2018, Chapter 6:
Amplifying the Future. Maybe.
Yep, I know, I’m monumentally late at getting the coaster amp chapter done. Which is pretty hilarious when we already have the coasters in stock. So yes, I should knuckle down and get the chapter done. But I won’t. Not this week.
Why? Two reasons.
- I want to make sure all the documentation is really, really correct on the coaster amp before I release it. This is not a trivial bit of work.
- Lots has been happening around here, and I haven’t really talked about what’s going on in the shop since I blathered on about 3D printers in January.
And, a bonus reason, based on #2: some of the “lots of stuff what’s been happening” around here is a whole lot of what-ifs, build-ups and tear-downs, play-with-designs-and-start-over-again kind of things, involving both new and updated products.
“Holy hell, is he gonna break his rule and talk about what’s coming?” you may be asking.
Well, yes and no.
Yes, because I’ll be talking about the future. Or, to be more accurate, some possible future. Not necessarily THE future, because nothing is set in stone.
As a plus, this is your chance to weigh in on products that haven’t been fully baked. As a minus, neither of the products I’m going to talk about have any set timeframe. So don’t get too excited.
Aside: let’s turn the “don’t get too excited” up to 11 with this reminder: we are ALWAYS working on revisions of current products, and on new products. Most do not come to pass.
Aside to the aside: no, seriously. We are ALWAYS and CONSTANTLY working on new stuff. In many cases, nothing comes of it. Do you know how many runs I’ve made at an Asgard 3 or Valhalla 3? Yep. Not worth doing.
Aside the third: let me be extremely and painfully blunt: the products I’m gonna talk about may never happen.
But hey, let us know what you think. Seriously.
Before we move on to What Might Come To Pass, however, let’s talk about What’s Happening.
The Functional Present
Tomorrow, we get first articles off the injection molds for our light pipes and knob inserts.
“Boorrr-ingggg,” you groan. “Let’s move on to the stuff that might happen.”
Patience. All in due time. And custom injection-molded parts are hardly boring. They’re the next logical step for us, allowing us to reduce manufacturing time, increase serviceability, and make the LEDs not so ****ing bright.
“Wait, what?” you say, waking up from your snooze. “Bright LEDs? Cured? What the hell is Schiit coming to?”
Yes. With light pipes, we naturally throw away a lot of the LED brightness. So we can still run the LEDs with enough current to ensure they always turn on and function at a consistent level, AND deliver front panel lights that are less, ah, laser-like.
“About damn time!” someone grumps at the back.
Yep. Agreed.
It’s also about damn time that the LEDs always line up perfectly with the front panel, and disassembling our products doesn’t mean you have to deal with near-impossible-to-align and super-easy-to-break LEDs. Now, the light pipes will be attached to the front panel, with the light towers all exactly the right depth to be flush with the front surface, and they’ll never touch the surface-mount LEDs on the board.
The catch? Actually, there are two:
- The first articles we get tomorrow may not work. I’d rate the possibility of this as being roughly equal to the resurrected corpse of Henry VIII offering me 4.5 tons of gold in exchange for a majority ownership in Schiit.
- It’s gonna take time to roll this out through the line. Only the newest products are set up for surface mount LEDs; everything has to change. Some just require a small layout change, others need to have spacing changes. (Engineers out there are groaning at the amount of work this entails.) If we have it all done by end of the year, we’re doing well.
Next up, the press-on knob inserts are also coming in. Again, this may not seem like a big deal (or even might seem alarming, if you’re thinking about the Magni-style shell knobs.)
Don’t worry—we’re not changing the custom machined aluminum knobs for a thin shell knob. We’re just changing the machining so it takes a custom insert that allows it to be a press-on knob. It’s still heavy aluminum—hell, the wall thickness is nearly ½”.
But, the insert allows us to do two things:
- Eliminate the damn setscrews. They’re ugly and a pain in the rear end. They also take significant time to insert, align, and fiddle with. Time for them to be replaced by a solution that simply presses on and stops at exactly the right depth every time.
- Get a good amount of insulation from chassis heat. For Asgard 2, Valhalla 2, and Lyr 3, this may make some of you very happy.
