aamefford
I have a custom title!
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2007
- Posts
- 3,914
- Likes
- 661
Oh dang - that's brutal! I think my best bet will be to forget I ever heard that so I don't accidentally blurt that out!
Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up
- Thread starter Jason Stoddard
- Start date
-
- Tags
- schiit audio schiit-audio
Oh dang - that's brutal! I think my best bet will be to forget I ever heard that so I don't accidentally blurt that out!
gelocks
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2011
- Posts
- 4,382
- Likes
- 390
LOL!!! 
StanD
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2013
- Posts
- 9,002
- Likes
- 1,134
You gonna start selling off her jewelry? Just wait till she catches you. She might kick the Schiit out of you and you'll end up dropping a DAC.
preproman
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2011
- Posts
- 10,625
- Likes
- 774
scootermafia
MOT: Double Helix Cables
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2008
- Posts
- 3,024
- Likes
- 246
Order'd. God help me. Also anyone want an Auralic Vega?
audiobill
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2011
- Posts
- 159
- Likes
- 98
The Auralic Vega is very well reviewed so it should be easy for you to resell.
The Auralic Vega is a thousand more..
Better sell it like a hot potato!
Sorry could'nt resist as this is a schiity thread.
Jason Stoddard
Sponsor: Schiit Audio
2015 Chapter 7:
The Yggy Circus, Tidal Uprisings, and the Unknown Future
April 21, 2015 is the day I am free once again.
Free of expectations, free of questions, free from the ramifications and repercussions of the idiotic leaks and promises I began making, almost 4 years ago. Because Yggy is released, and nobody knows what comes next.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it here again: never, ever, ever, ever, for any reason, no matter how much you’ve had to drink, no matter how much it will change the world forever, no matter how cool and wonderful and groundbreaking you’ve convinced yourself it will be, never ever for any reason talk about future products.
No, really. NEVER.
Bottom line, I should have never mentioned Yggdrasil or Ragnarok. But I did. And, in doing so, I probably wasted half a man-year in my time, Mike’s time, and Nick’s time, responding to questions about when they would launch, (honest answer: when they’re damn good and ready), what features they would have (honest answer: no clue until the spec’s finalized, and even then…well, development changes everything), how they’d sound (honest answer: really? We don’t hear the same things you do, and how do you answer this when the product doesn’t exist?), what they’d compete with (honest answer: see the Yggy FAQ, first question, but hey, that was the target, and targets aren’t realities.)
Go back and read that bit about wasted time.
Then ask yourself: what else could we have been doing, other than managing the spin on our own information leaks?
Yep, there could have been new products.
Yep, we could have gotten a better handle on production.
Yep, we could have explored some exciting new tech we’re only now getting into.
But we didn’t. Am I bitter? Not at all. It was my choice to blab about upcoming products, secure in my ignorance about how difficult they’d be to get to market. It was my choice to dig that hole deeper, when we first thought we had a handle on them.
But now Yggy’s done. And we’re heading into a grand new future.
Last Minute Tricks, or, The Inevitability of Problems
Yggy, like any product conceived by humans, had both its share of hole-in-one triumphs and irritatingly stupid things that held it back.
I know some of you conceive of the product development process as a wonderfully smooth and seamless flow from a group of shining white-coated scientist-types, eyes glowing with the reflections of data from advanced touchscreen test equipment, to spinning 3D models on giant displays, to touchless advanced robotic manufacturing producing a flawless product from the predicted start date.
AHHAHAHHAHHAHAAAHAAA! Right. I’ll eat my hat if the current iPhone didn’t have at least half a dozen tweaks/kludges/unexpected workarounds in its first run.
(And, ah, one rather large—and I bet unexpected—failure mode.)
Bottom line, the path to production is never linear, never smooth, and never completely predictable. Especially for a one-of-a-kind product like Yggy, using DSP code and D/A converters never used anywhere else.
