83 different features for “enhancing” sound
- 16 different filters for ditto
- A 100-button remote
- A 2-button remote with proximity sensing gestural technology
- An Android or iPhone remote
- No external controls for a clean look
- Logos that shine through the PC board
- A nifty glass window to look at the guts
- 8 inputs, including ones that sound bad (Bluetooth)
- 100% buzzword compliance
Products that are made with lots of “couldas” usually look good on those long checklists that, say, automakers like to use.
Hey ma, this here Kerfluppelator A8 has three 8” touchscreens and reads your brain waves to unlock the doors, plus it has a 40-speaker sound system with Golby GigaSound, and 17 cupholders, plus it lets you change the engine note with a Dynamically Tuned Induction Resonator! Let’s definitely get that instead of the Boretonium LE that just has knobs and crap for the stereo.
But products made with lots of “couldas” can also spell disaster on many fronts:
- It’s so complex nobody wants to, or knows how to, use it.
- None of the fancy features ever works quite right.
- Service guys shudder and hide behind the building when one comes in to be fixed.
- Production lines that are always stopped for the latest firmware, hardware, or software tweaks that respond to 1-3 above.
The biggest “coulda” failures I’ve seen (not just in audio) usually stem from one of two things:
- Getting fixated on a design that is not producible. This is the current bugaboo of the super high end. Milled chassis with hours of CNC work for “striking” features, made out of a single block of aluminum. Yark. Do you know what billet aluminum costs? Do you know what machine time costs? I’ve seen quotes for stuff (not ours) that went as high as $1600 for a faceplate (yes, one faceplate.) This type of design is simply unsustainable, unless you’re literally producing millions of products, like Apple—and even then it’s pricey. So, hint: just because Apple is doing it doesn’t mean you should.
- Getting fixated on a long list of features. Or, the “Well, of course it has to have this and this and this and this, because Portlefloot and Giggleberry both have them,” excuse. If you find someone making a list of the competitors’ features, and that list is over 5 items long, take it out of their hands and tear it up. You’re comparing the wrong things. Especially if it contains the en-vogue buzzwords of the day.
Okay, So What Does This Have to Do With 2 Cheap Products?
Oh, you want me to make a point?
Well, here it is: pretty much all Schiit products start as “couldas.” Some of them never make it past this stage. Some do. SYS and Optimodi both did.
Why?
Okay, let’s start with the story. SYS first. SYS (or Switch Your Schiit, our little 2-input passive preamp) started without a name or any purpose beyond letting me switch between two different music sources on my desk in the garage, where I did most of my engineering work, up until an office reorg finally got me a space in the house.
At my garage desk, I usually use powered monitors (variously, Emotiva, Equator, and JBL—nothing super special.) Powered monitors require a line-level signal, and many don’t have convenient volume controls. An Asgard 2 would work for one source, but I didn’t want to waste a perfectly good A2 on a system where I don’t use headphones much. Plus, I had two different sources I wanted to use.
So, an easy solution is a small passive preamp (or attenuator, to be more precise.) We had a small chassis for Magni and Modi that could easily fit two RCA stereo inputs and one stereo output. We had a small pot we used in Magni, and a pushbutton switch we used in Loki.
Ten minutes of PCB layout, and I had a board that would fit into the Magni/Modi chassis and provided the two inputs and one output I needed.
Of course, there was one small problem. Passive preamps really don’t want to see a 50k potentiometer, like we use in Magni. They’d rather see 10k, or even 5k. The reason? Since they’re passive, they don’t have a low-impedance output stage to drive cables, and some cables have significant capacitance. The result? Rolled off highs with a large pot and long, capacitive cables.
But there are other pots out there, so I picked up some 10k pots, and everything worked fine.
And that might have been the end of it, except I made up a couple more and brought them into the Schiitbox (the prototype PCB service we use usually gives us several boards.) Alex grabbed one and started using it at his desk with powered monitors. Mike wanted one. Tony took one.
That’s when the light bulb went off. Our DACs don’t have volume controls. Many people have powered monitors and don’t use headphones. Even more have power amps with no volume control, and only one or two sources. There was a business case for making this small, unnamed experiment into a real product. That’s when it turned from a “coulda” to a “shoulda.”
Note: it may have stayed a “woulda,” if we didn’t have the resources to dedicate to making a whole lot of SYSes…and taking the chance on them hanging around for a while if I was wrong on people wanting them.
But SYS wasn’t a big investment. So, with a quick chassis modification to Magni, a name, a manual, and some photos, we had a new product, and launched it without any major fanfare other than a press release on our site.
Happily, SYS has found a nice home in our product line. Its sales won’t light the world on fire, but it’s a steady seller, and a ton of people really like them. I still have one on my desk (now in the house) to this day—and it’s even more important inside, where I have less space.
The Optical Modi was Mike’s gig. As I’ve mentioned before, Mike wasn’t a fan of USB input. The optical Modi was both his way of saying, “I really don’t want to use USB,” and a response to various inquiries we’d had about offering a Modi with optical input.
Aside: Mike’s softening on USB over time, but the fact is, USB input still has its own collection of glitches (usually related to port power management problems), and optical has a whole different collection of them (like 24/192 being very iffy, except when you have a source that can
really output it, and a good short USB cable, and you’ve performed the ritual blood sacrifice of a goat when the planets were all aligned). Mike didn’t like Toslink back in the Theta days—look at the default input on all the old Theta DACs—but that was then, and this is now.
