We have received our first orders and are very excited for the early birds (you know who you are). You will get the best USB DAC + headphone amp money can buy AND you will save 10% off the regular price AND you will get free shipping! This unique offer is only good through the end of the month, so hurry and place your order here:
Here is a quick production update: We have shipped all the parts off to our factory in Wisconsin, which is building the PCBs. Tomorrow we were going to visit them to observe production, but decided to postpone the trip — they predict 10-13 inches of snow and 30-40 MPH winds, so driving 1.5 Hours from Chicago will be unsafe. Production goes on, however, despite the snow — raw PCBs are coming in tomorrow and assembly will start later this week. We are planning to have stuffed PCBs around the 20th.
Meantime your humble servant will sneak out to China for a week this Friday. I will bring back the remaining parts from our suppliers there and we will finish assembly right after my return, around the 22th. Then, a busy shipping time. Let’s see how closely we hold to this schedule. A lot of ducks have to be in a row, but so far we’ve managed to avoid (or reroute against) any major obstacles. I will give you another update towards the end of the week, this time from China. Look for interesting pictures from Hong Kong and China next week!
Well, we can’t contain our excitement. The supplier sent us pictures of the new cylindrical chassis and low and behold – our prayers have been answered – instead of 2 holes on the top, we now have 1, which is the correct number!
We are now much closer to the day when everything in the chassis is entirely per spec. However that day is not today, since laser engraving needs a slight change – capitalization of DAC in DACport. Fortunately, that’s a minor issue, compared to what we’ve gone through, so we are looking forward to the chassis saga to be over very soon. You are tired of hearing about it, no doubt, and so are we…
Take a look at how close the actual part is to our 3D rendering…
An old boss once told me that you could never have enough prototypes and those words still ring true. We just built our first pre-production run of 10 units, to prove out the manufacturability of the design. Clearly that’s not enough!
We received good customer feedback about the product and we want to ship a decent quantity of DACports. In order to build the product in volume we need to make sure that the design is manufacturable.
New products often ship with tiny hand-soldered wires on the PCB, the result of hand-made rework, to fix last minute issues. This raises the cost of assembly and decreases product reliability. At CEntrance we don’t like manual rework and typically ensure that the product can be built entirely automatically. Sometimes this requires extra PCB turns, to get everything “just right” but we feel this is worth it in the long run.
Our 10 prototypes are going to the media outlets for reviews. The next run of 100 pcs is scheduled for the end of November. The goal is to make 100 units available for sale by Christmas. You can reserve your unit by adding your email to the list here. Soon, we will start taking pre-orders for the product. The first production run of 100 units is not fully spoken for yet, but the que is filling up fast.
This is a short post. Our Internet line went down yesterday and while we are waiting for it to be restored I am blogging from the iPhone. It’s amazing how dependent we are on this modern lifeline.
Meantime, we have finalized the text for the unit’s chassis. The original plan was to use silk-screened labels, but we experimented and decided against that. DACport will have laser engraved labels instead. It’s more expensive, but looks solid and professional compared to paint. We are going for color contrast with the white tube and black end caps. It will look super-sharp when we finally get those chassis finished!
Our Internet connection should be restored shortly. Until then, I’ll be taking a break and reading a book… Turns out those things are made out of wood – how entirely analog!
DACport is housed in a rugged, roadworthy aircraft aluminum cylinder. The same cylinder houses our award-winning MicPort and AxePort products, used by Hollywood producers and musicians all over the world. Our aluminum chassis was designed in Holland and features easy access to two circuit boards, maintains small package size and acts as a heatsink. A lot of innovations.
Production has its ups and downs and that’s what this blog is all about. Today we received the sample DACport cylinders from our supplier.
Good news and bad news. The color is correct – a beautiful white, anodized, brushed aluminum that looks super-sharp. That’s great. But the supplier did not remove the second hole at the top of the cylinder. Scroll down and you will see a post on this issue.
Develop enough products and you know what to expect. You cannot overcommunicate. Something always gets lost in translation. If that wasn’t the case products would be developed in weeks, rather than months… But I have to honestly say, we are getting faster with each new product. Faster and more experienced. We are learning to anticipate the challenges and avoid them early on.
Apparently not in this case however, so we have to wait… Fortunately, our supplier is fast. We are expecting new cylinders in a week or two.
You will ask – Really? How does weather affect electronic assembly? Well, unfortunately, it does. We just learned that several semiconductor companies including TI shut down their factories in the Philippines because of the recent typhoon activity. This means that some electronic parts won’t be available for an extra month or in some cases two. The semiconductor industry is coping with a generally slow economy, pockets of extreme activity (iPhone) and now weather delays… It’s amazing they can predict anything anymore!
