December 31st, 2005
Teflon/Alu Platter Conversions.
In the course of supporting our installed base of customers, we converted the first two Teflon/ALU composite platters to the new Stelvio architecture - implementing the graphite Tunable Platter Interface (TPI)©.
After returning from CES, we will finish work on making this conversion the standard issue for the Teflon/Alu platter - revising its architecture to
incorporate the TPI©.
This revised Teflon/Alu will be re-christened the Gavia - to match the name of the turntable.
In order to hold the price-point on this platter while improving its performance, we are exploring material alternatives for Teflon.
Teflon is extremely expensive and using it in this architecture would push the price too close to that of the Stelvio. Our early experiments
give us confidence that we'll be able to provide more sonic value at this price-point. Our material evaluations will be complete in the weeks
after we return from CES.
Our goal as always, is to support our existing customer base while moving the bar ever higher. Contact us if you're interested in converting your
Teflon/ALU to the graphite, TPI©.
September 20th, 2005
The Stelvio is born.
It's been a busy Summer of development, and over the weekend, we've certified the final version of the Stelvio platter.
This platter is nothing short of the same revelation that the Teflon/Aluminum composite platter was. In our listening sessions,
the prevalent comment about this platter was the phrase: "tone color".
Now that we've finalized development, we'll be showing off this platter in both of our rooms:
- Suite 7130 with Exemplar Audio
- Suite 7920 with Artemis Labs
Of course, your existing composite platter is fully upgradeable, and we'll be working out the pricing for this shortly.
Additionally, we are working on a hybrid combination of the Stelvio and the existing Teflon/Alu. We're still evaluating the
price/performance ratio of this option, but we realize that the significant cost of the full-out Stelvio platter may be prohibitive
for many individuals.
Stay tuned for photos, and of course, be sure drop by our rooms if you make it to the 'fest.
August 2nd, 2005
RockyGrass - July 30, 2005: Lyons, Colorado
I'll try to post more photos in the next few days - a link to a thumbnails page, linking higher density images from there. For now, here's a
teaser: Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, playing with bass player Bryn Bright and mandolinist Sharon Gilchrist (thanks to Art Dudley for their names).
I don't get much time for full day events (let alone a 3 day extravaganza like RockyGrass), but we did get to catch these folks, Doc Watson, and
Bela Fleck.
Click
here, or the thumbnail photo above to link to a photo index
July 20th, 2005
Bear Country ...
It's been a while. Development has been going on under the surface, but I wanted to take a moment to describe another wildlife encounter.
I snuck away for a lunch time bike ride today, and 2 miles up Left Hand Canyon (about 6 miles North of Boulder), I saw a mother bear and her
2 cubs crossing the road - returning from the creek. This was my first ever siting of a bear in the "wild" and it was on a state road - not
on some back country trail! I wonder what we're doing in this part of the country where a bear has to come down to 5,000 feet on a 97 degree day.
On the development front, there are a couple if items of interest ...
The straight sided pulleys are a success and I'm about to produce a batch of them.
Over the last few weeks, our listening group has been evaluating phono stages. We heard two remarkable ones:
- Steve Bench's unit which doesn't have a single capacitor in the signal path or the RIAA circuit. It's an ambitious DIY project, but
very worthwhile for the experienced hobbyist. Check out Steve's site for details on the
RIAA 5 for details.
- The Artemis Labs PL-1 and PH-1 phono stages. I was so excited about this gear that I've
applied to become a dealer. Stay tuned...
A lot more is going on, I'll try to catch you up in the coming days.
June 12th, 2005
One of my goals has been to tear down the wall between manufacturer and consumer. I don't view there being a clearly defined line
in the sand between small manufacturers and hobbyists. This blurring of the lines serves everyone.
I would go so far as to call a hard line in the sand philosophy to be Audio Fundamentalism - a world view that supports the powers
that be in Sea Cliff - designed to separate the consumer from as much cash as possible - the hell with good sound. JC Morrision once
wrote an article in the now defunct magazine Sound Practices where he referred to the old guard as the Audio Puritans.
I had a revelatory expereience about 10 years ago, when I discovered small guys like
John Tucker (Exemplar),
Jim Hagerman,
Ron Welborne ,
Don Garber (Fi),
George Wright,
and a host of other small guys who were beating the pants off of the big boys in terms of providing the sonic goods while at the same
time providing a level of accessibility heretore never seen by me.
This (accessibility and information transfer) is one reason I spend so much time adding content to the website. The blog idea was more
of a fun thing, resulting from meeting customers who told me that I'm not half the "difficult personality" that I appear to be on
some web forums. I felt the need to add more of a personal face to this project, because the product is truly a reflection of the man.
