CEntrance HiFi-M8

A stack of Digital PCBs has just rolled away from the assembly robot

I’m spending time at the factory this week, making sure that our engineering vision is adequately communicated to the assembly personnel.

The more complex the product, the harder it is to communicate the vision. Our digital PCB was a tough nut to crack, but I think we are over the hump now.

The good news is that the factory can stuff the “sadistic chips” all day long, hundreds per hour (that’s way faster than we need). I inspected their work today and it was impeccable.

The chips are sadistic if you try to place them on the board by hand, but the SMT assembly robot doesn’t have feelings — it just places parts. This is where a robot is much better than us uncertain, doubting humans.

So, once we crunched through some documentation errors and got on the same page, I got me 12 PCBs to test.

They all passed. The pass rate is much better than what we had a couple of weeks ago, with hand-stuffed boards.

I did have a “panic moment”, however.

Yesterday I discovered a large discrepancy in our documentation, which was hastily put together prior to the build. The discrepancy concerned some resistor values in the power supply.

If wrong resistors were left on the board and someone had accidentally turned it on, the entire digital board would blow up and return to meet its maker. So I panicked and asked the factory to stop production. They pushed back, asking if they could fix the errors manually after the robot was done. Nevertheless, I insisted — I was too worried about producing “garbage”, so they reluctantly complied and stopped the machine.

That decision came with a price. They cannot restart the robot as easily as they could stop it. Restarting takes hours in setup.

Suddenly, I’m not so popular around here. And all I wanted was quality… Go figure.

Right now I’m trying to find out when is the next time they could squeeze us in to finish our small build.

How ironic — setup takes longer than actual build time on this small prototype order.

This special test rig saves time in production, by adding flexibility in testing and debugging

Today we received the production test PCBs. As you may recall, these special connector boards were designed a couple of weeks ago to make life easier in the factory environment.

The flexible test PCB joins HiFi-M8′s digital (left) and analog (right) PCBs together. Normally the two PCBs are sandwiched together, which reduces access to the inside components.

Since our test PCB features a ribbon cable it joins the two in such a way that they are completely exposed to test and measurement equipment, making it easy to troubleshoot any production issues.

We are planning to start using this test PCB (aka “test rig”) as soon as next week, when the first pre-production samples are assembled for verification.

Our production PCBs arrived from the supplier and were inspected today. They look good.

Now we turn our attention to the factory.

Here, we were working to setup component assembly this week.

There are five different PCBs involved. They will all be “stuffed” (assembled with components) at the factory.

To get the PCBs quicker, we went for a one-week option, even though that cost four times more than the standard, four-week option. But we don’t have time to waste. We need to move forward.

Today, we’ve been inspecting the PCBs, which just arrived. They look good.

We are waiting for the remaining parts and planning to start component assembly next week.

No matter how short the trip to Japan,  it’s not complete without food shots.

Fish awaiting grilled preparation in a traditional Robatayaki restaurant

Sake in a wooden cup -- plentiful and delicious

Sashimi on rice -- a quick and healthy lunch, except I underestimated the power of real wasabi and squeezed too much from the tube...

Another on-the-go lunch option. Volume is key to the exceptional freshness here. For us Americans, a different take on the fast food concept.

Once again, pictures tell the story of last weekend’s Tokyo Headphone Fest…

Nathan Wright of TouchMyApps with Michael Goodman

Michael Ting of Headphonia with Michael Goodman

Sasaki-san, the Japanese digital audio authority, listening attentively

ExpatInJapan spent much time listening and wrote a report in the appreciation thread

What sounds better, bass or treble control?

Nathan sporting rice sandwich headphones

As you can see, it was fun and we really enjoyed it. Thanks to everyone who came!

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

Q: Please confirm if Hifi M8 and Hifi M8 LX will be the same price? It has been suggested that the retail price of the Hifi M8 LX will in fact be $150 cheaper than the Hifi M8.

A: Yes, originally we had the desire to have two different prices. However, recently we added more stuff into the LX. It’s quite advanced now with auto-switching, additional stages of jitter cleanup and some other bells and whistles. It turned out to be more complex than we thought, so we cannot make it cheaper than M8.

For simplicity, we are making both products the same retail price ($699.99). A couple of people may have lucked out and gotten a better deal than that, since they called in while we still considered a lower price for the LX. Good for them!

Moving forward, M8 and LX will be the same price.

A week of sleepless nights has come to a conclusion.

Our battle with prototypes is nearing the end.

We won. We will have some juicy units to demonstrate at the Tokyo Headphone Fest this weekend.

First the data, then the story.

The prototype units have been verified to work (and play) with the following iDevices:

- iPhone 3GS
- iPhone 4S
- iPhone 5
- iPod 4 Touch
- iPad 2

These are the devices we have in the office. I’m glad we have at least this many. We would have had fewer devices if not for the accident that happened the preceding week.

So what happened last week?

