DACport development blog

On the plane back from China I saw the movie “Julie and Julia”, about a girl who blogged her way through the recipes in a Julia Child cook book. A blog is a powerful tool in helping one get things done. I can now attest to that.

The purpose of this devblog was to showcase the process of bringing a product to production. That goal has been accomplished. DACport is ready for sale and we will ship the first units out tomorrow. This devblog is therefore complete. We are shipping our first production on the day we promised. Incidentally, this has never happened in my product development practice. Turns out that no crazy deadline and no mean boss can equal the pressure of holding your own feet to the fire. True passion can come from one and only one place – from within.

The pre-order period is over and now we are taking real orders for DACport. All who preordered will have their units shipped with overnight delivery tomorrow.

Thank you to everyone who helped make DACport a reality by reading this account of trials and tribulations and living through the process together with us.

What will we blog about next? Something very exciting, indeed. You will learn soon.

Meantime, there is still a chance to get 10% off the retail price of DACport through the end of the year. Email me here: info [at] centrance [dawt] com for the secret code.

I’m writing this from a giant 747, which is taking me to Tokyo. Then I will fly to Hong Kong and from there will drive into China. Back to Chicago in a week.

While DACport PCBs are being assembled at our factory in Wisconsin, I need to visit a couple of suppliers in Shen Zhen and bring back the remaining parts for our first production of DACports… Busy times, good times.

We have several trusted partners in Asia, who help us procure parts and also build our other products – MicPort Pro and the AxePort Pro. Granted, China’s component prices and labor costs can’t be beat, but there is always a downside to volume production – a reduced quality focus. This needs to be taken into account when building a product for audiophiles. The more demanding the product, the higher the margin of error in assembly.

We decided early on that DACport will be built in US. The exacting quality requirements are too dangerous to leave to chance. A “benign” part substituion, which saves the supplier a couple of cents could result in a disaster. This almost happened yesterday when a suppler suggested a cheaper opamp in exchange for the expensive, ultra-low distortion part we use in DACport… Yikes!

We can’t afford this risk. We will test and adjust every unit built by hand in our Chicago facility, where we are equipped to do audiophile-level listening tests and have a bunch of precision measurement equipment. We will make sure that every DACport that leaves the factory is fully tested and signed off. That’s my personal guarantee.

So when you compare DACport to cheaper products built in China, question if someone is actually taking the time to ensure quality of the build. Will someone pay attention not only to how many units are shipped but also to how they sound?

Rest assured, CEntrance will.

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!

Production is ongoing and we are now taking pre-orders for the DACport. If you have submitted your email here, you will soon receive an email with a coupon code for 10% off the DACport at our store. The link below will take you to our store. The product is anticipated to ship around December 22nd. We are doing everything we can to speed things up.

First Production Underway

We have played enough with DACport and now it’s your turn.  The product is sufficiently stable and there are no known bugs at this point,  so now it’s just turning the production crank and making DACports available to you.

Having listend to various material through DACport over a variety of headphones we are convinced that the sound quality is second to none! The performance is simply outstanding! Familiar recordings really come to life in a new way.  I promise that once you listen to DACport you will never want to return to the on-board sound card again. The difference in detail and clarity is just night and day!

Amazing Specs, Amazing Price

DACport gives you an Ultra Low-noise, portable Class-A headphone amp, over 40 kHz audio bandwidth, 100dB THD, and true USB plug and play. No batteries are required. Most importantly, you can listen to true 24/96 HD content without the need to install any custom drivers – all these benefits are courtesy of CEntrance exlusive USB technology, previously licensed to Benchmark Media, Lavry, Belcanto, Empirical Audio, PS Audio and many others. With CEntrance, you can’t go wrong!

All this quality and painstaking attention to detail will very soon be available to you, dear reader. Today I’m happy to announce the price.  We think we established a very fair price for DACport at $500 USD. No other portable product comes even close. DACport is a true first, a genuine CEntrance Innovation. In fact, we are so convinced that you will absolutely love the product that we are offering a 30 day money back guarantee, too!

Early Bird Discount

As promised, those of you who have submitted you email here will have a chance to order he product with a 10% discount, at a low introductory price of only $450. There is still time to get the early bird discount through the end of the year, but on January 01st the price goes up, so hurry!

We are building the initial quantity of units this month and plan to have them available around December 22nd, in time for the Holidays. We will throw in free overnight shipping, too (US only).  In a couple of days we will open up the pre-ordering opportunity – initially to those, who have submitted their emails here. I will make a special announcement about that soon.

Everyone wants to get immersed in the experience of listening go high-quality music. CEntrance now has the answer to that need. DACport is our true pride and joy, a product of years of reasearch and development. We are very excited that it is finally becoming a reality!

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.

The Internet is finally up and boy is this a relief! So many things are now possible… like communicating with our customers, for one example.

Case in point – the DACport Information Universe is growing and there is more information to read on the product.

Even though the product is not shipping yet, we had some customer requests and so we have enabled the DACport forum. Now you can read the FAQ, ask questions and interact with us and other people. Once we start shipping, we expect that folks will be sharing experiences about using product, its audio quality, design, build, etc.

We don’t sensor the posts – if you have a negative experience, we don’t delete it like some others, just to make the fourm look good. Instead, we answer to the best of our ability and provide the solution for your problem. So don’t be shy, communicate away!

The DACport user forum, still in its infancy may be accessed right here:

http://www.centrance.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=22

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.

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (RMAF) in Denver was a blast. Despite a couple of power outages that left the demo room in complete darkness, it was a lot of fun and we had many customers sit down and listen to the DACport. Click the image to the right to read the coverage if you haven’t done so already.

At the show we demonstrated first samples. We knew they were close to the production quality, but they weren’t final yet. Our work was cut out for us and that’s what this blog is all about.

As soon as we returned from the RMAF it was time to “shed”.  Shedding is musician speak for “concentrated effort”.  We came back and disappeared into the lab to measure up the first prototypes, tweak the performance, listen and tweak some more.