One thing I find to be intolerable is a neutral response. Better that you hate me or love me. I can deal with that.
Perhaps I'm becoming more of a curmudgeon with each passing day, but I find Arthur Salvatore's high-end
audio web page to be more relevant each time I return to it, but that's a whole other topic. I initially read Arthur's writing and took
it as its own form of self-promotion. Heck! We're all trying to make a good impression ... nothing wrong with that. Arthur is slowly winning
me over.
So, in following this "full-disclosure" model, I think out loud ... sometimes a bit too candidly. Hopefully, even when I screw up,
I'll provoke thought on your part at a minimum. I can live with that.
June 1st, 2005
Today, I snuck out for a bike ride West of Longmont, CO and had one of those special treats that reminds me why I live in Colorado.
A mother Hawk was teaching her young hatchling the ways of a predator. She left her hatchling in the brush on the
side of the road and demonstrated how to swoop down for her prey. At first, I thought I was about to witness a "kill", until I
realized that I was watching school in session.
The young bird was "peeping" for its mother. After mom took a couple of passes over junior, the young hatchling took off, flying parallel
to the ground, dipping several times to simulate a kill - just like mom does.
I wanted to stop and watch further, but didn't dare disturb the lesson. I felt blessed to have this much revealed to me.
May 31st, 2005 - the music never stops ...
I took advantage of the rain to drop over to John Pessetto's for more beta testing on a new motor pulley
profile.
It's great to have Galibier owners with different systems in which to evaluate changes. This new pulley is very promising - in the same way
that moving to wider tape was.
May 29th, 2005 - time to recharge ...
It's been a crazy two months, and my weight is hovering around 170 Lbs (77 Kilos). I should be at 160 Lbs / 72 Kilos to
keep up with my younger climbing and riding buddies. The work days have been long and the bike riding and climbing have
suffered. I feel the accumulated baggage.
It's a long weekend in the US (Memorial Day), but the forcast is for rain for most of it here in Colorado. Joan and I managed to get out
Bouldering on Flagstaff Mountain on Saturday.
This puts me in touch - in more ways than one. My work and my life suffers when I don't get out.
May 28th, 2005 - another happy customer ...
Delivered Larry Keatt's Schroeder reference. Check out his owner's page.
May 21st, 2005
Guerrilla Audio -
Is that us?
Guerrilla (noun) - a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit
carrying out harassment and sabotage.
In many senses of the word, this is a fitting description and consistent with my understanding of Lao Tzu's
seminal Taoist work "The Art of War" (also translated as "The Art of Strategy"). This book is more a treatise
on understanding human interaction and strategy than it is about war, so take the title in the context of
Chinese society at the time it was written
Last night, I had a fantastic conversation with a fellow over the course of a wonderful demo session. The
concept of distribution model for small manufacturers came up. If you've been following this thread, you know
that this topic has been weighing heavily on me as of late, as I've wrestled with how best to balance the multiple
demands of producing a world-class product with all of the other demands that Galibier places on me.
There's a reason for example why so many small manufacturers' websites are so information poor and out of date.
I'm estimating that this year alone I'll put about 600 hours into the site. Putting this into perspective, that's
about 15 weeks' work for someone working a 40 hour week. Admittedly, this year I have a major facelift in store
(stay tuned), but in a normal year, the number is still in the 200 hour range. To accomplish this, I'm sacrificing
product photo updates, so maybe 400-500 hours / year is a realistic number.
There's a lot that goes on "behind the curtain" so to speak, and a surprisingly small percentage has to do
with product development. This is in no way a statement of how disinterested any of us are in the concept but
rather an observation of how few hours there are in the day. This is one reason why time to market for a new
concept is anywhere from 2-3 years. Any shorter a period results in the inevitable and rapid fire succession
of Mk I, Mk II, Mk III ... syndrome which I for one loathe. A customer deserves to know that they are
purchasing a finished product and are not beta testers.
I'll pick this topic up later in the day ...
May 18th, 2005
Who are we?
Direct audio sales business models range from purveyors of garden variety, dime-store equipment to the audio equivalent of limited
production luxury motor cars.
Recent conversations with several of my ilk convince me more than ever of the need to better educate the public about what limited production
audio is about.
Some have called our segment of the market "craft audio", but to me the brings up connotations of basket weavers and such. Certainly,
we have share a value system with crafts people.
Pride of workmanship, attention to detail, small scale production, and treating our customers as individuals immediately come to mind.
Perhaps a better term is artisan audio.
