2017, Chapter 2: "Obsolete."
On Friday, January 20
th, I was miserable.
Well, maybe not completely miserable, like you are when you have a crappy-ass flu, or pneumonia, or something like that, but definitely spacey, low-energy, and under the weather. Of course, I had nobody to blame for this except myself: I was 36 hours into a multi-day fast.
Yes, fast. As in, no eating. As in, at all.
Yes, I am an idiot. Or at least a little crazy. I like to try different biohacks from time to time, and see if they help or not. I’ve been tuning my diet, exercise, and supplements for many years now. Hell, I order my own lab tests to check my progress. And yes, I understand this sounds like a bucket of nuts…until you factor some notable results, including eliminating my high blood pressure and bringing my cholesterol numbers down into a happy range, without medication.
So, fasting was something I wanted to try for a while. Lisa was away with Jen on a writing retreat, so I had some days when I wouldn’t have to cook, so I jumped at the chance.
And so, when AndreYew posted:
Now the Stereophile Facebook dude is calling Yggy's DACs “obsolete.” :/
I was not, perhaps, in the best place to read about it.
Say Some Nice Things About Stereophile
Okay. Let’s be clear. This is not a “dress down and insult Stereophile” chapter. In fact, even today, my feelings towards Stereophile are, in general, warm.
Why? Because they sought us out and reviewed our products, before we ever spent a dime in advertising. They reviewed Bifrost, SYS, and Mani before any Schiit ad hit the magazine. I know Stereophile gets accused of “pay for play” crap all the time, because I read the comments on their own website. And the fact is, they don’t operate that way. That speaks to honest curiosity and journalistic integrity. And that’s significant.
(Contrast this with another industry mag that kept asking us to advertise with them…think, like, every month…without ever asking to review a single component of ours. After a couple of years I snapped and sent a testy email telling them that if they’d showed just a tiny bit of interest in our products, I would show a tiny bit of interest in advertising.)
So, you know what? The fact that Stereophile went out of their way to find our products and review them—especially Bifrost, when we were a tiny, tiny company—is deserving of recognition and respect.
But, on Yggdrasil, I think something very, very strange happened.
Back to the Dark Side
Okay. But what about that “obsolete” slur on Stereophile’s Facebook page?
Yeah. Rage.
I sat there at home, all thoughts of a nice, leisurely stroll through social media before a nice, leisurely drive into the office forgotten. My low-blood-glucose-addled, adrenaline-pumped brain was on fire. The Yggy review had been very positive. Herb Reichert had loved the DAC. So why had they taken a cheap shot at Yggy on Facebook? What’d we done to piss in their Cheerios? What had we done to them?
It hurt even more, because I’d just confirmed a new ad placement with Stereophile’s ad rep yesterday. All sorts of stupid ideas ricocheted around in my skull, but first and foremost was something like this:
Cancel the ad! Cancel all the ads! Make them feel the pain!
And so, the first thing I did was to send an email to our Stereophile ad rep, copying John Atkinson, Stereophile’s editor, saying that I found it hard to support them when they posted such blatantly inaccurate stuff, and educating them on what “obsolete” means in terms of engineering.
Aside: one of the things that lit me up the most was that “obsolete” has a clear definition in engineering. A part is obsolete when it is “not recommended for new designs, or ‘NRND.’” The PCM1704 is obsolete. It is NRND. The AD5791 is not obsolete. It is in current production.
After that email, I posted this on HeadFi:
Yes, this gets my blood boiling. Just commented on Facebook and sent a letter to the ad rep and editor.
The reality is, for those just tuning in: AD5791BRUZ DACs used in Yggdrasil are 100% current and used in the most mission-critical applications on the planet, including medical imaging and defense. They are much higher spec in terms of INL and DNL than any audio DAC, ever. The Yggdrasil uses 4 of these blindingly expensive DACs.
Then, it was time to jump over to the Stereophile Facebook page and post much this same thing on their feed (which was already starting to take flak from some readers.)
By the time I’d gotten done with that, I’d gotten a response from John Atkinson, saying (paraphrasing) that he still thought “obsolete” was an appropriate adjective, given that we “live in a world of 24-bit audio.” Still, he said he’d add a clarifying line on the Stereophile Facebook post.