So what tripped us up? Lots of things:
It feels good to finally talk about some of these problems, because it wasn’t like I could discuss them when we were going through the pain.
All these problems help explain why we’re so late. But it also goes to show what you’re really getting yourself into, when you say, “Hey, yeah, this is what we’re planning to do…” whether that plan is next month, next quarter, or next year.
Seriously. Just shut up. You’re aiming for “product launch,” not “product escape.” Talking about what you have planned in the future may feel good now, but it’s usually not a great strategy for the long term.
Why? Because suddenly:
But we do blab. Lots of us. Including me. Because it does feel great! And sometimes you really, really think you’re right around the corner from revolutionizing the industry.
Hint: it’s not you who calls the revolution. It’s your customers.
The Utterly Predictable Press
Which is a great segue to the mainstream press’ audiophile-immolation-du-jour. Now done with Pono, they’ve moved on to Tidal.
Yes. Groan. There’s tons of great opinions on the idiocy of the mainstream press in the audiophile press out there, so I won’t belabor the points again (and, yeah, you already know them anyway, like nobody can hear the difference, its snake oil anyway, it’s elitist, the artists are greedy, etc, etc.)
And…here’s what gets me:
All these histrionics are over a company that’s nothing more than another competitor to Spotify and Pandora, offering essentially the same thing at the same price.
On any other news day, snore. Nobody cares.
But…this competitor ALSO dares to offer a higher-priced tier that promises higher quality.
Now, it’s get out the pitchforks!
Does this make sense at all? Yes and no. Yes, in today’s moment-driven mainstream online press world. It’s a lot easier to start a war than to get into a nuanced discussion. And if it’s a class war, even better. Because everything has to be black and white. It has to be compared. If you’re in this camp, you can’t be in the other. There’s no possibility for a continuum.
Idiotic, yes. But this is what so many things have devolved to: people shouting at each other online over the most trivial stuff, with the press egging them on.
Here’s what I say to Tidal: it’s your customers who call the revolution, not the press. Stay focused on real quality, and you have a chance.
(But really, a compressed tier the same price as everyone else’s? This is not the way to differentiate yourselves.)
But I’ll shut up now. We’re not their marketing agency.
The Unknown Future
Okay. Back to Schiit. We’re in a funny place now, aren’t we? Because the future is unknown. Completely open. Full of limitless possibilities. We could do anything. We could start making toasters or car door handles tomorrow.
Or, much more boringly, we could just keep doing what we’re doing.
The reality is somewhere in the middle. I expect we’ll surprise some people this year. I also expect that some of what we announce will be utterly predictable—especially if you know Mike’s history.
But I’m not going to promise what kinds of products, or even how many. Even some of our predicted products have seen schedules slip…so you may not even see the same number of products I predicted in December.
“Wait, what, are you getting lazy?” you might ask.
Nope. It’s just that most of the stuff we’re working on is pretty far off the “safe and easy” template. It’s more unpredictable. It’s harder to develop. It takes more time.
And—I’ll say it—we’re taking more time, too. Deliberately. Not because we’re lazy, but because to keep things moving forward, we need to get stuff right…and we need to explore some surprising new things, from new manufacturing methods to different and unexpected technology.
“Oh, no, are you gonna change completely on us/go crazy and do Beats-like headphones/get acquired by Kanye?” you might be asking?
No. Relax.
We’re still going to have fun and make great, affordable, and unique products. That won’t change. Ever. It’s what we are. Hell, our trip down the path of great and affordable will probably accelerate. A lot of the stuff we’re looking into right now gives us virtual superpowers in terms of cost and efficiency.
“But if you don’t tell us what you’re gonna do, if everything is behind a cloak of darkness, how’re you gonna deliver what we want?” some others may be asking.
It’s simple. Because we listen to you. We do our research. We understand the market. And we’re confident that we, ourselves, bring enough intelligence and insight to the mix to create products you want to have…and that may even be on an “out of the ballpark, category-redefining” level from time to time.
But there will be no more teasing.