We are keeping our fingers crossed that our initial run of 100 units will not be affected, since we have most of the parts already in house. Will keep you posted.
The goal of this blog is to keep you, our loyal reader duly informed about product availability. We can design great electronics all day long, but it all becomes worth it when our customers get to experience for themselves the audio quality we keep talking about.
The good news is that we are pretty much done with circuitry and so it is time to “shoot the engineer”! (what? me?)
The entire month of October since the product premiered at RMAF was devoted to optimizing power consumption, lowering distortion, raising the gain a little to compensate for less sensitive headphones and making sure that DACport can be built. This meant making sure that all necessary parts were in stock at our suppliers.
Let’s cut to the chase. We are planning to build 100 pcs in November and make them available for Christmas. Those of you, who have already submitted your emails will get an early bird discount – 10% off the regular price, as we promised. The final price will be announced soon. We will be building these in USA.
If you want to get the unit by Christmas, please submit your email on this page.
One of the benefits of DACport’s design is the small size of its PCBs. The advantage is in the layout of the ground wiring. When ground paths are short, there is less chance for ground loops forming inside. Fewer ground loops means less noise and higher quality sound.
But the flip side of a small space is a limited number of power supply caps, which are needed to filter out the supply ripple and create a smooth, clean power for the amplifier circuitry. The design quickly becomes a study of compromises. How do you maintain the best audio quality while conserving USB power, and fitting everything in the smallest possible space?
Higher power supply voltage provides several benefits. Firstly, there is more power available to drive any kind of headphones. Secondly, the signal-to-noise ratio is higher. Thirdly, ClassA amplifiers running at higher supply voltages typically produce lower distortion, so all in all more votlage is a good thing. It’s easy to raise the supply “rails” in a wall-powered product, but how do you do that in a portable device that takes its power entirely from USB? Well, we recently made the decision to upgrade the internal power supply to 18 V to gain the last couple of dB of THD out of the circuit. Inside of the tiny aluminum tube there is a switching power supply that makes +/-9V out of the 5 V that is provided by USB.
It took several weeks of optimization, but the end result is simply astounding—we have achieved unprecedented -97dB of THD+N at the output! This means that DACport’s distortion spec is now at the theoretical imit of its Digital to Analog converter. This is miles ahead compared to a standard CD player! We simply couldn’t improve it any further. And so, on to new challenges.
We returned to the lab knowing that a lot of work was still ahead of us. For example – we are using the chassis from our award winning MicPort Pro and AxePort Pro products, but we need to make some changes to adapt this chassis for DACport.
Micport uses two control knobs and so there are two holes drilled at the top of the aluminum tube. DACport has only one knob for volume, so we were joking that between now and production time we will need to “learn how to not drill an extra whole”. Manufacturing is not always smooth, so we will see how that goes… Meantime, on the right is the picture of what it will look like once the hole is undrilled… If you said “photoshop”, you guessed it right. The engineer’s quickest tool….
Here is a quick production update: We have shipped all the parts off to our factory in Wisconsin, which is building the PCBs. Tomorrow we were going to visit them to observe production, but decided to postpone the trip — they predict 10-13 inches of snow and 30-40 MPH winds, so driving 1.5 Hours from Chicago will be unsafe. Production goes on, however, despite the snow — raw PCBs are coming in tomorrow and assembly will start later this week. We are planning to have stuffed PCBs around the 20th.
An old boss once told me that you could never have enough prototypes and those words still ring true. We just built our first pre-production run of 10 units, to prove out the manufacturability of the design. Clearly that’s not enough!
Good news and bad news. The color is correct – a beautiful white, anodized, brushed aluminum that looks super-sharp. That’s great. But the supplier did not remove the second hole at the top of the cylinder. Scroll down and you will see a post on this issue. 
You will ask – Really? How does weather affect electronic assembly? Well, unfortunately, it does. We just learned that several semiconductor companies including TI shut down their factories in the Philippines because of the recent typhoon activity. This means that some electronic parts won’t be available for an extra month or in some cases two. The semiconductor industry is coping with a generally slow economy, pockets of extreme activity (iPhone) and now weather delays… It’s amazing they can predict anything anymore!
The goal of this blog is to keep you, our loyal reader duly informed about product availability. We can design great electronics all day long, but it all becomes worth it when our customers get to experience for themselves the audio quality we keep talking about.
One of the benefits of DACport’s design is the small size of its PCBs. The advantage is in the layout of the ground wiring. When ground paths are short, there is less chance for ground loops forming inside. Fewer ground loops means less noise and higher quality sound.
We returned to the lab knowing that a lot of work was still ahead of us. For example – we are using the chassis from our award winning MicPort Pro and AxePort Pro products, but we need to make some changes to adapt this chassis for DACport.
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