DACport development blog

Ahh, it was good to relax over the long Holiday weekend. Best Holiday Vibes to all!

We have sent out the first batch of pre-ordered units and initial comments are showing up on the web. I especially like this comment from head-fi.org:

“Without a doubt, the DACport is more resolving, dynamic, and extended on both frequency extremes.”

Meantime, we are busy updating the DACport website. The current version has a “introduction” feel to it, or simply too much hype. We will be changing that shortly, updating with newly taken pictures, explanations and features. Stay tuned for that.

Meantime, we are preparing to take a number of units to CES and NAMM to demo and show around. It’s nice to be back after a holiday break.

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.

This is what I will be bringing back with me from China. The shining new chassis are done. They will be used to build DACports this weekend. Last day in China today, returning to US on Thursday.

Tokyo is always fun. I had a couple of hours to kill at the airport before my next flight, so I was looking for a clothing store, similar to our Banana Republic, called “Unicolor”. They have a wonderful selection of fleece jackets, in case you know someone who’s into that…  Anyway, it took me several mintues to understand what the girl at the information desk was saying. She kept referring to “Unikoro”, which in my mind conjured up an image of a mystical horse , but not a clothing store…  Ah, the cultural differences… But the ice cream was good and plentiful.

It’s on to China later tonight, but first some obligatory Hong Kong shopping. They say that electronics prices are the lowest in US. This is mostly true, but some brands are not readily available in US and that’s where Hong Kong shines.

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.

Chicago is covered with freezing snow and temperatures are heading down to 14F (-10C) for tomorrow, so going out for cappuccinos is not fun right now. Acknowledging that we are stuck in the office we decided to publish some measurements instead of loading up on lattes…

DACport continues to amaze our whole crew. Aside from the fact that familiar recordings come to life in a totally new way (you could hear new instruments, recording mistakes and other nuances, which previously escaped your ear) DACport also measures extremely well. I guess, there should be a correllation, after all. If it measures well, it sounds excellent, and vise versa.

THD+N remains well below 95dB, but we need to measure up a lot of units before we get a good statistical value. Frequency linearity is simply astounding… How often do you come across a piece of audio equipment with linearity over the entire espectrum within only .1dB! DACport’s frequency responce  is flat 10Hz to 40kHz. This temporary graph only goes to 20kHz — we will publish the performance at 40kHz soon. Even 10Hz..20kHz, what a performer! Click the image to see the entire plot.

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!

If you look through our website you won’t find an explanation of our company name anywhere. Which, you may say is an omission. So for lack of a better place, let’s explain the meaning of CEntrance here.

You’ve probably guessed by now that this humble blog is authored by Michael Goodman, our cheif cook and bottle washer. Back in the day, when there were fewer dishes to wash, one could actually spend time thinking big picture thoughts. I still get to do that, but time is stretched rather thin these days, partially due to the introduction of DACport… But back to the company name.

CEntrance is the expression of my life-long passion for Consumer Electronics. CE is actually inside our company name. Twice, if you look closely.

Any great concept (if I say so myself), eventually develops a life of its own and other people  find new meanings in it, which is what happened the first time we attended a European trade show. As some of our readers will know, CE stands for Communauté Européenne, or European Union, in French. This was quickly brought to our attention. Quite flattering, thank you, although we aren’t that big just yet Others have suggested that our name should stand for Customer Entrance because we are so relentlessly customer-focused. Bring it on–we welcome all positive feedback! Probably the most obvious meaning is that of “core essence”, which is the one that’s near and dear to my heart.

A lot of people mispronounce our company name. The correct way to say it is “Sentrance”. So there you have it–an excursion into the long-forgotten year 2000 when CEntrance was originally formed as an Illinois corporation, located 20 minutes north-west of Chicago.

Incidentally, the company turns 10 years old next February. Not a small feat.

Back in 1998, while working for a large microphone company I co-chaired an AES working group on Digitally-interfaced microphones (the standard has been published as AES-42). One of the members of our diverse, international group was Julian Dunn, a brilliant engineer from UK who wrote a lot about jitter measurement and specification. I got to work with Julian during several AES meetings until his untimely passing several years ago. His papers are still online, but they are not very easy to comprehend, so here is a summary of the issue:

Jitter is the most important and the least understood parameter in the quality of digital to analog converters. Everything else is already state of the art. Jitter refers to clock instability. The less stable the clock, the more jitter, the more mushy the audio quality. To the human ear, jitter makes audio detail less sharp, like a photo that’s out of focus.

Ok, so everyone doesn’t have an expensive jitter analyser at home. But fortunately, we have a good analyser built-in right into our heads and that’s our ear. There is an easy way to compare audio DACs by just listening for particular instruments in the mix. The instruments typically used for this purpose are the cabasa and the triangle. Both feature wide spectral content and therefore are most affected by jitter.

So now, if you are comparing two DAC products, pick a familiar music track that has those instruments on it and listen for how they reproduce. It will be very easy to tell the difference between the products. I say this because we know that CEntrance DACport will give you excellent results, comparable to products costing 10 times as much. Now it’s up to you to make the test.

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.