No more pre-announcements.
No more blabbing.
That is, until the new stuff is ready. Then, you can tell us if we’re insane…or not. Thank you again for your patience, your patronage, your requests, your suggestions, and your insights.
Here’s to the last 5 years…and to a great 2015.
The Yggy Circus, Tidal Uprisings, and the Unknown Future
April 21, 2015 is the day I am free once again.
Free of expectations, free of questions, free from the ramifications and repercussions of the idiotic leaks and promises I began making, almost 4 years ago. Because Yggy is released, and nobody knows what comes next.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it here again: never, ever, ever, ever, for any reason, no matter how much you’ve had to drink, no matter how much it will change the world forever, no matter how cool and wonderful and groundbreaking you’ve convinced yourself it will be, never ever for any reason talk about future products.
No, really. NEVER.
Bottom line, I should have never mentioned Yggdrasil or Ragnarok. But I did. And, in doing so, I probably wasted half a man-year in my time, Mike’s time, and Nick’s time, responding to questions about when they would launch, (honest answer: when they’re damn good and ready), what features they would have (honest answer: no clue until the spec’s finalized, and even then…well, development changes everything), how they’d sound (honest answer: really? We don’t hear the same things you do, and how do you answer this when the product doesn’t exist?), what they’d compete with (honest answer: see the Yggy FAQ, first question, but hey, that was the target, and targets aren’t realities.)
Go back and read that bit about wasted time.
Then ask yourself: what else could we have been doing, other than managing the spin on our own information leaks?
Yep, there could have been new products.
Yep, we could have gotten a better handle on production.
Yep, we could have explored some exciting new tech we’re only now getting into.
But we didn’t. Am I bitter? Not at all. It was my choice to blab about upcoming products, secure in my ignorance about how difficult they’d be to get to market. It was my choice to dig that hole deeper, when we first thought we had a handle on them.
But now Yggy’s done. And we’re heading into a grand new future.
Last Minute Tricks, or, The Inevitability of Problems
Yggy, like any product conceived by humans, had both its share of hole-in-one triumphs and irritatingly stupid things that held it back.
I know some of you conceive of the product development process as a wonderfully smooth and seamless flow from a group of shining white-coated scientist-types, eyes glowing with the reflections of data from advanced touchscreen test equipment, to spinning 3D models on giant displays, to touchless advanced robotic manufacturing producing a flawless product from the predicted start date.
AHHAHAHHAHHAHAAAHAAA! Right. I’ll eat my hat if the current iPhone didn’t have at least half a dozen tweaks/kludges/unexpected workarounds in its first run.
(And, ah, one rather large—and I bet unexpected—failure mode.)
Bottom line, the path to production is never linear, never smooth, and never completely predictable. Especially for a one-of-a-kind product like Yggy, using DSP code and D/A converters never used anywhere else.
So what tripped us up? Lots of things:
- Rewind to more than 2 years ago, when we found that our planned DSP platform was end-of-life, or “not recommended for new designs.” This meant that we had to re-do literally everything on a new, unfamiliar DSP platform. The upside was much higher processing power and greater bit depth for the calculations (resulting in a truly insane 18,000+ tap digital filter). The downside was that it was an entirely new platform that none of us had used before, so the learning curve was very steep.
- Rewind to even before that, when Mike got the nutty idea to use the AD5791 DAC in the first place (he first brought the idea to me in 2010, shortly after the part was introduced). The AD5791 is NOT a friendly part to work with, for many reasons, including a data format that was fundamentally incompatible with audio, and an output that can include significant glitch energy. Early experiments in formatting audio to run on Analog Devices’ demo boards were not promising—in fact, so un-promising that we explored two other alternatives to the AD5791 before finally deciding that yes, they were usable for the Yggy. We came to this conclusion (to use the AD5791) less than 10 months ago.
- Follow the AD5791 through the first working motherboards and analog boards. It took quite a few iterations before we were happy with our solution to its need for reference voltages, error-correction amplifiers, the glitch problem, and so forth.