I’m not your typical early adopter. I like my technology stable, because I depend on it. I need it to work, and work all the time. I don’t have time to fiddle with settings, updates, bugs, transitions from old systems to new systems, etc. I typically buy later in the cycle, when the product is stable, and I hold on to my devices for a long time. My iPhone 3GS served me 4 years, which is probably way longer than Apple would have wanted

But last Friday something happened that changed the course of events. My trusty 3GS stopped working. It got wet (a reminder to keep phones away from faucets.)

This was a wake up call. I now have the 5 and a Touch and my old 3GS, which came to life for long enough to demonstrate that it works with our M8. All’s well that ends well.

So what remains now is finishing up the switching mechanism, so that both iDevice mode and USB mode could co-exist peacefully. We will work on that as we build our first small run over the next two weeks.

I will be traveling through the 26th, so updates here may be less frequent.

Our friend ExpatinJapan, whom we are looking forward to seeing in Tokyo this weekend started a brand new HiFi-M8 appreciation thread, before units have even started to ship! Thanks! It’s a bit too early, but we get that you are anxious!

Yes, we are feeling the pressure (and rightfully so).

You can take a look at the new thread right here:

http://www.head-fi.org/t/662881/centrance-hifi-m8-incoming-impressions-and-appreciation-thread

First impressions may be posted as soon as this weekend from the listening demos at the Tokyo Headphone Fest.

I want to thank Damon for setting this up and am anxiously awaiting the Tokyo Fest this weekend.

Meantime, this week is full of hectic activity. We are prepping for the Tokyo show,  building prototypes, packing seven large boxes of parts to send to the factory and coordinating production — that’s just a lot of busy work. But it’s all good. All of this needs to be done.

The good news is we are well over the hump. This boulder is rolling downhill with the force of gravity at this point. We just need to jump out of its path

We can’t wait to move this thing into the category of “shipping product”!

Here are some Questions and Answers from recent Head-Fi.org forum posts:

Did I make it into the early-bird preorder period?

If you sent in an email last Friday, you made it. We were busy building units and it’s “all hands on deck” time right now, so we may not have responded to all yet. Rest assured that you will get a reply. We will give you one week to come up with the arrangements.

Where does the name CEntrance come from? And why the capitalized E?

It came to me in my sleep one day. We take CEntrance to mean “on the inside”, “at the core”, etc. We capitalize CE because it stands for Consumer Electronics, our passion magically worked into the company name. CE also stands for European Community, so they like the name over in EU. Some people mispronounce the company name as “see entrance”. We usually politely point out that it’s one word, not two

I wonder if the LX’s will be completed at the same time as the regular M8′s?

Also, I wonder how many units will come out.

We are building a small run in just a couple of weeks. The small run will likely take care of all October/November people. But don’t quote me on that. Stacie is handling that list. The plan is to final assembly the first run in Chicago at the end of May and if the firmware is ready and fully tested by then, ship. We have added all the changes for LX into the main analog PCB, so all units made during this run will already be LX-capable. It will be an issue of parts placement. LX gets this set of parts, regular M8 gets that set of parts… We expect to ship LX orders at the same time as regular M8, since both LX and regular M8 will use practically the same hardware.

I was wondering if the CEntrance HiFi M8 has shielding to protect it from interference [from text messages]

HiFi-M8 is shielded very well. Our preliminary tests showed that a ringing phone right on top of HiFi-M8 did not produce any audio artifacts in the headphones. I’d expect that a text message will do the same. We will continue tests and will send some messages as well, thanks for the tip.

I tried a working model earlier in the year at another Tokyo show when mgoodman of Centrance came to Japan. It was out of a laptop at that stage as idevice etc wasnt implemented at that stage – my very brief impressions are posted earlier in the thread.

Here is the deal. We demoed the USB-capable version in February. We showed the M8 with a laptop then. We know that works.

We will plan to demo the phone-capable version this time. That will sure build confidence that both paths are working well and that we are nearing completion.

What may not work yet is switching between USB and phone “on the fly.” We are in the throws of that switching business right now. We may or may not have that completely ready for Thursday, when I get on the plane to Tokyo. By the time units are ready, I expect having the switching business worked out. In the least case, we will have the M8 on the table with an iPhone or iPad (feel free to plug in your own).

Yes, but for me, it’s not about what data bit rates the M8 is now capable of processing, but what the various legacy and current idevices are capable of transmitting to it.

For the iUniverse, we can already play 16/24 bit files and 44.1 / 48 kHz Sampling Rates now. We are still working on higher res than that. It’s too early to tell which devices could do which things, but I’ve posted sometime back on the blog about the devices that “may” give you better resolution and those that will not, due to their internal limitations. Basically, consider that all iPads, phones above 3GS, and modern iPods, including Touches will be fine with higher res. Stuff prior to that, including classic iPad, is stuck at 16/44.1 or some such. Nothing we can do about that.

For the USB Universe, we’ve been at 24/192 for awhile.