Audio converter buyer list

It is hard to go into the mosh pit of DAC production.
Your prices were really low calculated regarding what you try to achieve, designing a state-of-the-art uncompromised converter unit.
Differences on ADC quality are greater by far than they are with DAC quality. But it's exactly these small differences in quality that make huge price differences and are harder to achieve.
Getting something that sticks out of the crowd is the niche to fit with a product like this. "Eleven", so to speak.
The (good) arguments to buy your product:
- better opamp on the ADC input than any product on the market
- the best ADC chip on the market
- best DAC chip available today
- best DAC topology possible
- best DAC output opamp on the market
- professional looking frontend with LCD parameter UI
- professional PCB layout due to your dayjob experience and electrical engineering education
- fast development, time-to-market
- good availability and shorter estimated delivery times than comparable products
- fast response to the customers, good communication skills

From my perspective, Tony is right.
Your best marketing argument overall is the uncompromised design at a fair price. There will always be customers for this.
Those, who don't care about PCB colour but are looking for the best conversion fidelity technically possible now.

Best regards,
Martin

All-in is what I was hoping for.  Otherwise, why bother?  You want to be known as a producer of "very-best quality stuff for a reasonable price", as opposed to "good quality considering the price".  At least I think so, given that you said you were anal about the design in the other thread.

By the way, I sure as hell hope you're going with a purple PCB with pink polka dots, it makes all the difference!  A built-in Radio Shack digital clock and a $3,000 power cord  would also make a world of difference.

You can do this with a cheap used Alesis AI-4 or even a Lynx Aurora.

Are you planning both ADC and DAC in a single rack space?  I promise I'm in for both, BTW.

svart confirming I'm in for both too !

No one has mentioned this for some reason so I will say it... Please make them look pretty

I typed this really long reply to this thread and the damn site logged me out again.

I swear..

Anyway,  the long and short of it is that as of this point I will not be adding any more features to the ADC, DAC or chassis designs.  They are locked and I'll move ahead with what is already planned.

I regret not being able to make this everything to everybody but it's gotta keep moving along!  I'll try to revisit some of the outlying wish list stuff in the future hopefully.

I have a feeling I'll have boards before the chassis is finalized, so having both during the first pilot runs isn't out of the question yet. I thought for sure it'd be kinda slow selling these things, but I might sell the first batch out quickly, which might be a good thing because I'll have some capital to get a larger batch going for the next run, and maybe start getting automated stuffing of the boards kicked off.  I'm going to be putting around 6K$ into the build of the first batch, which in the short term is a lot of money to my wallet, but it's not a lot for a pilot run of products.  I had hoped that the profit from the first batch would pay to buy the majority of the parts for the second batch, etc, but with the cost increases due to the design complexity increase, that's not likely to happen.  I figure it'll be a couple batches of 15-20 before I break even on my own investment and can really increase production, if warranted.

Nothing on the BOM so far has more than a couple weeks of lead time. The chassis might be the long lead time item though. It's still not out of the question that I make them by hand. It's just a few holes and a couple cutouts, and a few standoffs. I could make some jigs that guide a router so it's as simple as buying blank chassis and just running a router through the paces. Aluminum makes that easy to do. My cousin does some silk screen work with clothing, I might see if he can do me some screens for epoxy paint and maybe we could silk the chassis ourselves.

There is a lot of possibility here.

mca could probably give you some silk screening tips. He's doing the screening on the Mammoth Cave stuff as far as I know.

looks like there is 15 peeps on this page if you're doing ^ this(which i hope is the case), i also have my brother interested in a dac, and a few non members interested in both as well.

I was talking about silking the back of the unit.  the front will likely have a decorative bezel of some kind.

How about this name?  Cassius Clay Converters, aka CCC. This sucker floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

Understood, however customers are fickle.  I've dealt with it for a long time.  People say they want the best quality, but when it comes time to choose, they'll almost always talk themselves out of absolute quality if something cheaper but relatively high performance comes around.

Thus, that's why the DIY road is so enticing to people, as people want top quality, but don't want to pay for it.

Also, RM might have issues with production now, but who's to say they will forever?  They might ramp up next month and be cheaper than I can produce..  And I can expect most of my would-be customers to jump on the RM bandwagon once again.

There are tons of reasons to go all out on a design, but there are only a few reasons to keep prices competitive, and those are the most critical reasons of all.  Those reasons are that people will always weight cost vs. performance and the average buyer will always find the middle ground.

I'm hearing from folks who are very concerned about quality, which I understand completely, but it's the other folks that I'm concerned about, the folks that haven't spoken up, the folks that have yet to know this will exist and don't care about absolute quality.  Those are the folks that care about quality, as long as it's within their price range.