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Schiit Happened: The Story of an Improbable Startup (2014)
- lazyjones 7y agoPast: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Schiit%20Happened&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Schiit%20Happened&sort=byDate&...
- cbm-vic-20 7y agoPretty 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 7y agoSchiit sponsors head-fi iirc. Definitely some business interests involved
- landric 7y agoI mean, so do dozens of other audio companies: https://www.head-fi.org/sponsors/ https://www.head-fi.org/sponsors/
- Shaddox 7y agoI 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/hardware-teardown-of-schiit-fulla-v2-dac-and-headphone-amplifier.3154/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h...
- laxatives 7y agoThe 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 7y agoI 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.
- dsr_ 7y agoThe difference between the subjective and objective schools is this: objective school: if we perform a high-N properly double-blinded ABX listening experiment, we can be confident that humans can either reliably tell a difference between A and B or cannot reliably distinguish between A and B. Once we establish a reliable difference, we can have informed individual opinions on whether A or B is better. subjective school: all experiments are worthless because every listener and every listening situation is unique.
- beat 7y agoYou're misrepresenting both schools here. First, the "objective" school consists largely of internet loudmouths who have never done an actual A/B test. They're saying what seems intuitive to them, and imagining it's logical. Second, most serious subjectivists recognize the value of experiments and testing. Where they disagree with the would-be objectivists is that when their subjective experience disagrees with the test, they suspect the test might be wrong as well as the possibility that their subjective experience might be wrong. The so-called objectivists argue that when the test disagrees with the subjective experience, then the subjective experience must be purely imaginary. This perspective could be easily disproven with a test...
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoThe 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.