2019, Chapter 14:
The Current Craziness
In the past week or so, I’ve been approached by several people asking, in hushed tones proper to inquiring about an ill relative, if “I’m doing all right…with all the craziness right now.”
Now, by “craziness,” I’m assuming they mean the ten billion or so new products that just came out, the sudden retraction of Sol as a selling product back into beta, the speedbump we hit on Bifrost 2, and the other products we’re promising for the end of the month.
So I thought it would be a good time to answer this.
And yeah, it’s been a helluva year. At the time of this writing, we’ve introduced 9 products (Aegir, Ragnarok 2, Saga S, Saga+, Freya S, Freya+, Bifrost 2, Asgard 3, Sol), and have said we’re releasing two more around the end of this month, aaand we’ve still found the time to very publically play around with a direct-drive amp for Raal ribbon headphones, aaaaaandddd there may still be a couple of other things hitting before the end of the year.
By any measure, 11-13 products in a year is full blown crazytown. No sane company would want to do this all the time. Nor do I expect we’ll be doing this again next year.
But…I’m not unhappy we went a little nuts this year.
Progress Through Pain
Here’s the thing: in 2016, 2017, and 2018, I heard one thing again and again from production: “We can’t do this.”
Of course, the “can’t,” came in many forms, most relating to late parts (or the closely related ‘bad suppliers’ meme), but it also slopped into other things. Nothing surprising. You’ve probably heard the same thing:
we don’t have space. We don’t have enough people. We’ve never done this before. What if it really takes off and we can’t keep up?
And you know what? This is super dangerous. This is what kills companies.
But this reluctance to change is the normal path, the typical path, the way almost every company goes when they start seeing some success. They start a company, sell some stuff, have it take off, make some more things like it, have more success, and eventually they have this crazy, idiotic ephiphany:
“Hey, we got this all figured out! All we have to do is keep doing X and we’re set.”
Yeah.
Until a new competitor shows up at half the cost.
Or until a new competitor shows up doing something way better.
Or until fashion and taste change, and your customers move on.
Here’s the thing:
no company has everything figured out. Not for long, anyway.
Seriously, throw away the Successories. Lose the plaque with your mission statement. Paint over the inspirational quote from your business mentor. There’s only one thing that should go on your office wall:
Nobody has it all figured out. At least not for long.
And yeah, I get it. It would be great to sit back, relax, and rest for a bit. It would be wonderful to simply be comfortable for a while. And sometimes you do have to get away from it all, to rest and recharge.
But letting off, letting go, thinking, “We have this figured out, we got this…” No. That kind of complacency is dangerous.
And so, by the end of 2018, I was done with hearing what we couldn’t do. Because that’s the first part of the slide into irrelevance. And that’s why I decided that we were going to see how we could turn the “we can’t do this,” refrain into “actually, we can.”
And I knew it would be a bit painful.
Have I Gone Nuts?
“But…wait a second,” most business-y people will say. “Isn’t introducing a billion new products gonna break something?”
In short: yes.
But, if we do it right, it’ll break the stuff that
needs enbrokening. The can’t-do-it mindset. The bad processes. The bad space utilization. The crappy suppliers.
And, to be honest, we were already in a much better place to apply this kind of pressure after 2018, when we changed a whole lot of suppliers and processes, and now have much better relationships. A recent painting error that would have set us back 8 weeks a couple of years ago now cost us less than a week.
We were also in a much better place due to a new incentive system, which ensures that everyone in the company benefits from shipping quality products on time. This is not an insignificant program—it makes a real difference in our employee’s lives. Coupled with new line managers (Asa and Cameron), we’re running a lot more smoothly than ever before.
And, we were in a much better place because Mike, Alex, Tyler, and I agreed that it was time to push harder, and see what we could do.
And those are some super-important points that nearly every company misses:
- You can’t just apply pressure if your supply chain and processes are crap. They’ll just break, and you’ll be stuck with nothing.
- You can’t just apply pressure if your people don’t benefit from it. They’ll just keep doing what they’ve been doing, and you’re Schiit outta luck.
- You can’t just apply pressure if management hasn’t agreed to it (or, at least, accepted it, and is up for really really trying.)
If you don’t have those things in place, you can’t open the floodgates. Heck, I’d argue that you still can’t open the floodgates unless you have at least a couple of other things in place:
- The ability to delay products until they’re right. The schedule has to be flexible. And yeah, I know, some of you are snickering into your hankies about Sol, but I’ll get to that.
- The ability to kill products if they’re wrong. If it’s just not gonna work out, the product needs to die, and you need to be able to do that calmly. We’ve actually shelved some products in the background this year, which will help next year be a lot more sane.
