It’s scary that in December 2016, over 6 years ago, Paul was talking about having a v1 working server interface and they were already a year in to building their Roon-killer. So PSA are in their 8th year of this.
The firmware was being outsourced to “a brilliant fellow” (obviously not that brilliant) and the work internally was handed to someone called Tyera, who left in 2018. The product I mostly use, a start-up, developed great firmware and app, but it took 5 years and for at least the 2 years there were at least 10 programmers working on it. It was certainly obvious to me that this was massively under-resourced from the start and, as was stated at the beginner of the server thread, the resources have to be maintained after the product is launched.
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that Ted should have just been told that a Bridge III using the new ConversDigital card has to be designed into the Mk2 DAC and PSA could happily charge $1,000 for it. Many people have been after a Bridge III for years.
Just seems to me that doing servers, speakers and Octave Records all at once was too much and something had to go - it’s great, though, that the speakers seem to be a big success.
I did notice the SFP input on the Lumin U2. Progress at last! I use a battery-powered media converter from SoTM (LHY do one now as well) for SFP to RJ45 so there is no mains connection, but I hope this becomes more common. As there is no current flowing down a fibre-optic cable it provides galvanic isolation (someone will tell me I’m wrong), so SFP has always seemed obvious, but the next best is an RJ45 input. A certain Scottish company started with a blank piece of paper about 20 years ago and decided you only need one input, a network connection, and I don’t think they were wrong. Linn Klimax DS, still one of the best streamer/DACs ever made.
It is curious to see that the brand new 2023 Lumin T3 is almost identical in layout to the 2009 LINN KLIMAX DS, with power supply, streamer/input board and DAC side by side, isolated (Lumin using a steel case, Linn an aluminium billet). They are almost clones, in a good way, everything lines up the same. I’m not into electronics, but to me this is elegant, clear thinking and attractive.
