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Supatrac: the world's best tonearm?

Why go for a massive scale up?. I know of a guitar manufacturing company that is family run/staffed and in recent times have had a huge demand for their product. They continue to do what they do, however with longer waiting lists. Price has increased, but not exorbitantly and demand remains high.
I am not from a business or engineering background so apologies for my ignorance in that regard, potentially rendering my previous paragraph to the dustbin. But to the OP, do not ignore the need to self care. Your enthusiasm, skill, and wanting to provide the best value for the customer are incredibly admirable qualities. But there are only so many hours in the day and I hope you find the right balance. IME life balance, self care, increasing self awareness are really important. Health is wealth, no question.
Continued success. You deserve it. Be careful out there.
 
I used the blueprint above for most of my working life in a different field. I value my time, job (and client) satisfaction and wellbeing more than money and since 1996 have only produced what my two hands could produce, with the occasional use of my brain.

I had no interest in having big premises, staff and associated headaches and paperwork. I also discovered that my work is better than that of anyone else I asked.
 
sonddek said:
All I can say is I'm working very very hard, and constantly looking for ways to get quicker, but making the arms, especially the tubes, takes a degree of craft and is labour-intensive.
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May I ask what makes the arm tube so difficult to fabricate? In other words, why is a "a degree of craft" needed?

You've stated that one of the design goals for the arm was that it should not require precision engineering to build, instead relying on a novel (and brilliantly simple) bearing design to deliver the 'magic'.
 
leroyd said:
Why go for a massive scale up?. I know of a guitar manufacturing company that is family run/staffed and in recent times have had a huge demand for their product. They continue to do what they do, however with longer waiting lists. Price has increased, but not exorbitantly and demand remains high.
I am not from a business or engineering background so apologies for my ignorance in that regard, potentially rendering my previous paragraph to the dustbin. But to the OP, do not ignore the need to self care. Your enthusiasm, skill, and wanting to provide the best value for the customer are incredibly admirable qualities. But there are only so many hours in the day and I hope you find the right balance. IME life balance, self care, increasing self awareness are really important. Health is wealth, no question.
Continued success. You deserve it. Be careful out there.
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I think Leroyd is giving some sage advice, or at the last sage consideration.

Many companies or corporations make the mistake of trying to scale when scaling wasn't necessarily required, or at least scaling to the degree they shot for before everything went bust from underneath. All companies have a "good fit" size, output, and market, the trick is figuring out what those quantities are.

These considerations are complicated further when the company comes out with other products, licensing deals, services, or market demands on the company's offerings. An example is Canada Goose. The company has been in business for about 100 years. They made the same number of coats--the best--for about 80 (roughly). Then one day Brad Pitt asks a Toronto crew member about the jacket all the crew is wearing in the cold, buys one for himself, gets shot by the papp's, and the next thing you know they had to scale first 5x, then 20x, and now I don't even know.

I think it's safe to say one is always better off moving up when it HAS to happen. Being reactive, but quickly reactive, is a key.
 
If you are selling through dealers, you probably can't afford to have too-long lead times as they won't want to let their customers down, or keep them waiting without a clear delivery timescale. Once customers commit to a purchase, their heads are already in 'want it, now' mode. So scale depends to some extent on the size of the order book, and the rate of production to keep that order book churning over in a sensible period. I reckon dealers will lose interest if lead times creep above 6-8 weeks, unless they can be assured those are firm. Ideally, you'd want to fulfil made-to-order within 1 month, and with a stock buffer for 'vanilla' items (Linn, SME or Rega mount 9" arms). How you get there is the key to it, obvs.

The biggest risks for small businesses in the first stages of growth tend to be:

cash flow/growing faster than funds permit;
taking on staff rather than doing everything yourself; and
maintaining quality/cost when taking on subcontractors/suppliers for key assemblies.
 
sonddek said:
Yes indeed. This is one reason why it's very difficult to answer when people ask which length to buy. The 12 inch arm has a higher default effective mass - it can never be as light as the 9 inch. The nine inch can be made heavier though. This means that the 9 inch is compatible with a wider range of cartridges. A comparison between the two lengths using the same cartridge would require adding the supplied mass adaptor to the 9 inch arm to bring its effective mass up to the same value as that of the 12 inch. Very few people compare arm lengths in that way, so most discussion of arm length merits is really about something else.
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10.5 inch arm?
 