“But you still sound nuts,” some people will say. “Why take the chance? Why didn’t you introduce these products over the next 3 years or so. You’d be set!”
Yeah, we’d be set.
If
we had it all figured out.
If
the competitive landscape didn’t change.
If
the market didn’t change.
You see where I’m going.
In actuality, accelerating product introduction brings a lot of benefits. Let’s look at them.
- Improved efficiency. I mentioned this before, but let’s expand on this a bit. Because of all these new products, we’ve had to dramatically reconfigure pretty much every part of production. We now have segmented “small, large, and Sol” product lines, with much more streamlined parts handling. Our inventory is much better organized, and our space utilization efficiency has gone way up. What’s more, the teams are better defined, productivity is higher, and morale is high. Sounds like a panacea? Be careful, and make sure your teams have input on what you’re doing—to the point of letting them make extreme changes to your own plans. Not only that, architect around the people who know how to make it better. We did—and now, we’re doing almost 2X the work with the same staff. This is a huge win—and, as a bonus, I’m not hearing “we can’t do this” any more.
- Better market data. More products allows us to get more data. We coupled product intros with additional quantified outreach and reinvigorated Amazon presence, and we now know much more about how people find our products, buy them, enjoy them, and we’re learning a lot more about what they want. In my opinion, nobody has seen an audio company employ any real marketing…the time may be coming for this, though.
- Expanding successful lines. Aegir is a home run, building on top of Vidar. Sales of both are way up this year as they synergize, and provide more options for our customers. The Saga/Freya Thunderdome products are also moving very well (more on this later), building on some very popular preamps from just a couple of years ago.
- Eliminating moribund products. Ragnarok was over 5 years old, Asgard 2 was over 6 years old, and Bifrost was a massive 8 years old when they were replaced. Ragnarok 2 further bolsters our position as a speaker amp company. Hell, it’s the amp I use. Asgard 3 is a super-high-value addition to our modular line, allowing someone to move up from a Fulla 2 at $99, to a Magni/Modi stack at $198, to a powerful, modular one-box solution with a 4490 DAC for $299. The $100, 200, and $300 price points are well-covered. Bifrost 2 is damn near a desktop Yggdrasil for $699, plus it has super-easy upgrading for the future. Plus, it sounds friggin amazing. It’s the DAC I use with my headphone rigs.
- Expansion into new markets. Sol gets us into the turntable market (yeah, I know, when it finally ships, again. I’ll get the scourges out for our friends who think we should really be repentant). And the coming Fulla 3 and Hel get us into the gaming market. Maybe none of these will go anywhere…but if we don’t try, we won’t know.
So yeah, we could have waited…and lost out on a lot of benefits. I’m personally glad we decided to put the pedal down.
I mean, let’s review. We’re currently at 9 products introduced this year. And none of these products were anything like Magni or Modi or Vali or Sys. They were real, serious, holy-crap-you-nuts products.
How nuts? Let’s do a quick review:
- Literally everything we’ve introduced with the exception of Asgard 3 and Sol were microprocessor controlled and required firmware. That’s 7 products, for the people who aren’t so hot on math.
- One product (Aegir) introduced a new output stage idea into a speaker amp (Continuity™ had previously been on Lyr 3, a headphone amp.)
- One product (Ragnarok 2) is literally the most complex product we’ve ever made, requiring many new production techniques, high precision mechanical engineering—and it introduced an all-new balanced topology, Nexus™, that we’d been working towards for years.
- Four products (Saga S, Saga+, Freya S, Freya+) extended our preamp line and introduced a new way of getting real market data on products: the Thunderdome approach.
- One product (Bifrost 2) was a complete re-think of how we do upgradable DACs, and introduced a whole new platform—Autonomy™—to ensure it never had to come back to us for upgrades. It ALSO introduced our all-new USB input, Unison USB™, based on a general-purpose Microchip microprocessor, rather than C-Media or XMOS. That makes us literally one of two high-end audio companies with our own USB technology (the other is Audioquest), the only one with UAC2 compliance, and an offical USB-IF developer. Bifrost 2 is literally the second most complex product we’ve ever done after Ragnarok 2. (Yes, when you take into account the oversight, USB, and mechanical aspects, it’s more complicated than Yggdrasil).
- And one product (Sol) was our attempt to shake up a whole new market, one we’ve never been in before, and our first complex mechanical product.