Wait a sec, I thought, my addled brain kicking into high gear.
Does this mean that John Atkinson does the Facebook posts for Stereophile himself?
That was a really weird thought. I always figured that their Facebook presence was overseen by some minimum-wage “social media specialist” in-house (or by the same person at an agency.) I was very familiar with that model, having done it for many companies at my marketing agency. And, to be perfectly frank, social media mavens weren’t always the sharpest tools in the shed. It would be understandable if a low-level guy took a shot at us. But the editor of Stereophile himself? It made no sense.
So, yeah, the “clarifying line” got posted—“obsolete in the context of 24-bit audio.”
So I had to add to my response:
By this time, reaction to Stereophile’s post was starting to percolate through the internet. At least 90% of it was negative—as in, critical of Stereophile. In fact, going back to the original Stereophile Facebook post today, there is not one single positive comment on it. There are some neutral comments (people looking for more information on associated components, etc,) but there are no supportive comments.
So, if John’s intention was to generate controversy and get eyeballs, he definitely did that. But, in my professional opinion, zero supportive posts ain’t a great outcome, even in the contentious and trollsome world of social media.
I sent an email to Alex saying I’d be in a little late, and spent some time looking at the reactions to Stereophile’s post. And thinking about our history with Stereophile and with the results of their reviews in general. (One thing great about fasting is you don’t spend time eating, so you can spend time thinking. Also, fasting apparently also floods your system with adrenaline to keep your blood glucose in range.
Had we done something to piss them off, really? No, I sincerely don’t think so. Was “obsolete” a fair characterization of the DAC, something I should just leave alone? No, not in my opinion, anyway. Mike wasn’t awake yet (he’s a late worker and late riser, I get up with the dawn), but I thought that would be his opinion as well.
Or, bigger, was this something to worry about? Was this something that, if we kept grinding on, would affect us negatively?
That was a tougher question. Especially coupled with the fact that magazines, despite their attentions, had never really moved the needle for us.
And especially, especially coupled with the fact that people were sticking up for us—supporting Schiit’s viewpoint—across an increasingly large swath of the web. People didn’t like the fact that Stereophile was attacking us. And not just people in this forum.
And that really sealed it. I realized that the things that mattered were what we were already doing: participating in forums, directly talking to customers, telling our story on Schiit Happened. The negative reaction—and the speed at which it spread—and the real-time changes it caused in our metrics—really underscored that the real action was no longer on the page, but on the screen.
Aside: and that’s what I really think is the future. The replacements for the current industry magazines aren’t going to come from a reorganization of the magazine, or a change in format of the magazine, or a move by the magazines online, or a concerted effort by the magazine to be present on social media…the replacements will come from places where people go to engage and interact organically. Places like Head-fi. This is the future. Just as commerce changed from the browsing at the local shop to point-and-click-and-get-it-in-2-days on Amazon, the voices of the experts are now online, in forums—and there are more experts, with more opinions, reviewing more gear than any magazine can hope to compete with. Yes, it’s a bit like the wild west at the moment, but it’s becoming clear where this is going…and it’s going to be big.
So, after making a post or two about how “you guys are the future,” I finally got up off my hunger-addled butt and went into the office. Just another crazy day at Schiit, best to put it down for now. I knew I could fight about this forever, bringing up points like the fact that delta-sigma DACs are, at best, 5 bits, so were they obsolete for missing 19 bits? And “living in a world of 24-bit music” is pretty hilarious, when it’s less than 0.1% of all recorded music at best, and the vast majority was still 16/44. Or even Stereophile’s own guest editorial/manifesto by Bob Stuart, which clearly stated:
"Principally because of the combination of environmental noise and microphone self-noise (plus tape noise with analogue masters), very few recordings achieve let alone exceed 16-bit dynamic range. Add to this the fact that we can hear signals within noise only to about 10dB below the noise level (see olive curve in Figure 21) and it follows that bits 19 to 24 carry no useful information."
So with more than 18 bits, sounds like we’re OK, right? (Thank You, Bigro, for posting this.)
But fighting forever is no fun. Designing new products is fun. So I got ready and headed into the office, figuring that was the end.
Making Lemonade
Except it wasn’t.