Pl
sonddek said:
Yes - but the problem is that as I scale up I have to pay people rather than doing it all myself, and nobody is as cheap as me.
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Plus: pensions, national insurance, company liability insurance, premises, tooling, sick/holiday pay... endless
 
I found Jason Stoddard's blog about the Schitt start-up interesting (if you can get past all the scatological puns and Jason's verbosity). Their M.O. has been low prices and high volumes but that's worked for them and they've scaled-up significantly. One take away, for me, is that Jason's initial involvement was all evening/week-ends and he kept his marketing company so wasn't reliant on Schitt income, to start with. Not sure about co-founder Mike Moffat, he was probably retired or semi-retired when they started so, again, not reliant on Schitt income to get going.
And they both had a background in the audio business so they had the connections and the experience.

www.head-fi.org

Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up

Hey all, I’m Jason Stoddard, the co-founder (with Mike Moffat) of Schiit Audio. You may have seen some of my posts on Head-fi. But you haven’t heard the full story of Schiit…why we started the company, how we’ve grown from June 2010 to today, the good stuff…and the bad stuff. So, in a burst of...
www.head-fi.org www.head-fi.org
 
Another vote for C. For me the music was just that little bit easier to understand / follow / flow. Played around with the volume settings on playback - don't think that led to my preference.
 
I love that this product came into being. I'm a great admirer of people who invent and then make things. Especially things which can compete with an existing product many times the price. Most inventors never make it to actually selling their product on the market. Richard deserves a great deal of credit for his efforts and invention. It's wonderful to see originality emerge in a very mature technology. I also love that it involves string! String under tension is a such pure manifestation of physics at work. Hard to simplify things any further than a taught string.
I'll never be in the market for such a product, but the world is a better place with this invention in it.
EDIT: I liked "C" best.
 
I liked both. After compensating for the loudness difference - I increased the volume on D by 0.9dB - I preferred D in the louder passages where it seemed to separate the instruments a tad better. Having said that, given the price disparity, whichever one the Blackbird turns out to be, it’s a bargain.
 
Regarding the question about pricing and whether the Supatrac is for the few privileged audiophiles ($3000 may be cheap compared to the SAT but is still serious mula for most of us) or the masses, some personal thoughts are:
After getting my my interest piqued about the Supatrac I did (as you do nowadays) some googleing and stumbled onto a massive thread on the Lencoheaven forum which turned out to be about members making their own versions of this tonearm with the same bearing type (SUPA).
It actually seems as if you can diy a decent version of this arm if you have some basic knowledge about turntables and tonearms and some standard tools in the shed.

And even more interesting is that the creator (user sonddek here) is an active member in the thread participating in explaining and helping builders in their process. Wow, I salute such an open minded and transparent approach from him!
This helps spreading the interest about this type of bearing and also makes amazing sound available for people with thinner wallets. And if I understand correctly some diy:ers have moved on to purchasing the real product.
Maybe this is a business risk but I think that more is gained from this transparent approach than is lost. And since the product is covered by a patent no one can start selling their own versions.
This really shows the commitment from sonddek in his invention and the belief that it hould not only be for the audio nerds with the biggest wallets.
 
Might be worth posting this old comparison while people are discussing price/value/marketing etc.…


This is MF’s prior $200k Continuum with the $30k SAT up against a bog standard $3.5k SL-1200G.

To my ears the Continuum is a little better, it seems a little warmer, weightier and clearer, but whether it is $226k better can only really be answered by an oligarch.

I’m posting this purely to highlight that if someone sticks an absurd $230,000 price tag on something that does not in itself set any absolute level of value or performance, let alone manufacturing cost. To my mind this is audio as Damien Hirst-grade conceptual art. It has absolutely no relation to function or design integrity. Chances are it is just overpriced!

My favourite counter-argument here is Rega with the RB300. That was such a radical piece of thinking when released. A simple one-piece tonearm that outperformed much of the then high-end and was priced for a very low amount. It was an object lesson in design, engineering and really thinking the whole thing through. It sent shockwaves through the industry and Rega could afford to stick it on their Planar 3! One of the real game-changers in analogue replay. It is here I’d be trying to look for lessons. Richard is lucky in that his design is beautifully simple. It works because it is clever. That is a huge advantage when it comes to production.

