
Schiit Happened: The Story of an Improbable Startup (2014) - wallflower
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-of-the-worlds-most-improbable-start-up.701900/
======
Shaddox
I was interested myself in buying a schiitstack but after seeing how messy the
soldering is[1], their constant QC problems and the outrageous shipping costs
to Europe I gave up and went with something else.

[1][https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h...](https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/hardware-
teardown-of-schiit-fulla-v2-dac-and-headphone-amplifier.3154/)

~~~
laxatives
The real story here is incredibly aggressive guerilla marketing on forums
written by snobs for entry-level enthusiasts. Schiit bombarded a bunch of
subreddits with posts and comments and eventually hit some kind of critical
mass.

------
beat
I like that early on in the story, he hits on the difference between
subjective experience and objective theory when it comes to the sonics of hi-
fi amps. There's this thing that "objective" dudes on the internet think, and
that's "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist". They look at power, noise,
and THD specs on an amp, and think that's it - that's the total explanation.

In reality, there are things that plainly exist, but are not measured - either
because they can't be measured economically, or we simply don't know how to
measure them, or what it is we're measuring. So audio amps of similar specs
can sound _very_ different, and the one with the "bad" specs is often better
than the "good" one.

Another thing I learned about audio, which has been useful in general for
engineering... marketing sells specs because specs look good, not because
they're meaningful. I roll my eyes whenever I see "total harmonic distortion"
ratings. It's like measuring how well a car drives 50mph. It's fine as a basic
"this thing works" measure, but it's meaningless for sound quality.

~~~
sethhochberg
Yes, mystery still remains in some parts of the audio world - in particular
when we're talking about transducer theory, there are some aspects of
loudspeaker and microphone performance that we can reliably characterize with
derived equations, but where we still don't totally understand how those
models translate back to the underlying physics fundamentals... but these are
relatively specific edge cases in speaker design.

Amplifiers and DACs have much less mystery about them - the math is solid,
extremely well understood, and tested extensively in related fields like radar
and sonar where the tolerances tighter and incentives for getting it right are
stronger.

Marketing absolutely drives specs (and especially specs without tolerances)
when pushing gear, but that doesn't mean that the measurements are somehow
invalid. Just expect the specs to tell you how close to the goal of a "wire
with gain" you're getting, not to tell you specifically how the measured
performance deviates from that goal. It also gets a lot more complicated when
you're dealing with devices like headphones that have widely variable
impedences - an amplifier that measures relatively flat into a medium-
impedance load might fall apart when given dramatically higher or dramatically
lower input impedance, and impedance matching is still a somewhat overlooked
issue in the industry.

The elephant in the room is always that some people just don't want to admit
they think colored sound is better, so they convince themselves that there
must be some aspect to audio performance that the science can't quantify - in
reality, they're just avoiding quantifying a warm EQ curve, or nonlinear
distortion, etc. I've studied audio electronics and DSP for audio at length,
write plugins for audio software, have worked as a recording engineer, etc...
and have no problem saying that mild nonlinear distortion and a bass boost
sounds nice. The industry knows what "sounds good" and uses it to sell gear,
but consumers think they want accuracy, so they get marketed to with terms
like "transparency" or "resolution", and explain away unpleasant results with
terms like "synergy" (or lack thereof).

~~~
holy_city
I'd disagree with you on the point of transducer theory. It's well understood
and poorly published. In particular, proprietary models are significantly more
reliable than what is publicly available (both for old school lumped-element
and newer finite-element analysis), and the major manufacturers keep those
close to their chest. Even the published models by those engineers are
glorified approximations of internal research. The limiting factors are in
manufacturing, where DIYers and small shops do not have access to the
materials and testing equipment of the big players.

I think the real elephant in the room is that audiophiles spend a lot of money
and don't like being told they're wrong. There's a weird psychology in high
end audio (both professional and consumer) - sales are made based on the
users' preconceived notions about the product/brand, and you make money by
playing into those notions instead of trying to subvert them.

PS: based on your username, I think I apprenticed under you a few times.

~~~
sethhochberg
If our mutual boss was named Paul, quite likely :)

------
cbm-vic-20
Pretty much every link on HN for head-fi.org is about Schiit, and mostly by
the same person.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=head-
fi.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=head-fi.org)

~~~
bazooka_penguin
Schiit sponsors head-fi iirc. Definitely some business interests involved

~~~
landric
I mean, so do dozens of other audio companies:

[https://www.head-fi.org/sponsors/](https://www.head-fi.org/sponsors/)

------
lazyjones
Past:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Schiit%20Happened&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Schiit%20Happened&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

------
dec0dedab0de
The year should be 2014-2019

I thought it was just a repost from when this was on the front page in 2015,
but it looks like they kept it up to date.