The catches? Two again:
- The inserts may not press in cleanly to the machined knob, and/or they may not press on to the potentiometer shaft, and/or they may not pull off easily enough, and/or they may pull off too easily. Unlike the light pipes, one of these four “oopsies” is a real possibility. This is the reality with press-fit parts. That’s why you get first articles. I expect we may be going back and forth on this a time or two. We’ll see; we may be lucky. But luck of this magnitude is like buying one lottery ticket—and winning a few million dollars on your first shot.
- The inserts are designed specifically for flatted shaft knobs. Most of our products don’t use flatted shafts, so that means new potentiometers. Yep, they’re ordered, and yep, they just drop in, but like the light pipes, don’t expect this to happen overnight. Even if the inserts are perfect first shot, again, end of the year would be doing well. It also means no easy retrofits.
Still not excited? Consider that with just a couple of custom parts, we’re significantly speeding up production, making products look better, improving anyone’s ability to service them, and addressing some very long-standing gripes about ergonomics.
Aside: don’t get too excited about us losing the rear-mounted power switches, however—some products are simply impossible to make that work with. And, on my more cynical days, I think of it as “the agency solution,” where we’d leave one obvious thing for picky clients to find, so they didn’t pick the whole thing apart.
Aside the second, less snarky version: it’s now getting to the point where we’re deploying many more custom parts, including die-cast, injection-molded, and stamped parts. Hell, I designed a clip-on heatsink for a GBU bridge (as used in Vidar), simply because there are no good stock options out there. Hell, there’s nothing out there that even bolts on. The part has a perfectly serviceable bolt-hole, so you think you’d at least see bolt-on parts. But no. And, dumbass that I am, I actually drew up a bolt-on heatsink before realizing, “hey dummy, this is a full custom part, just make it so it clips on and aligns automatically.” So I did. But the reflex to design full custom parts is still a bit alien; I need to unlearn a whole lot of garage-shop mentality.
Beyond that, a whole lot of stuff has been happening under the hood. I’m going to have to do a new chapter on measurements, because, in addition to the two Stanfords, we’ve also added a half-dozen Avermetrics Averlabs. Yes, as in 6 more analyzers. And, next month, we get an APx555.
“Holy moly, why do you guys need like, a billion analyzers?”
Well, business changes, and you change with it. That’s the short answer. I’ll go into the details in a much longer chapter, but it boils down to:
- The Avermetrics AverLabs allow us to deploy automated test much more widely. Now, Manis, Lokis, and all 16-bit multibit DACs are 100% automated tested to reference curves. This dramatically speeds up the testing of Manis and Lokis, and ensures that the 16-bit multibit DACs’ data lines are all present and accounted for (as a parallel-input DAC, they don’t necessarily fail “dead,” but can fail with, say, an LSB unaccounted for. Mike and Dave have also embraced the AverLabs for their at-home development, and Naomi (our lead analog tech) uses one for internal and customer repairs. She also developed the test procedures for Manis, Lokis, and the 16-bit DACs. We got our first AverLabs in December; since then, they’ve really taken over. They’re very capable, small, and relatively easy to use. They are not the last word in resolution; the Stanfords are better, especially from its analog generator, and the APx555 is even better than that.
- The APx555 allows us to get 24-bit measurements across a 1MHz bandwidth—which highlights interesting differences in out-of-band performance between delta-sigma and multibit architectures. Yep, delta-sigma will still have lower overall THD than multibit, but it’s interesting to see what they do on a much larger scale. It also allows closed-loop testing of USB DACs; we’ve previously had to use an open-loop approach. And, like the Avermetrics, it allows us to easily generate understandable reports and graphics—something the Stanfords are sorely lacking. It’s sad that time seems to have largely passed the Stanfords by. It’s insanely frustrating when it’s 10x faster to take a cellphone photo of the Stanford screen for documentation, than learning its arcane ways to save an image on a thumb drive. Sigh.
So, does this mean we’re going to turn into a numbers-is-everything company, hellbent on delivering 0.00001% THD across the line?