Whatever we call it, we need to better convey to the general public that individuals with limited resources but boundless passion coupled with
disciplined thinking and a love of music can produce musical time machines that the big boys can only dream about ... and only then, if the wind is
blowing in the right direction.
We need to band together and speak with a common voice. Everyone will benefit. We'll return to this theme.
May 10th, 2005
When are you done (part II)?
Well, the obvious answer is that you're never done. Maybe another way of stating this is "when is enough enough"? There are those who ascribe the
theory that "too much of anything is just enough".
This topic came up with a Database Analyst I know, and he had a different take on the issue - this from a perspective of tuning database performance.
To his way of thinking, you set performance goals ahead of time, and when you reach them you stop. This avoids the slippery slope of throwing more
dollars at a problem than it realistically deserves.
O.K. ... so this leaves you with trying to establish a "performance goal". The only one I can come up with (paying humble credit to the late,
great, Dr. Gizmo) is musical ecstasy. That's a real easy thing to measure, eh?
Maybe you're never done.
Keeping with the theme of musical ecstasy, maybe we can tell when we're on the right track. Schroeder tonearm owners for example are on the right
track. They buy a Schroeder tonearm and suddenly stop talking in hi-fi terms and start talking in musical terms. With all of our love of things
technical, music is after all the reason most of us started with this hobby.
May 5th, 2005
When are you done with development?
Some of my most productive ideas come from formulating answers to customers' questions. It's an opportunity to test my thinking to see
if it will stand the acid test of public opinion. In the course of formulating a response, I walk around a problem and get to view it from
a different perspective. It's much like listening to a well written, complex piece of music where you continually hear new elements with
each listening.
Between formulating answers, and thought sessions during long bike rides, ski tours, and hikes into climbs (I wish there were more
time for these), the ideas never stop coming. What's interesting however, is how subtle most of these ideas are - how stable the design
of the basic product is.
Even the Stealth does't promise to raise the bar significantly. As I listen to many of the pretenders out there, I've come to realize
that the bar is already set quite high on both the ALU and the Supreme. Will the Stealth surprise me? There's only one way to find out.
May 4th, 2005
I've been thinking about what makes a good website
For the type of product I'm selling, I've always emphasized content over form. This isn't to say that I want an ugly website
anymore than I want to build an ugly turntable. At the same time, I'm not about to pay a professional designer, with the main
"benefit" being that I get to pass the costs on to my customers. I'm all for paying a professional to do a job, but when you're
looking to add value for your customers, you have to be careful about where you allocate resources in order to best meet their needs.
It's getting to the point however, where I'm planning on trading some audio favors for some consulting advice. I've met some
brilliant software designers - people who are far more than simple web developers. Maybe this site can become the best of both worlds.
I'm curious about your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the website. One of my main goals is to try to make sense of the
sheer quantity of information on it. Currently, there are some 85 pages to manage and organize. I work hard to make everything 2 or
3 clicks away. We see all too many small sites of this size which need site maps. I look at the need for a site map as a sign of
either laziness or a disorganized mind - both of which I find inexcuseable.
As I write this, I see many parallels between the development of this website and the evolution of the Quattro turntables.
Form vs. function:
The Quattro line of turntables have always had a great sound, but in the early days, they had a bit of an industrial
look. After we got the sound right, we began to work on world-class appearance, and I'm very proud of where we've come in these 4
short years.
Modular development and prioritizing content over presentation:
Content would be information on the website and delivering the sonic goods in our products. Presentation would relate to
cosmetics on both the website and our products.
A coherent approach to problem solving:
In my studies of Eastern Philosophy, I've always taken the approach that everything you do is a reflection of yourself and your
world-view. I'd like to think that the website parallels the development of our products and gives you a better idea of who I
am and how I solve problems.
I'm curious about your thoughts ...
May 3rd, 2005
After spending the weekend gabbing with our good buddy Jim Hagerman of
Hagerman Technology, we both decided that it's time to blog. This simple page will do for the time being ...
We spent the weekend revising the menu system on the website and it seemed like a natural extension to add a blog selection to the
left side of the News Page.
As far as the menus are concerned, we're still getting anomalous behavior with Netscape (who isn't?) but things look great in
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera.
The alternative to putting on our web developer's cap was to take advantage of what has become a surprisingly good late
Spring ski season. In a good snow year, Araphaoe Basin is open
until July 4th, but this year, things were looking dismal. There were few who thought that "the Basin" would stay open past
the middle of May. With another drought year on the books, it didn't matter that A-basin has a summit altitude a touch
over 12,000 feet (you can climb up to 13,050). There's always bike riding ...