PS I found this one interesting personally as I did, for a remarkably short time, own a 1200G (I preferred my ancient TD-124!).
 
Track C has to be the Supatrac. It's clean, insightful, transparent, musical and a pleasure to listen to. Track D... erm isn't... IMHO
 
I found this comparison even more difficult to make a decision on than the AB one and again I could probably live with either. I did try to match volumes again, but found it wasn’t consistent thoughout the track. In the end I did as before and listened to both tracks all the way through a couple of times and for me this time D was the most musically convincing.
 
YesMan said:
Regarding the question about pricing and whether the Supatrac is for the few privileged audiophiles ($3000 may be cheap compared to the SAT but is still serious mula for most of us) or the masses, some personal thoughts are:
After getting my my interest piqued about the Supatrac I did (as you do nowadays) some googleing and stumbled onto a massive thread on the Lencoheaven forum which turned out to be about members making their own versions of this tonearm with the same bearing type (SUPA).
It actually seems as if you can diy a decent version of this arm if you have some basic knowledge about turntables and tonearms and some standard tools in the shed.

And even more interesting is that the creator (user sonddek here) is an active member in the thread participating in explaining and helping builders in their process. Wow, I salute such an open minded and transparent approach from him!
This helps spreading the interest about this type of bearing and also makes amazing sound available for people with thinner wallets. And if I understand correctly some diy:ers have moved on to purchasing the real product.
Maybe this is a business risk but I think that more is gained from this transparent approach than is lost. And since the product is covered by a patent no one can start selling their own versions.
This really shows the commitment from sonddek in his invention and the belief that it hould not only be for the audio nerds with the biggest wallets.
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It's just a rational reaction to the fact that IP law only entitles you to control commercial production of inventions, not production for personal use, and only for a decade or two, provided you publish the invention with an explicitness that enables anyone to copy the invention.

Artists who talk a lot of bollocks are far better protected by copyright law and can claim rights to it effectively forever (see Disney's rebadging of other people's stories and influence over copyright legislation).

But you are right: I want the maximum number of people to be able to get more from their vinyl collections and I don't see why I shouldn't make a few bob helping that to happen, as many before me have done!
 
sonddek said:
Last week I listened to a Blackbird on a Planar 3 and really enjoyed it. It cost me £100 on ebay (without arm).
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Hi Richard, I have been following this saga with great interest (and am sitting patiently in your order queue). Correct me if I'm wrong but I think you have stated that you believe that the turntable is an important determinant of the final sound, similar to the old Ivor Tiefenbrun ethos.

But on reading all the various reviews and owner accounts on a wide variety of decks at hugely different price points I am starting to wonder whether the Supatrac isn't something of a leveller? If so there are (at least) a couple of possible explanations, one substantial and one purely perceptual:
  • The unique nature of the suspension of the Supatrac means it interacts with the turntable in a different way to traditional designs conferring some level of immunity to certain turntable differences.
  • The fidelity of the Supatrac is so fundamentally high that it somehow diminishes the turntable's perceived contribution to the overall sound in a way that makes turntable differences seem less significant.
Not having heard the arm myself I accept that this may simply be may imagination running away with me. You have probably heard the Supatrac on more decks than anyone else, has a similar thought ever struck you, and if so do you have any theory as to the explanation?
 
Any word on when the reveal will take place? Miss the days of needle drops on PFM. It’s interesting that the Steve Hoffman forum allows them. I have provided a few over there over the years. Unfortunately my iMac that I used to make the recordings is no more, it did such a great job.
 
John said:
Miss the days of needle drops on PFM. It’s interesting that the Steve Hoffman forum allows them.
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The Steve Hoffman forum is owned by a very wealthy and successful music producer/mastering engineer. It has no advertising beyond Steve‘s services. Steve certainly doesn’t rely on his forum as a source of income.

pfm is absolutely dependent on advertising just to survive. The no-needle-drop rule is a contractual requirement for the google ads; I can’t host pirated material (even if I wanted to). This has been explained to you at length previously.
 
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