Because, somewhere between my shower and sitting down at my desk at Schiit, as the debate raged on at Head-Fi, and on Stereophile’s Facebook post, and elsewhere on the internet, I had a horrible, evil thought. At that moment, I knew exactly what the Grinch felt like as he hatched his plan to steal Christmas.
This was the thought:
“Obsolete” would be a great ad headline.
Hell, I could see the ad, complete in my mind: a single word, “Obsolete,” floating over a beautiful picture of the Yggdrasil. And copy saying something like “This is what Stereophile called Yggdrasil,” and reasons why it wasn’t obsolete.
And so, by the time I came into the office, I was chuckling to myself.
“You know what they say about people that laugh by themselves?” Alex asked.
“Yep!” I told him. “But that’s OK.”
“What happened?”
“Stereophile called Yggy ‘obsolete.’”
Alex frowned, looking suddenly concerned.
“And I need to see if I can change the Stereophile ad,” I said.
Alex’s frown deepened momentarily, then he nodded and laughed. He knows all about my history in marketing, and he knows that I like to stir things up. He got it right away. “Oh, schiit,” he said.
“Exactly,” I told him, running upstairs.
Now, here’s the thing. Like John Atkinson at Stereophile, I wear a lot of hats. One of the things I do is all of Schiit’s marketing and advertising. And you could say that most of our marketing is simply a reaction against the stupid, boring, homogenized, oh-gawd-don’t-offend-anyone crap I’ve been forced to make for people at Centric for over 20 years. I’m hands-on, and very good with Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator…and I have every photo from every shoot of Schiit products at my disposal…so doing a new ad took, literally, minutes.
Now, the question was, would they accept the ad?
After all, I’d confirmed our “Reset” ad for the preamps yesterday. Stereophile could easily say “done deal, sorry, we have your artwork and confirmation of it, run along now.” And that would have been just fine.
But…you gotta try. I sent an email to the ad rep, simply asking if we could change the artwork, with the new “Obsolete” ad attached.
After that, I figured it would be time to sit and wait. Because they might want to talk amongst themselves, debate it, even ask for changes, or even reject it altogether. I’m not stupid. I know it’s a (a) a bit of a dick move, and (b) deliberately pissing in Stereophile’s own breakfast muesli, which might not be the brightest thing to do in terms of our future relationship.
Aside: but hey, Stereophile may have thought they were pissing on our Schiit’s campfire with the “obsolete” comment…until they found out they were mutants that piss kerosene.
So, I posted the ad I wanted to run right here, and spent some more time on the forums. To say Stereophile was taking it on the chin was a bit of an understatement. Some of the top comments included:
Wow. Just wow. "Obsolete" is a rough term. Just how many mega buck components that Sphile reviews are packed with "obsolete" parts and designs....? Probably 80%. (DigitalFrontEnd)
just looked at the page, the poster is really snide. I've never seen Stereophile post an inflammatory headline like that on a product positively reviewed. (mithrandir38, before “the poster” was known to be John Atkinson)
The more I think about this, the angrier it makes me. The first time anyone puts any new effort into DAC design in 20+ years and Stereophile labels it obsolete. (dmckean44)
Utterly bizarre. Another reason I'm not renewing Stereophile when my subscription is up. The misinformation doesn't end. (belgiangenius)
I am rolling in the aisles over the obsolete comment. I wonder what Stereophile thinks of tubes and vinyl? (AudioBear—this was when I started going, “wait, well duh,” and wanting to change the copy in the ad. Yes, I am an idiot.)
And then, finally, Mike Moffat joined the fray and posted, “Perhaps tubes are obsolete as well…..” And the comments from DigitalFrontEnd and AudioBear clicked, and my brain stripped a gear. I should have thought of this from the start! Hell, everything we do is obsolete!
So, I posted this on Head-fi:
Ah hell, I totally missed this.
Discrete design: obsolete.
Tubes: obsolete:
Class AB amps: obsolete.
Real switches, no software UI: obsolete.
Multibit DACs: obsolete.
Hell, everything we do is obsolete!
I love it.
And—wonder of wonders—at that point, Stereophile’s ad rep had gotten back to me, accepting the ad, and asking if it was final text. I told him I wanted to make a quick change to it, and sent him new artwork.
It was done.