If we hadn’t applied pressure, we would have never been able to do this. The majority of these amazingly complex products have been trouble-free. Sure, yes, Sol is a problem, but we’re working on that (more on that later). And Bifrost 2 had a speed bump. But it’s now 100% solid, thanks in no small part to Autonomy.
On Thunderdome
“Okay, fine, we get it, you’re smart, blah blah,” you say. “How about an update on how the preamp Thunderdome is doing? What can we order safely?”
Ho ho. That’s a trick question. You can order any of the four preamps (Saga S, Saga+, Freya S, and Freya+) safely. They all have 5 year warranties, and we’ll be around to support them if you have any glitches. Remember, we’re nearly 10 years old now.
But as far as what’s selling, it’s changing.
Now that the OG Sagas are gone, Saga+ is picking up nicely. At the same time, Freya S is slowing down. Which is weird, because I think it’s a spectacular sounding preamp.
So, at the time of this writing, it looks like preamps with tubes are winners in the gonna-make-more-of-them race. Hell, Freya+ is doing so well that we’re almost out of stock again, after the second run. That’s a huge surprise. But it also makes me very happy, because that’s a heckuva of a preamp, with a whole lot of neat engineering tricks in it, for not a lot of money.
But again, we still have plenty of Saga S and Freya S…
…bottom line, there are no bad options.
On Sol
“Huh, now that was stupid, releasing a half-baked turntable on the world,” some have said.
And yeah, they’re right. Like Bifrost 2, Sol should have had an extensive beta period. Instead, we thought that having it running for over a year in our shop, plus a couple other early units were enough to get all the bugs out.
But we didn’t do a beta.
So, the first purchasers became the beta testers.
Now, before you go all ballistic on us, consider that these first purchasers were offered:
- A full refund, including shipping, if they didn’t want to be part of the beta program
- $300 off if they stayed in the beta program
- A full refund, including shipping, after the beta program if they still didn’t like it.
So yeah, we’re hanging on to $499 of the beta owners’ cash right now, but they have exactly zero risk. They either get a great turntable they like for their $499,
or they get all of their money back at any time, including after we declare the beta program over.
Again,
nobody participating right now is taking any financial risk.
So what are we working on in the beta program? Well, if you’re part of the program, you already know. We send update emails every week. A week ago, we sent the most verbose one, which I’ll share here:
Schiit Sol Beta Program Update #3
As promised, we’ll be updating you every week on the progress of the beta program. Here’s where we are.
Happening this week:
1. The longer headshell tonearm is approved. Headshells have been ordered and new jigs to build the tonearms have been ordered. You'll all get new longer-headshell tonearms when they are available, which is still 3+ weeks out.
Note: In the meantime, if you want a shortened tonearm with the standard headshell, let us know and we'll get you one.
2. Additional beta turntables are shipping. If you jumped into the beta late (that is, intentionally), your turntables will start shipping this week. These turntables will have many of the production improvements applied to them, including:
a. Shorter arm
b. Improved pivot cup
c. Pre-tied anti-skate weights
d. Pre-set-up turntable
Note: "pre-set-up turntable" means you won't have to go through the platter raising, etc rigamarole of the initial shipments. You should be able to mount a cartridge, align it, set the tracking force, and be done with it.
Note2: please give us feedback on this new setup.
Note3: If you didn't get your shipping notice, don't panic, we are being very careful about what we send out, so we will be slowwwwww.
FIndings (try these and give us feedback):
1. Belt wobble. In testing, we've determined that the belt wobble is related to too high a belt tension. If you are using our standard 1/16" rubber belt and standard flat-bottom pulley, you should not have belt wobble if the tension is set correctly. Try moving the motor closer to the platter and see if the belt wobble goes away.
Note: this doesn't mean you won't end up with a new pulley. Conrad determined that the reason the motor wasn't starting up on turn-on was because the pulley was too heavy. Yes, the PULLEY. Not the platter. Yes, we know, this makes no apparent sense. However, a pulley machined to reduce the mass starts up every time. So we're getting prototypes and you'll probably see a new pulley in any case.
2. Azimuth weight. We've received reports that the azimuth weight is too heavy. Please let us know if this is the case on your turntable. You should be able to adjust the cartridge to be perfectly parallel to the record in the lateral dimension using the small brass weight on the tonearm ring. If you can't, let us know. In any case, we're getting lighter weights.
3. Anti-skate height. While we are still waiting on shorter rods, you can tweak yours in the meantime if you'd like. It involves bending the anti-skate rod at about a 45 degree angle in the vertical plane to align it with the arm pivot, then bending it again about 30-45 degrees in the horizontal plane to ensure that the weight pulls exactly perpendicular to the arm. Proper operation requires 2 lb test monofilament, like we've sent out with the new short tonearms. See the attached images for an idea of what it looks like. When we get the shorter rods, re-profiled rods, we'll send them out in any case.
