I am sorry to hear about your disappointment Brian. If we had control over the worldwide shortage of chips, and how this is causing chips to also be removed from production, then we could do something about it. The other option, which might have been less irritating to you, would be if we left it in the line-up on the website but simply never produced another unit. From our perspective, that did not seem honest. Which brings us back to the question I posed a day or so ago - without a magic wand, how do you prefer that we handle these things? Either no one is reading this thread, or no one has a better idea - yet.
Options 2 and 3 seem the best for both customers / music lovers who want the best possible equipment and music production at any given point in time.
The upgrade option is a plus.
However, my funds are not limitless. This means I will have to deal with the sound of my EX/CX combi, both bought secondhand.
But there will allways be better stuff. For me no reason to complain.
I think we should enjoy and cherish whatever products are within our financial reach.
Like art I would not buy with a trade-in in mind, but buy Antipodes gear to enjoy music for the next 5 to 10 years.
And in time the new stuff should reflect state of art sound reproduction so you have to keep innovating.
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Thanks JustGert.
I want to emphasise that it is very helpful to hear how you guys are feeling about these changes, even though the options we have are limited. If we can do something better to handle these issues then we will.
There is a very simple solution. Obtain a crystal ball that lets you see into the future to ensure that you only introduce models that can have a five year life. Easily done, right?
Seriously though, as I mentioned yesterday, just keep doing what youâve been doing. We all wish the response to the pandemic hadnât been so disruptive but the plain fact is that itâs still going to be a while until we get back to normal. The initial shock of hearing of these impacts can be a tough pill to swallow so youâll likely hear carping simply because it is in our nature to do that. Since youâve done such a great job of filling our accounts with positive credits, a loss of a few credits here and there wonât result in the balance going negative. There will be a few who might not be able to get over it, but thatâs more about them.
Iâd rather have your design talents focused on delivering an even bigger bang for the buck. That you were forced to play this game of Tetris is a bummer in that regard. I do hope that things will soon become more predictable as far as the supply chain. Iâm already looking forward to how your learnings from OLADRA will trickle down to servers I can afford.
Oh and have I mentioned how much I love my K30?
Do 2. Do 3. Donât do 1. Donât do 4. Love my EX, sure newer products are a percentage? better, but I continue to be grateful to be supported with the opportunity to upgrade (which I took) and have that supported by a further 2 years warranty. That engenders customer loyalty. Antipodes customer service/ support has been exemplary, as has the dealer support in Australia. Keep doing that!
As I read in a forum somewhere, a learned poster commented, the introduction of a new model or the discontinuation of your model doesnât instantly make your model sound bad.
Possibly not adding much to this thread, but my thought for the day 
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Well Kennieb123, the Oladra is really the culmination of our Oladra project which did drive us towards higher cost for higher performance. The next stage for us is our Kula project. In the Kula project we want to distill from what we learnt in Oladra, to deliver much higher performance in low cost products. We already believe we can make something at least a little special in the $4k to $5k range. It will take some time to complete it, but that is where our focus will be for the next stage of electronic design.
Alongside that, look out for some changes on the software front, aimed at making the complexity of what we cater for to be very simple to use. The objective of software is to be complete in terms of range of functionality, but simple in terms of how you access that functionality, and we are making some big strides in that at the moment. But this is more a journey than a single step.
For K30 owners, one possibility is an upgrade option that will take you to the K50 level. But it would be expensive, so I am not sure whether that would address what you really want. If we knew that enough of you want that then it would be possible to do this in 2023.
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I think one of the keys to customer satisfaction will be making the software upgrades compatible with existing Antipodes hardware for as long as possible. This also takes care of Mark Coleâs comment above because I, for one, will be fine with my K50 for years to come if the software upgrades that lead to better sound can be applied. Thankyou.
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Yes, absolutely. We have been keen to get everyone onto the latest software so that it is viable to roll out improvements as they become available. When everyone was at different levels it was a bit of a nightmare for both support and for upgrades.
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Oh, and Kula will not be threatening to the K50. The performance will not rival the K50 at $4k to $5k. But it is going to shake up the market at that lower price level - if sound quality has anything to do with it.
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By expensive, do you mean somewhere in the ballpark of the price difference between K30 and K50? I am most certainly interested in an upgrade, but the question would become whether it would make more financial sense to just find a way to upgrade to the K50. If you were to come up with an upgrade that gets it close to knocking on the door of a K50 for just $5K or so., Iâd spend that right now. 
I am pretty confident we can do that but it would take a while to get that ready, because of our current production schedules. The biggest issue would be that we would probably need to take deposits to know the numbers, as we would need to do a run that fairly closely matches demand to keep the price in check. If enough people want it then I am confident we can do that.
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Works for me. I hope others do the same. Thanks for putting this out there.
First I have to say that I do like the sound and operation of the K30 (but iâm sure I would like a K50 better 
)
My disappointment is that after less than 2 months of owning a product that a major purchase, that cost a 5th of my take home salary for a year it is now discontinued.
The K30 still does sound the same as it did when it was in production, being discontinued
does not change the sound or operation.
Yes I do understand the chip shortage, causing the problems, but I am presuming that you
were aware that you would be running out of PCBâs before the end of last year and you guys had talked about discontinuing a few items from your line.
I as a purchaser would have like to see the K30 and other items being left on the web page
but marked as a discontinued item. For myself I would NOT have purchased a K30 knowing it was going to be discontinued, as it does affect the resale price down the road.
If you guys do offer an upgrade path in the future, once I know the path and pricing, at that time I will make a decision on the route I will go, stay with a K30 or go with the upgrade.
As for your marketing, I personally think options 2 & 3 are the way to go, with a bit more notice when you are considering dropping a model.
Brian
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Hi Brian. Thanks for your post. As I think I explained earlier, we had expected to be able to continue the K30 and tried to find a suitable replacement board as a drop-in. But nothing at a similar cost that delivered a similar level of performance, despite a lot of tuning and optimisation attempts. As soon as we got to that realisation, we notified we were pulling it, even though we still have several K30 in stock. In my experience, notifying that a product will be removed at some point in the future is pretty much the same as removing it, for obvious reasons, so I am not sure that would help. And when removing a product, there is always someone that just bought one, unfortunately. If anyone recently bought a K30 and would prefer move to a K50 or Oladra, book an appointment with us to see if we can sort something out that you will be happier with.
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There was a concern about resale value of withdrawn servers. One concern a prospective buyer might have is if there would be spare parts should the product fail. Another concern might be about whether it was withdrawn because it failed to get traction.
If the Antipodes website would allow one to pull up info on legacy products it might help if both were addressed. Itâs a fair question to ask as to what happens on the support side should one of these now-unobtainable boards fail.
We have plenty for repairs - they are put aside right from the start with every model. In our history the only issue for repairs has been that 32 bit units could not be used with 64 bit software and we offered hardware upgrades to address that.
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I expected that to be true, but itâs wonderful to hear nonetheless. Iâm obviously not thinking about resale at this point. Just nice to know that the parts shortage wonât impact repairs.
I have gone from a D to a K50 what I found was that the music had been impacted by software so I tried a Chord David Dac to solve the D problem. This had a slight improvement and not great.
The next step was the purchase of the k50 oh no the back pocket cryed and the ears laughted.
The improvements from the D to the K was huge.
The D was great when I got it and over time softwear wore it down.
It shows me that antipodes needs to stay on its game and be ahead of the external software game of the likes of Roon.
By the way The way the K50 with my old Dac runs rings around the D and Chord David
Thanks Antipodes
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Created new topic: Hardware Modules new and previous