Antipodes Audio - Updated Range and Upgrade Program - July 2023

Announcements
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@LGA

1/ The reason they aren’t renamed is because they aren’t new products they are upgrades.

2/ For the original model K50 to come up to new spec, it has to have a new back plate, and bottom plate, new internal case work, it gets a new Re-Clocker a new USB a new power supply, new isolation footers, upgrades to the server engine and player engine.
It has to be pulled apart put back together again, tested, it gets a new 3 year warranty, extendable to 5 with product registration, and freight is included.
Other benefits include an increase of 200% to 400% in system resources to improve system responsiveness, and enterprise-level OS resilience against data loss in unusual AC power events.
No one is forcing any one to upgrade, if you feel that the opportunity Antipodes gives to keep your purchase current is not for you, then honestly, that’s your decision.
We have tried to keep prices down, there are many factors that influence a price increase, not only the upgrade costs, but freight costs, and procurement costs etc.

3/ Upgrades to all K Series and OLADRA are the same as current production.

4/ Customs and taxes are on a per country basis, we do not have control over that, we simply state we have a global price, there is nothing new in this statement, our pricing always states this.
For upgrades we have stated that the freight and taxes if applicable are included in the price, you pay the upgrade price that’s it.

5/ Pre-Upgrade prep instructions are in progress, I have a month to complete this as no upgrade will be undertaken till August.

6/ There are no user upgradeable fuses in the power supply.

7/ The K50 and OLADRA get a dedicated ground connection.

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23

I sent in my request for upgrade to my original K50. While I am happy that this upgrade is available to us I am not happy with the pricing as well. As an early adopter of the K 50, before all the rave reviews came out I knew I was taking a chance on a new product. As such, although I understand Mark’s rationale why the price is 6 k, it doesn’t smell right to me that we have to have to pay this much over the cost of a newer K50 upgrade. Also, I don’t use USB, I use AES, and I have pricey HRS footers so no need for the upgraded footers. @MarkCole can you provide an upgrade price reduction for those of us that don’t need or use the USB and new footers?

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24

On the subject of sound quality changes…

Until you hear an Oladra, you do not realise that the K Series has a sense of strain and constriction. The Oladra diminishes that by a very large margin. The music flows more freely and thereby the music communicates significantly more. If you are a music lover, this is incredibly important, and it directly addresses an area that has been a major weakness of digital audio. Let’s call that change more ‘ease’.

The other notable difference is that the Oladra reveals significantly more detail, particularly in the high treble and the deep bass, so it simply communicates more of everything in a way that makes it more engaging than a K50. The detail in the deep bass is particularly impactful on musical enjoyment. Let’s call that more ‘detail’.

The big difference in sound quality from upgrading the K50 is that is gets the kind of ‘ease’ that the original Oladra gets. This transforms the K50. It becomes a whole new experience.
But, the upgraded K50 does NOT get the level of ‘detail’ that the original Oladra gets. It does get noticeably more ‘detail’ than before, and the detail is presented in a more natural way. By that I mean that the greater detail is not because anything is hyped, it is just there.

The improvements for the K40, K41, K30, K22 and K21 are similar to the improvements for the K50. But it really does make the K22 and K21 a realistic option for very good high-end audio systems. All the things you want are buttoned off a little compared to the K50, but there is no glaring fault. As long as you can put up with the things impacted by low power, these two are now a huge bargain.

The improvements for the Oladra are in both ‘ease’ and ‘detail’, with the increase in ‘ease’ being the more significant. The K Series improves much more than the Oladra does, but ‘diminishing returns’ is what you tend to get when pushing the envelope.

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25

This is the question all Oladra owners have. The AES output is great- what is a “new Player engine” and does it change the AES output?
I also have no use for USB.

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26

I completely understand you (or I) wanting to upgrade parts of the K50, however I think we have to take into account how this would play out.

Being able to do either one of these upgrades doesn’t make an original K50 a K50v3 and therefore wouldn’t increase its resale value if you were to later upgrade to another unit such as the OLADRA (or some other subsequent unit).

It could also create a major headache with managing the upgrades and subsequent upgrades (alongside a potential nightmare with the software as you could end up with a Frankenstein hybrid of a K50v1 player with a K50v3 digital output).

