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

[Jones Bob]

Jason, for fun you and Mike ought to go on Shark Tank and play with their heads.

 

[lblb]

Here's 2016 Chapter 02 typeset as a PDF:
Tablet Version
Dark Version
and the rest as always in my initial post linked in the signature.

 

[FrivolsListener]

  It's just a filter guys.

 
I didn't notice this until I reread this page of posts.  It may be just a filter, but if you hear what it does, it'll just blow your mind.  I had to be convinced; Bach pipe organ wasn't doing it for me.  It was pop (Brothers In Arms original CD pressing) that made my jaw drop.
 
Now if you *can't* hear it, that's both good and bad.  The good is you don't need a Gumby to be impressed.  The bad is, you are kinda missing out on something, like being colorblind.

 

[Baldr]

   
I didn't notice this until I reread this page of posts.  It may be just a filter, but if you hear what it does, it'll just blow your mind.  I had to be convinced; Bach pipe organ wasn't doing it for me.  It was pop (Brothers In Arms original CD pressing) that made my jaw drop.
 

 
That was one of my R&D eval discs almost 30 years ago at Theta.

 

[FrivolsListener]

   
That was one of my R&D eval discs almost 30 years ago at Theta.

 
Back when I had good hearing range and was more of a serious listener, the harmonics on Telarc recordings of pipe-organs sounded otherworldly (when you're used to a church organ that puts them all in a Swell box) and violins were downright painful.
 
Sadly my upper reach has dropped dramatically in the last 5 years from still above 17k to  14.5k.  But I do love playing the FLACs on my Gumby and learning new things about those familiar tracks.

 

[bixby]

  Hi Friends,
Need some advice on my rig.  I've developed a "scratchy" sound quality that seems to come and go.  The upstream rig is MacPro 2014 Mavericks / JRiver 21 / toslink / GMB.  The scratchy sound seems to start when I open Chrome to surf Head-Fi while listening to music.  At first, I thought it was all the pop-up ads that are running on Head-Fi.  Then I checked the Mac's sound output and Apple TV is listed there, for some reason, also using the digital output for something.  Anyone have a similar problem, or Mac experience that would help me?  It does sound like something else is trying to output digital sound, and it's getting in the way of the music.
 
Thank you all.
RCB

pm me,  I'll try to help.

 

[kstuart]

 

  It's just a filter guys.

 
I didn't notice this until I reread this page of posts.  It may be just a filter, but if you hear what it does, it'll just blow your mind.  I had to be convinced; Bach pipe organ wasn't doing it for me.  It was pop (Brothers In Arms original CD pressing) that made my jaw drop.
 
Now if you *can't* hear it, that's both good and bad.  The good is you don't need a Gumby to be impressed.  The bad is, you are kinda missing out on something, like being colorblind.

First - you took hekeli's comment totally out of context.  He was not disparaging the filter, he was talking about its marketability.
 
Second - most people cannot hear any difference between DACs, because they are not trained listeners.  It's not a genetic ability per se (although there may be some aspect of better or worse hearing apparaus) - rather it is almost entirely due to training, practice and experience.
 
Well over 90% of people will not know what we are talking about, with regards to sound quality more subtle than turning bass and treble knobs to 10.
 
Of the remaining people, 90% of those only think about sound quality in terms of bass-midrange-treble.  They have no idea of imaging, room sound, attack-sustain-decay, preservation of original balance, instrumental timbre.
 
You have to be an audiophile, audio engineer, or musician to notice any of those things.  Only those people will benefit from the Multibit DACs.

 

[valiant66]

Originally Posted by kstuart /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
--snip--
most people cannot hear any difference between DACs, because they are not trained listeners.  It's not a genetic ability per se (although there may be some aspect of better or worse hearing apparaus) - rather it is almost entirely due to training, practice and experience.
 
Well over 90% of people will not know what we are talking about, with regards to sound quality more subtle than turning bass and treble knobs to 10.
 
Of the remaining people, 90% of those only think about sound quality in terms of bass-midrange-treble.  They have no idea of imaging, room sound, attack-sustain-decay, preservation of original balance, instrumental timbre.
 
You have to be an audiophile, audio engineer, or musician to notice any of those things.  Only those people will benefit from the Multibit DACs.

 
Ummm... pardon me, but, uh, who else comes to Head-fi?

 

[valiant66]

Followup.
 
According to http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ the world population is ~7.4 billion.
 
Thus 90% who cannot tell the difference between DACs leaves 740 million.
 
And 90% who only think in terms of lo-mid-hi leaves 7.4 million.
 
Head-fi obviously has a lot of room to grow.
 
As does multi-bit.
 
And Schiit.

 

[SoupRKnowva]

An interesting article about another startup that probably shouldn't have succeeded, but did, Koenigsegg Cars

http://www.jaredporcenaluk.com/koenigsegg-a-lesson-for-startups/

 

[valiant66]

And to put that in perspective, in a review elsewhere on Head-fi it is mentioned Creative Labs claims 400 million users for its Soundblaster products.

 

[hekeli]

  I didn't notice this until I reread this page of posts.  It may be just a filter, but if you hear what it does, it'll just blow your mind.

 
The problem is you can't hear only the isolated filter, there's all that pesky multibit and analog stuff in the way, which might also affect things. How many dacs have you compared personally? There's lots of stuff out there without "off the shelf" filters and topologies. I think throwing blanket statements like "someone not being able to hear it" is pretty poor standard.
 
It would be fun to read some serious filter comparisons leveraging Bimbys 192khz passthrough feature. But haven't seen much effort from anyone yet.
 
Again, don't take any of this the wrong way. I wouldn't have Gumby if I didn't consider it very good value. Most of the "exotic" competition is pretty expensive or requires lots of DIY work.

 

[crazychile]

 
Second - most people cannot hear any difference between DACs, because they are not trained listeners.  It's not a genetic ability per se (although there may be some aspect of better or worse hearing apparaus) - rather it is almost entirely due to training, practice and experience.
 

 
This. You nailed it.
 
I've mentioned this many times to coworkers that just don't get my obsession. They assume that I must have perfect hearing. As I approach 50 I know I don't hear as well as I did when I was 20. It's safe to say that their hearing ability is better than mine. Yet after being into high end audio for almost 30 years, I've heard a ton of music, a ton of gear, and from that you develop the ability to detect when stuff just sounds right, and when it misses the mark.

 

[beemerphile]

If I was perfectly happy with a $1,000 something, but could train myself to distinguish the otherwise undetectable merits of a $20,000 something, I believe I would just skip the training.

 

[wink]

Never skip the training..........
 
It's the difference between a gifted 100 metre sprinter and an olympic qualifier.