Sure. When we stop making tube amps. Or when the space aliens tell me how to use all that Area 51 tech that’s supposedly kicking around. Or when undead Henry VIII shows up with a shedload of gold bars.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.
The Powerful(?) Future, or Not So Much, or What MAY Be Coming
Now, I know this is the real reason you hung around—to get an idea of what might be coming, and to weigh in with your opinions, experience, and insight.
Not kidding on the above, because “what’s coming” starts with a tale of incompetence.
Namely, mine.
Maybe #1. Let’s start with a story.
After doing two complete prototypes of an upcoming product, I realized I still hadn’t addressed two of the three biggest pain points of the current design: the ridiculous chassis cost and difficulty to assemble and service.
Think about that.
I made a prototype—a complete, functioning prototype. This is a prototype that included both analog design and firmware.
Then I decided I had a better gain stage, so I threw that one away and did it again. This time, it went right up to a finished first article chassis, I was so confident in the design.
And then, in the midst of designing custom parts that
really address issues with other designs, I realized that I’d built a shiny turd. Yep, it was a big improvement on the current design, and it would be pretty much what everyone would expect it to be, but it completely, utterly ignored the very painful assembly of the product, and didn’t address the stupendously expensive chassis—both of which could easily be addressed.
Yeah.
I literally sat there, staring at the screen of the Surface Pro I use as an engineering computer, and thinking,
You are the dumbest butthead on the planet.
And, as I sat open-mouthed, it was like my brain opened up and a brand-new design dropped into it, whole and finished. Because part of the problem was heatsinking.
But we already had heatsinks for Vidar. If I went away from the idea of using the chassis as a heatsink, I would reduce the cost of the chassis and use parts we already had. And, if I realigned the way we did the volume pot, it could have a motorized part that we already had to the remote control. And if I did that, it could use the light pipes we already designed to eliminate LED alignment problems. And the whole thing could be a stamped subassembly using our standard-height pin headers. And it wouldn’t have to screw to the front panel, it could be held in by the pot and locator pins. And it could bolt to a steel subchassis for perfect alignment.
Holy hell, I thought,
I can actually fix all of the problems with the design—and I can do it with parts we already have!
But…but the other design was pretty much done. If I went this new direction, I would literally be throwing everything away. The board would be entirely new. The heatsink clips would be new. The interior stamping would be new. It wouldn’t look like the old product.
But it would be so much better! yelled the positive, go-get-em side of me.
But it would be soooo weird and different! the negative side of me yelled back.
I really, really, really wanted to find something wrong with the new design. Because, let’s face it, when you’re hundreds of hours in on something, the last thing you want to do is throw all the work away. Especially if you’d already done that once.
And so I looked at it. Really looked at it. And did some to-scale sketches, to see if there were any gotchas. Because it really was a new direction, even if it used a whole lot of parts we already had. Who knows what might happen when I started doing the equivalent of genetic engineering on the line.
But, the deeper I got in, the better it actually looked. Sure, there were tradeoffs, like less horizontal space in the chassis, and there were risks, like the need for higher precision alignment between the boards and front panel…but in general, it was much better.
**** it, tear it down, I thought finally.
And by teardown, I mean teardown:
- New boards, both main and control—complete rework, different sizes and shapes, re-lay-out, and reroute.
- Completely new metal, starting with 2D test/visualization stuff, then 3D CAD, then new first articles.
- New thermal clips for the heatsinks.
“So what’s this mystery product that you screwed up, screwed up again, and now are in the process of re-doing a third time?” someone is asking.
Heck, I thought I’d given you enough hints. It’s Ragnarok.
I can hear the gasps from the back of the audience. But again: we are
always working on new product and new versions of
everything. Of course we are.
Every sane company is. That’s
how it works.
Aaaaannnddd…there’s no guarantee the one I’m working on right now won’t end up in the trash as well. I thought I’d had it solved, two times before.
That’s right. I can screw up again.
That’s why there’s no timeframe for this, and no guarantee it’s going to happen. If you ask me, I’ll say “I don’t know.” If you ask
info@schiit.com or
orders@schiit.com, they’re say “We don’t know.”
So why am I torturing you with this information?