- Check out those first working analog boards, with a shiny new discrete balanced topology gain stage on them…a balanced topology not yet ready for prime time, as it turns out. We ended up using “simple” JFET buffers, rather than a complex topology.
- Note the scare quotes around “simple” in Point 4 above. Simple is relative. Managing the performance of these buffers with complex, very-low-noise voltage references to set operational points took some iteration.
- And let’s go back to the DSP code, shall we? The early versions required a computer tether to reboot the processor on the fly, when it had a little oopsie or two when changing sample rates. Not exactly something you’d want to bring to a show, let alone ship.
- For fun, how about a shunt power supply just this side of self-immolation? That went through some iterations as well.
- And let’s not forget the USB Gen 3 input. It performs quite a bit better than the Gen 2…but it also requires different drivers for Windows. This meant many rounds of qualification before we were comfortable releasing them (the good news is the Gen 3 drivers work for both Gen 2 and Gen 3 USB inputs.) This is something that wasn’t fully worked out until last month.
- And then there were the usual stupid problems—metal that needed revised to fit, the wrong connectors on the front panel boards, etc. But this is relatively minor—these kind of things happen with all new products.
It feels good to finally talk about some of these problems, because it wasn’t like I could discuss them when we were going through the pain.
All these problems help explain why we’re so late. But it also goes to show what you’re really getting yourself into, when you say, “Hey, yeah, this is what we’re planning to do…” whether that plan is next month, next quarter, or next year.
Seriously. Just shut up. You’re aiming for “product launch,” not “product escape.” Talking about what you have planned in the future may feel good now, but it’s usually not a great strategy for the long term.
Why? Because suddenly:
- Everyone knows what you’re planning. Can you say, “Lost competitive advantage?” Especially if they can move faster than you.
- You’ve just invited a bunch of questions from everyone. You now have to manage implied release dates, even if they are only fuzzy suggestions.
- You’ve opened yourself up for evisceration if things change. Different specs? Missed features? Slipped dates? Doesn’t matter how much you said, “You know, we’re only kinda-sorta thinking about doing it like this and that,” you’re gonna be held to it.
But we do blab. Lots of us. Including me. Because it does feel great! And sometimes you really, really think you’re right around the corner from revolutionizing the industry.
Hint: it’s not you who calls the revolution. It’s your customers.
The Utterly Predictable Press
Which is a great segue to the mainstream press’ audiophile-immolation-du-jour. Now done with Pono, they’ve moved on to Tidal.
Yes. Groan. There’s tons of great opinions on the idiocy of the mainstream press in the audiophile press out there, so I won’t belabor the points again (and, yeah, you already know them anyway, like nobody can hear the difference, its snake oil anyway, it’s elitist, the artists are greedy, etc, etc.)
And…here’s what gets me:
All these histrionics are over a company that’s nothing more than another competitor to Spotify and Pandora, offering essentially the same thing at the same price.
On any other news day, snore. Nobody cares.
But…this competitor ALSO dares to offer a higher-priced tier that promises higher quality.
Now, it’s get out the pitchforks!
Does this make sense at all? Yes and no. Yes, in today’s moment-driven mainstream online press world. It’s a lot easier to start a war than to get into a nuanced discussion. And if it’s a class war, even better. Because everything has to be black and white. It has to be compared. If you’re in this camp, you can’t be in the other. There’s no possibility for a continuum.
Idiotic, yes. But this is what so many things have devolved to: people shouting at each other online over the most trivial stuff, with the press egging them on.
Here’s what I say to Tidal: it’s your customers who call the revolution, not the press. Stay focused on real quality, and you have a chance.
(But really, a compressed tier the same price as everyone else’s? This is not the way to differentiate yourselves.)
But I’ll shut up now. We’re not their marketing agency.
The Unknown Future
Okay. Back to Schiit. We’re in a funny place now, aren’t we? Because the future is unknown. Completely open. Full of limitless possibilities. We could do anything. We could start making toasters or car door handles tomorrow.