I’m guessing Mark’s team would rather invest their time on their next step forward, yet I completely understand where you’re coming from because I had the same thought a couple of months ago!

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27

The main impetus for the revisions and the upgrades was the new USB output. I was never happy with the ‘PCIe to USB’ card approach. You can get nice sound with them but the music is, for me, lost. It becomes mechanical. This does not seem to bother a lot of audiophiles, given how they seem to like the digital audio that uses this approach. I should not say too much on that point as I really don’t want to be negative about other peoples’ products or taste. I just want to describe how I was a bit frustrated when the PCIe technology was introduced many years ago. It drove me to start the Oladra project - to figure out how to move forward without using PCIe.

I was also never very happy with USB regenerators. The available methods were kludgy, and they were always a few steps forward and a few steps back. It also seemed to me that the audiophile world would see the benefits of adopting I2S and you could see this beginning to happen when I was developing the K50. Sadly that has not eventuated.

What has eventuated, is that new technology has become available that does the USB regeneration ‘properly’. I put that in parentheses because this is only my opinion, not a statement of fact. We have known about the development efforts into this new technology for a while now and so we have been waiting for it to become available in the quantities we need in order to go into production.

Basically, it has enabled us to wrap our technology around some new technology to make a stunningly good USB output. A conventional implementation of the new technology yields something halfway between the existing USB output and the S/PDIF or AES3 outputs, but wrapping our best technology around it closes all of the remaining gap. It really responds to our power supply technology.

So to bring the new USB to the K Series, we really needed to work through implementing the Oladra-style power supply in the K Series, or the USB would still be inferior to the other outputs.

We know a lot of our users really want to use USB, because of the benefits in playing high bit-rate files, and I2S has simply not become a reality in the DAC market. Resolving that has driven the intensive work that has gone into these revisions. And my sense is that delaying the new USB would be disappointing for many of our customers.

If you want a description of the new USB, then my main impression is that it has gone from a bit electronic and mechanical (ie you did not feel the music, you just heard it), to being juicily, gorgeously musical. Some of you will prefer it to the other outputs. Some of you will prefer one of more of the other outputs over the USB, but this will be driven more by the DAC and the connecting cables to the DAC. It is the first time I have felt USB has entered the ring.

At the same time as this was happening, the cost of bringing enterprise-level resilience had reached an affordable level so we decided to adopt it, and the work required for this enabled us to make some breakthroughs with the firmware tuning of all of the motherboards which results in a significant leap in ease and detail for all models.

So, the impetus was the USB output because we saw it as urgent for some users, but that drove us to make a raft of improvements before dropping this on all of you.

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28

You definitely get more ‘ease’ with the upgrade, and that is musically important. But ‘ease’ is already a strength of the Oladra. On its own, you might not find the upgrade compelling, but it definitely does take one particular area of improvement over the K50 and extend it.

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29

Apologies, that was in response to those with Oladras not interested in USB.

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Wonderful outcome! Thank you for remaining dedicated to getting the best from USB.

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31

I also want to add some comment on pricing. We have for some time kept our upgrade pricing standard at USD2,000 per ‘computer’ upgraded. Hence why you see some at USD2,000 and some at USD4,000. But there are some exceptions this time because there are significant case-work changes, or some very expensive parts, etc.

At the same time, as I am sure you have seen elsewhere, there has been high inflation, parts shortages and price hikes, etc. At the same time we have also seen some parts costs fall as world-wide economic activity has taken a hit - more so in some sectors than others.

In amongst these changes, some prices would have risen and some would have even fallen a little, without any product revisions. So you are seeing the impact of a range of issues in our new pricing and upgrade pricing. We did our best to make them fair to everyone, including of course to our cost structures, and the amount of factory resource that has to be dedicated to handle these upgrades.

If money is tight or you do not see the value in this set of upgrades, you can always wait for another iteration later and reconsider your options then. We want these upgrades to be good news, not bad news, but we realise everyone will see them a bit differently. We are aware of that and do our best to weigh all these factors up when we make moves like this.