First, because I can at least give you a thumbnail sketch of what I’m working on, and second, because I’d like to hear what you think. Take a chance to weigh in. I won’t guarantee anything, but we do listen.
Here’s where we are:
- If you like the current Ragnarok, you may hate the new one. It’s a complete rethink in the vein of the Lyr 2/3 changeover—different topology and output, different chassis, different thermal management.
- It’ll have Vidar heatsinks, so it will run very cool—that’s a ridiculous amount of heatsinking for its power output. Power output will be the same, or nearly the same, as the outgoing version.
- Of course, it will have remote control.
- Of course, it will have speakers/headphones/both selectable with a separate control.
- It will still have 3 gain levels.
- It’ll use a new topology we haven’t used before, but it will still be differential.
- I’m holding back a couple of features which I don’t feel like discussing right now, but I think you’ll be excited about.
Beyond that, what do you think? Like I said, no guarantees, but we will listen.
Disclaimer: I’m afraid that there isn’t much I can do to make the product smaller or more desk-friendly, but that’s why racks were invented. I also can’t break the laws of physics, nor make a new Ragnarok much more or less expensive than the outgoing model.
And again, this design still may get schiit-canned, sidetracked, display a showstopper-level bug or bugs when deeper into development, or simply never happen.
And there’s no timeframe.
So don’t get too excited.
Maybe #2: let’s talk going low, or Captain Obvious strikes again.
Remember that 25W Class A amp in a Vidar chassis I mentioned in a previous chapter? Yeah, we’re playing with that. Take the Lyr 3’s Continuity™ constant-transconductance output stage, scale it up, bias it wayyyy up, and you might have a pretty neat product, right?
Well, except for one thing. It’d really be more like a 20W Class A amp, or else it gets too hot. How excited would you be about a 20W Class A amp?
Wait. Before you answer, let’s break that down:
- 20W real honest Class A per channel into 8 ohms
- 40W into 4 ohms, falling out* of Class A
- 80W mono into 8 ohms, again falling out* of Class A
*Rather than “falling out of Class A,” a better term may be “transitioning to the Continuity™ constant-transconductance region.” This is, after all, the whole point of the Continuity output stage—it seeks to keep the output stage operating in the gm-doubled region, even when out of Class A. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But it blurs the line between Class A and Class-AB amps, at least in my opinion.**
**Of course, many people think I am crazy. Or incompetent.
Still, that’s a big, hot, heavy 20W amp. Think 50 degrees C heatsink temperatures in a 20 degree C room. And it’s only 20 watts.
On one hand, I really like the idea of going with a low-power amp. It’s the exact opposite of what most people expect us to do—most expect us to go into welding-class amps next, but I’m not convinced that’s the right direction for us…an may be something we simply don’t need to do.
On the other hand,
20 watts.
Jeez, that’s
small.
How do you explain to someone that a 20W amp costs more than your 100W amp? Even though it’s in the same basic packaging, differences in the chassis and feature set would put if about $100 more than a Vidar.
Aside: “feature set” differences are mainly a planned front-mounted button for output stage shutdown, so you can press a button and have the amp go into a low-power standby mode, where it burns very little power (probably less than 10W). But this hasn’t been fully tested. It might work. It might not.
Am I being too sensitive to the low-power issue?
Would we be better off rating it at 25W/50W/100W (8 ohms, 4 ohms, mono), and specifying a lower class A bias (like, 15W into 8 ohms Class A—the total bias has to come down, because the rails get larger.)
Or would we be better off not doing it at all? Is it too much confusion in the line?
What say you?
The Schiit Uncertainty Principle, or Yoda Philosophizes
I know, I know, I know, I’ve said it a million times before, but I need to say it again: the stuff above may or may not happen. It may or may not happen in the way I’ve outlined. We may or may not be able to incorporate all, some, or none of your input.
Aside: and I haven’t even talked about two of the most exciting products coming down the line (one very soon), or the new directions that Mike and I are discussing. Prepare to see some Scanners-style exploding heads.
Or, in other words,
always in motion the future…
Thanks for tolerating this little diversion from the coaster amp. I should be able to get that one wrapped up in a couple of weeks.
Then, who knows?