Or, much more boringly, we could just keep doing what we’re doing.
The reality is somewhere in the middle. I expect we’ll surprise some people this year. I also expect that some of what we announce will be utterly predictable—especially if you know Mike’s history.
But I’m not going to promise what kinds of products, or even how many. Even some of our predicted products have seen schedules slip…so you may not even see the same number of products I predicted in December.
“Wait, what, are you getting lazy?” you might ask.
Nope. It’s just that most of the stuff we’re working on is pretty far off the “safe and easy” template. It’s more unpredictable. It’s harder to develop. It takes more time.
And—I’ll say it—we’re taking more time, too. Deliberately. Not because we’re lazy, but because to keep things moving forward, we need to get stuff right…and we need to explore some surprising new things, from new manufacturing methods to different and unexpected technology.
“Oh, no, are you gonna change completely on us/go crazy and do Beats-like headphones/get acquired by Kanye?” you might be asking?
No. Relax.
We’re still going to have fun and make great, affordable, and unique products. That won’t change. Ever. It’s what we are. Hell, our trip down the path of great and affordable will probably accelerate. A lot of the stuff we’re looking into right now gives us virtual superpowers in terms of cost and efficiency.
“But if you don’t tell us what you’re gonna do, if everything is behind a cloak of darkness, how’re you gonna deliver what we want?” some others may be asking.
It’s simple. Because we listen to you. We do our research. We understand the market. And we’re confident that we, ourselves, bring enough intelligence and insight to the mix to create products you want to have…and that may even be on an “out of the ballpark, category-redefining” level from time to time.
But there will be no more teasing.
No more pre-announcements.
No more blabbing.
That is, until the new stuff is ready. Then, you can tell us if we’re insane…or not. Thank you again for your patience, your patronage, your requests, your suggestions, and your insights.
Here’s to the last 5 years…and to a great 2015.
45longcolt
1000+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2011
- Posts
- 1,127
- Likes
- 5,037
Thanks, Jason, for another enjoyable chapter. And since I just ordered Ygg, could you please not introduce anything else until my wallet has had a chance to recover?
Much appreciated, amigo.
RickB
Headphoneus Supremus
You read it here first, folks. Schiit toasters and car door handles on the way!
jacal01
You've just been blocked by Mr. Conviviality!
Sooo... The Yggy has a glitch problem.
But speaking of utter deprecation, the way-too-early announcement of Ragnarok and Yggdrasil has its redeemable side, which, while however painful, exasperating and wasteful, may have been every bit worthwhile. It gave Schiit long term marketing exposure and consumer product anticipation to a unprecedented level, making the Ragnarok and Yggdrasil your watershed products in all likelihood, and positioning your company well into prominent status as a result. That turn of events may prove priceless.
But speaking of utter deprecation, the way-too-early announcement of Ragnarok and Yggdrasil has its redeemable side, which, while however painful, exasperating and wasteful, may have been every bit worthwhile. It gave Schiit long term marketing exposure and consumer product anticipation to a unprecedented level, making the Ragnarok and Yggdrasil your watershed products in all likelihood, and positioning your company well into prominent status as a result. That turn of events may prove priceless.
superjawes
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2014
- Posts
- 860
- Likes
- 157
The most interesting point, IMO, is that Schiit are basically done with their topmost-tier components (unless Jason gets crazy and wants to do a tube-like alternative to Ragnarok). So new products are probably going to be more interesting combinations of features and price points.
Here's to a Schiity 2015!
Here's to a Schiity 2015!
Ableza
Headphoneus Supremus
What's the release date for [REDACTED]???
Tuco1965
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2012
- Posts
- 4,545
- Likes
- 192
wink
His amps are made out of recycled beer cans
and his source from tomatos.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2009
- Posts
- 20,312
- Likes
- 3,656
Quote:Jason Stoddard
FTFY
FTFY