And—kudos to them—Stereophile hadn’t even blinked. They’d accepted our dick-mode ad without a second thought. In fact, the ad rep told me that he really liked what we were doing.
Or, in more wise posts:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (KoshNaranek)
Never mess with the guys who have no sacred cows. Especially when you consider yourselves above reproach. (FrivolsListener)
Things Change Fast
In the old days, something like this could have been disastrous for a company like Schiit. To be branded with a disparaging term, “obsolete,” with no method other than the slow, painful back-and-forth of letters to the editor or manufacturer’s comments, could have hurt us.
Why Stereophile felt the need to do this—as a banner over a very positive review by Herb Reichert—is something I may never know. I get the feeling that some of the staff over there don’t like us. Whether it’s our name, our demeanor, our products, our undermining of the sacred order of Holy Magazine, Anointed Dealer, and Reverential Customer, or something else entirely, I’ll never know.
But it’s not 1987 anymore. Hell, it’s not 1997 anymore (1997 is pre-Google, if that makes you feel a little twinge of future shock.) And, really, in 2007, Facebook was only starting to take the mantle from MySpace and Second Life seemed like a smart thing to get into.
No. It’s 2017. And in 2017, things move rapidly.
By the middle of the day, Stereophile’s comments had spread far and wide. Posters brought up other equipment that didn’t measure so well, or failed in Stereophile’s tests, and had gotten a (paraphrasing) “Great job!” in testing. Several people who really respected Stereophile’s testing started openly expressing doubts. Now, Centric no longer subscribes to sentiment analysis tools (software used to keep tabs on what people feel in social media), but I’m sure the net result wouldn’t have been pretty.
But, by the middle of the day, my fast’s grogginess and general malaise had gone away.
Aside: apparently this is normal after fasting for a couple of days. For the curious, I ended up taking it till Sunday afternoon, then eating again. The trippiest thing was going to the store before breaking the fast. Jury’s still out if it was a good idea or not.
I wasn’t hungry at all, nor tired, nor spacey. I was happy I’d turned around something ugly into (what I thought was) a neat new campaign. So when I responded to posts online, it was usually just to thank Stereophile for the ad idea.
And this wasn’t snark—this was sincere thanks. Sometimes you have to have someone kick you in the ass to get you out of a rut. And our advertising, while OK, wasn’t exactly something I thought would set the world on fire. This new direction I like a lot more. Including “Obsolete” shirts at Axpona.
For Stereophile, though, things continued to be served up with additional snideness. When someone said they liked the sound of Yggy, he was told that he might simply like the sound of truncation (truculently delivered, after I had disambiguated rounding from truncation both via email and via Facebook post), and reiterating their opinion that Yggy was “sub-optimal engineering.” Later, they would dismiss some of the most interesting discussion of Yggy—which included independent measurements (from 2 different sources) that didn’t show the same behavior Stereophile noted, as well as some interesting proposed experiments, such as checking the musical content of the 4 LSBs–with one word:
amusing.
But, back to “Obsolete.”
I think Stereophile handed us a great theme that can serve us for several years to come. Because, you know what? It’s time to skewer some sacred cows. And this campaign gives us a perfect platform for that. Imagine follow-up ads with headlines like:
Cheap.
Some people say we should charge a lot more. Here’s why we don’t.
Idiotic.
Yes, but our name is a big part of our success. Find out why.
Silly.
That’s what we’re called when we insist on Class A and linear power.
And so on. There are tons of other hurtful adjectives that we can throw at ourselves, unpack, and defuse. The words are simple, strong, memorable, and create ads with stopping power. And, once deployed, they can never be used in a negative way against us, ever again.
So yes, we’re obsolete. Proudly obsolete. Even our prices are from another era. Our business model, based on actual costs and what the market will bear, is completely out of whack with what they consider current today. Our products are almost unbelievably throwback, using power supplies and topologies considered wasteful and frivolous today. We offer not a single product with a screen, not a single product with a soothing artificially intelligent voice, not a single product with a wireless interface, hell, not a single product with a battery or soft-touch buttons.
And maybe that’s what Stereophile sees. Maybe, to them, we are a veritable dinosaur wallowing in the primordial ooze, roaring in futility against the fire of the world-shattering meteor that ended their reign.
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
As with everything, we’ll see how it goes.