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32

On a slightly different note, while I am here, I hope you will join me in congratulating Mark Cole. He has been with us for about 3 years and has been appointed to the position of Chief Operating Officer. This reflects his capabilities and that he has gotten across what is quite a complex business, given the range of disciplines involved when you combine computing with audio.

It allows me to focus much more of my time on development. We have a large amount of work on the go on the software side of things, where we are building an entirely new software stack, and my software team needs more engagement from me to provide clear direction and decision-making. Software takes time - which is a massive understatement - but you will see some interesting stuff come out of this as it develops.

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Wonderful news! Congratulations @MarkCole

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34

As a K50 owner, this is extremely important to understand as dealers will have a natural economic incentive to push their K50 clients to trade up to the Oladra. It also reflects Antipodes’ integrity that this sort of insight is shared so freely/openly.

35

I should have added that if I was starting out all over again, i would defintely buy an Oladra. But since my K50 upgrade gets it very much closer to the Oladra v1.0 and the K series remains so well supported, i feel curently my funds will be better deployed on other upgrades to my existing set up (eg power cable upgrades on power conditioner & analogue co ponents) as opposed to K50 trade in for Oladra trade.

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Indeed, congratulations to Mark Cole!

Regarding the upgrades and pricing, certainly I would like to be able to do this for less money for my first-release K50 unit. However, most likely I will pursue the upgrade, though I intend to wait until I digest feedback from other owners on their perceptions of change in doing this, in particular USB, reclocker upgrade and the change in power supplies. A number of folks have purchased accessories, such as Innuos PhoenixUSB, to enhance their USB presentation. I will be interested in their feedback how the Antipodes upgrade compares. You can find these on pre-owned market, but U.S. list price new is, I believe, $3749 just for it. We have folks here that also have spent thousand(s) of dollars just on a single cable. Again, though I would like to be able to upgrade for less, the changes in hardware appear to me to be significant and expense in line with what is offered. I also appreciate the upgraded K50 warranty is 3 years, extended to 5, with registration.

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37

You make a really good which is often overlooked. Namely that in a very “dialled in” system ( ie with a lot of care and expense invested in infrastructure that supports components) upgrading/swapping out components could be less than optimal vs previously “very dialled in” state or/or make these past infrastructure investments redundant.

Eg I found the PhoenixNet made my K50 sound a bit more easeful and fleshed out. Would a PhoenixNet feeding an Oladra be too much of a good thing in this regard? That is a very interesting open question.

Thanks for raising this point as alot of people just simply feel the urge to upgrade components without considering nuances like this.

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38

Congratulations, @MarkCole :slight_smile:

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39

I realise this might be tricky to respond to, but would there be any benefit from doing the same with the ethernet outputs for those of us that primarily use those?

Also, how much better do you consider the OLADRA from the K50 v1 in this respect as this would likely be a key driver in my decision to upgrade?

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40

The Ethernet side is definitely on the list, and ranges from Router to internal connections.

One of the slight problems is that our network at Antipodes Audio is so good that we don’t hear much improvement, if any, with things we have experimented with, including a number of high-end products. But in some home situations the difference is starkly obvious. It does suggest to us that providing a high-end Router is probably the most important step to get right first, but we are still at the ‘throw crazy ideas on the white-board’ stage with that - and some of them are very exciting if we could actually make them work. To give you an idea of what I mean, we are toying with the Router being a hub for considerable functionality, and that makes a better business case for placing high quality technology into it.

The by-product of dramatically improving the stability and manageability of some of our customers’ networks would remove 90% of our support calls too…

Exactly when it gets into the development stage depends on what we find in the feasibility stages, so it is way too early to say anything more than it is on the list and the outcome might be really cool.

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41

@Musiclover Just to respond to you on this as a past owner of both Mk1 and Mk2 K50 and a current Oladra owner, all connected via a PhoenixNET. The answer to my ears is that the PhoenixNET is definitely beneficial to the Oladra as well as both K50s. I know another Oladra owner who disagrees with me on which switch he prefers but only in as much that he prefers a different manufacturer’s audiophile switch with his Oladra and not that he doesn’t think such switches are beneficial to the Oladra. I have tried his switch in my system over a few weeks (he loaned it to me) and I still prefer the PhoenixNET. If you want to discuss further we can perhaps message or start a new thread.

1 Like