Mike’s optical Modi was a lot more work than SYS, because, other than the DAC, output, and filter stage, everything changed. Optical doesn’t carry power like USB, so we had to add a wall-wart and a power switch (both taken from Magni, of course.) Also, we decided to try out the new, cool AKM SPDIF input receiver, the AK4113, which we hadn’t used before, so Mike had to learn its oddities and apply his own tweaks to it.
Still, there came a day when Mike gave me a green-board prototype and said, “Have a listen,” grinning. And it sounded very nice, just out of the built-in optical of a MacBook Pro.
“Is it worth making it, though?” I wondered.
Mike shrugged. “People have been asking for it.”
“They asked for black, too.”
Mike groaned.
“But...it might be less fuss than dealing with all this new USB port power management crap,” I said.
“And a lot of people still use CD players,” Mike added.
“Yeah, 7 of them,” I shot back.
Still, what pushed it from being a “coulda” to a “shoulda” was simple: I remembered that Apple Airport Expresses and Apple TVs had optical outputs. A Modi Optical would be an easy way to make a much higher quality streaming system from them. Like SYS, if we were a younger company, or more cash-strapped, though, it may have stayed a “woulda.”
Now, I didn’t see this as a separate product; just an alternate Modi. Want a Modi? Cool. Choose optical or USB. Hence no different name, no separate model.
So we ordered some boards, made some more chassis changes, did a manual, photos, etc, and we were off and running.
It was only after we launched that someone brought up a killer app for the optical Modi: positional audio for gaming. It seems that a lot of computer sound cards can do positional audio, and have optical outputs. However, they can’t output via USB. So, after we heard that, I added that to the list of applications for the Optimodi.
Like SYS, Optimodi probably won’t set any sales records, but it does sell rather briskly. It’s found a home in a lot of streaming setups, in gaming, and even with the 7 or so people who still spin disks. It’s a neat little product, serves a need, and will probably be around for a long time.
So, About Those Couldas…
I mentioned that I was playing with some other stuff…one of which became Fulla. All of the things I was playing with were on the “portable” end of things. Fulla I’ll cover in another chapter. The other three variants (including, yes, a battery-powered model) probably won’t ever become “shouldas.”
Why?
It’s simple: we didn’t really like them all that much. The portable stuff we’ve played with was either:
- Too close to other products on the market. If other companies are already doing a good job on portables, why get in just to be a “me-too?” Our key sticking point here is in the switching power supply. Sure, you can take a 3.7V lithium battery and use a switchmode converter to create, say, +/- 10V, which would give plenty of power…but there are companies already doing this. How would we be different? By being fully discrete? Maybe. But would it matter enough? More interesting would be using two 7.2V batteries and not using switchers. Again, maybe. But the charging issues wouldn’t be trivial, and the size of the box wouldn’t be especially small. So that’s shelved.
- Too much of a question mark. There are plenty of other companies doing portables, with long experience using lithium batteries. They know the ins and outs of them. We don’t. And we don’t want to find out about them the hard way (as in, after the product is released.) Could we have a flawless launch? Perhaps. But also, perhaps not.
- Limited interest internally. I understand the use case for a portable amp/DAC combo. I understand that not everyone has a house or apartment where their stuff can sit all day, nor a desk in an office. But I don’t need such a device, and Mike is even less interested. If we can’t give it our all, why bother?
So, will there never be a Schiit portable? Most likely. But who knows? Maybe I can solve the two-battery problem. Maybe I’ll make something that I really love and want to bring to the market. But it’s definitely not top of mind.
So Why Waste Time On Diversions?
For us, it’s simple: because we get frustrated. Projects like Ragnarok and Yggdrasil are immensely draining, especially when you hit the latest bump in the road. When something goes wrong on a massively complex product, you really have three choices:
- Go back into it frustrated and angry. And risk screwing it up worse. Or going down a bad path that you don’t have the perspective to shy away from. Getting right back on it, without a breather, is dangerous.
- Go watch some Fast and Furious movies. Or cartoons. Or Facebook. Or whatever mindless activity you need to reset your perspective and come back at it fresh. Of course, doing this isn’t really moving anything forward (even if it is necessary now and again.)
- Play with something else. You know the old expression, “A change is as good as a rest?” Yeah. Put away Ragnarok, and work on something simple. Easy. Quick. See if it goes anywhere. If it doesn’t, no harm except some spent time and a few prototyping dollars. If it does, you win. Both Mike and I take this approach most of the time. Sometimes it works very well.
It’s simple why you’d waste time on diversions in the general sense, too: because you never know what you’re going to find. If you’re going to start a business, you should feel free to explore—and to let your engineers and design teams explore. Don’t put the shackles on them at the front end, and you may be amazed what comes out of it.
But definitely, totally, absolutely, consider the shoulda, woulda, couldas.
I experienced something like that with my cell phone being too close to my tube amp. Might have been some break-in because haven't heard it in a while. I marked it off as tube-specific, but now I wonder. Certainly wouldn't want to spend more and still have an issue. For now, not an issue, knock on wood.
