On product lines in general and The Gadget:
In the customer (and potential customer) service world, it is quite true that 3% of the clients or potential ones are 97% of the volume, action, or trouble according to your view. Since we now have over 20 products to build (23 as of Jason's count), feed with parts buys, and juggle with other priorities in assembly, the superficial answer is don't build so many products. For some percentage of the products, there are too many of them crammed into so little price bandwidth that I even get confused as to which DAC to give my nephew for Christmas. It is an easy trap to fall into, as new products come online, in a LINE of DACs, the space between them narrows. As long as there is demand for the old closely spaced product remains, the necessity for simplification remains in the background. We then have to look at which products are th e top 20% of trouble to make. Factors there not only include sales, but how hard the parts are to reliably schedule, which have the highest yields, and which confuse our clients the most. More on this in a bit.
Over the years, a strategem which began by accident has solidified this tendency. For example, I began the multibit DAC line with Yggdrasil, followed by the lesser priced Gumby, Bimby, and finally by MultiModi with a price drop of roughly half each step down. This resulted in some cannibalism of higher priced sales by lower priced units. At the same time the sigma delta DACs were built from the bottom up, with the resulting count of 6 DACs from $100 to $2300.
Of those 6 DACs, the top 4 are upgradable. That adds complexity, and makes more work for us. I will alway offer upgradable DACs because it is the best I can do to honor loyalty. There are those who believe that it is a ploy to extract more money and hose our clients forever as long as they remain using our products. I pay little attention to those as many of them believe any company/corporation exists solely to screw them; they will never be happy. There are those of use who use hobby to have pleasure. I am a people pleaser, believe it or not. Those are the people I work for. One of the ironies of being unemployable is the reality is that you always have to work for someone, in my case clients. The better I do at making what you want, the better I do myself, Yes, marketing exists – but if you believe it makes you want to buy one of my products you really do not want, then you are selling yourself really short. If I want to be a part of this market, I want to hang out with my peers – not a group of gullible dolts. That is why I chose it. (A huge plus: It is a phuc ton of fun.)
So What does this have to do with The Gadget? Something like this. It is another product for our mix. That means it should be fully baked. Yeah there are some DSP issues in the first gadget for 192KHz stuff. It is a very minor problem, and can always be redone later in a faster proc. The problem is that I came out with it at the same time as Eitr. Yeah, Gen V sound baby. In all of my wisdom, I wanted to bring it out at $200, which meant Magni/Modi chassis. To make the $200, with USB/Coax in (It was never intended to be the Coax only in out that I brought to RMAF, just what we had at the time.) it had to be Gen 3 USB in and was still really space constraining the Magni/Modi chassis. That's all fine except Gen 3 (or any non isolated USB) sounds like hemorrhoidal ass.
Then we have the fact that it is a single purpose component for $200. Worse, it is a single purpose component that no one understands. At the show and at the Schiitr people look at it and say "What is that?" The factual explanation is C=256. You can't even get to relative and absolute pitch before their eyes glaze over. A capella singers, adjusting flat to C=256, yada, yada. makes them comatose. Only if they are a musician who can actually read music and understand music theory do they understand. How do No one knows how to write a flyer for the Gadget. The reality is it is really simple.
The Flyer:
How do I use it, you ask? It is just like masturbation. You fool around with the knob until you get it. And when you get it, you GET it! There is only one knob, for God's sake.
But as a standalone product for $200 with yesterday's USB today that no one knows how to use – naah. Buried inside a DAC or a better EITR – Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
It is coming folks. Just a bit more down the road