Still waiting:
1. Cuing felt. Still waiting on the cuing felt. We’ll send them when we have them.
2. Motor base. We’ve ordered a rubber base for the motor, and will send them when we have them.
3. Platter mat. We've ordered a new platter mat that should be round, rather than slightly oval, and will be sending it when we have it.
4. Leveling feet. Still no really great options here. Conrad has expressed concern about possible resonances with adjustable feet that don’t lock down, and height may prove to be problematic. This one may be a no-go.
Thanks again for your help!
The Schiit Sol Team
I’m sharing the email from a week ago mainly because we’re about to go into a long string of emails that will have lots of updates like this:
still waiting for parts, you’ll get them when we have them.
So why did we have these problems? Largely due to three things:
- We made some bad assumptions about cartridge length, and the cartridge clips we used were too long. This means we really need a new headshell, which is in process.
- There was some variable machining on the tonearm pivot cups and the platters, which we didn’t catch (first box was OK, rest were crap, that kind of thing.) Both these issues are fixed.
- Motor pulley is too heavy. This meant the motor wouldn’t self-start.
We’re also cleaning up some other stuff, like variable/walking belts and the motor base, before we start selling again.
If everything goes right, we should be selling Sols again by the end of November. I’m hoping we’ll have both a “standard” Sol that is pre-set-up for a typical cartridge, and a Sol that offers a pre-set-up cartridge (that is not a piece of crap). We’ll see.
Apologies again for the stupidity.
On Bifrost 2
Oh ho ho. Now this one
was gonna be dead easy. We’d been running betas for over a year, because we were super-paranoid about Unison USB. Some readers here may have even had a 3D printed plastic Bifrost 2, or they may have a Yggdrasil or Bifrost Unison USB card (still unreleased). So yeah, we went through several revs on the Unison firmware, and got it super-solid. We did everything right, so it should have been a painless launch.
And then that asshole Murphy comes along, and reminds us that even with tons of betas, Schiit can hit the fan.
Aside: anyone at Apple, how’s iOS 13, iPadOS13, and Catalina feeling? Never mind, I know how two of the three are. I’ll be holding off on Catalina for a while. At the same time, I feel your pain.
And, instead of being a single issue, it was two different issues: bad capacitors and funky firmware.
Bad caps are stupid. They should not exist. But, like contaminated blood pressure meds in this crazy world, they do. The same cap that failed has been used in a half dozen other products. But the fact is, we got a bad batch. When they failed, they failed shorted, which took out the power supply.
But before taking out the power supply, they could also glitch and make the Bifrost 2 think that a card wasn’t connected, which caused the “three flash” problem.
So when we found the caps, we thought that was it. Stop production, change the caps, move on.
Until someone said they had to tape over the Bifrost 2’s remote receiver, because their Sony remote would cause triple flashing.
Huh? That didn’t make any sense.
But hey, I had Sony gear. I went home, grabbed a Sony remote, and pointed it at the Bifrost 2.
Boom. Triple flash.
Crap.
Now, we hadn’t seen that issue in beta. Heck, we hadn’t had any real issue with the firmware at all. And suddenly we have triple flashing from remotes, plus another issue, garbled output, which showed up at the same time…and that one was intermittent, and only in some Bifrosts (mine never did it, for example).
It took Dave a few days to find and squash the bugs, and a couple of days of testing on the line to make sure they were dead, but on September 26th, we got to use Bifrost 2’s Autonomy platform for the first time (a year or two ahead of schedule): we released new firmware that could be written to MicroSD card and installed in Bifrost.
Also, since this was a maintenance release (Apple-speak for “fixing stuff we messed up,”) we also sent MicroSD cards out to all Bifrost 2 owners.
So, not ideal…but hey, Autonomy came through this acid test just fine.
So What’s Coming?
I know, I know, I said there might be a couple more things this year, even after the launch of Fulla 3 and Hel later this month. Some of you may be in a full-scale tizzy guessing what they might be. But here’s the thing: remember, we can move launches, or kill them entirely. So there may not be anything coming at all.
But if things work out the way I want, these new products may be the biggest shock. They’re designed to deliberately challenge the way you think—and, at the same time, if I’ve done this right, these products might be a way to bring everyone together.
Intrigued? Hold on...
It only took me seven or eight lessons before he figured out which end of a soldering iron to hold but he got it, eventually. The man is starting to show potential, albeit slowly.
