Many of us will have heard of the legendary Mark Levinson ML2 amplifiers. Well, in those amps, the power amps cost $6 each. I challenge anyone to say the ML2s weren’t exceptional. I listen to the product of a project that gives me (along with all the other components in my system) the pleasure of listening to good music. Fabrizio De Andrè said, “From diamonds nothing grows, from manure flowers grow.”
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Luigi ,i totally agree with you.
I’m just saying that if a customer has a question, it absolutely needs to be clarified, for the good of the company and the customer themselves.
I’m very happy with my Oladra, i confirm that and i absolutely recommend it.
Audiophiles are difficult customers.
Add the internet to the mix and we’ve got a mess.
Happy listening, guys.
Nick
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I do have a very nice dac, price for a new one is about € 6000. Recently I had to go to the factory for a repair / replacement of an important chip. € 50 including fee for the repair itself. Much investments go into R&D.
Still increadibly happy with all of my gear including CX and EX. I only could dream of buying a K50 or Oladra.
Hope you all just enjoy the emotional rewards of listening to your precious music and I as a financial have stopped bookkeeping in enjoying my hobby.
Happy listening.
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Nick, I just want to say that no one can evaluate a piece of technological equipment based on its individual components. What I pay when I buy an amplifier or a DAC is not the sum of its components but, and rightly so for me, the designer’s ability to fine-tune a device that meets my musical tastes. An audiophile can only determine the value of an audio piece of equipment by whether or not he buys it. And he can’t afford to complain if a component doesn’t meet his expectations. We spend thousands of dollars on cables, but does each cable have enough material to justify the price? Of course not!!! I pay for all the research necessary to produce a cable that sounds good. I paid the designer/manufacturer’s fair price for my K50. I could have refused, but instead I accepted because I thought the request was fair. But then I can’t complain because I thought the PCB tracks inside were made of pure gold.
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I worked 41 years as a Design Engineer in Automotive and Aerospace. (Half of that time as an Engineering Manager.) Product design requires most of all experience. It requires discipline in the arts and sciences to design a product according to what the customer wants, is robust enough to take abuse and still operate even when used not exactly as intended, looks appealing, is safe to use, and lasts. The final test is the value that the market puts on that product both as new and used.
It is so easy to second guess what the designer had in mind in selecting components and/or execution of a design. Everyone has an opinion. And of course as hifi enthusiasts our greatest fear is the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome- getting duped for a product that turns out to be inferior. Luckily, I have seen over the years in this hobby that inferior products do not stay in the market for long. This hobby has a pretty good network for calling out bad products regardless of price. And as for a $25 SMPS in the Antipodes, what we don’t know is what additional components or steps are taken in the design to make this power supply help this music server/player sound so good. I know that some of the most expensive DACs out there start with D/A chips in the $100 range. And I mean DACs costing $20k and up. So it takes a lot of ancillary components to make that D/A chip sound amazing.
Two contrary examples that come to mind are first, my old Thiel CS6 Speakers. I was proud of the fact that these speakers used crossovers with all film capacitors. This was back in the day when electrolytic caps were the norm in speaker crossovers. Prior to my Thiel speakers I used to change out caps myself in my speaker crossovers. Well, my cousin does refurbishing work on old speakers and he also rebuilds the crossovers with film capacitors. He told me that my Thiel speakers had the cheapest level of film capacitors. They still sounded great to me.
The other example was my previous DAC. It was a beautiful piece on the outside and on the inside. This DAC was built with some of the best high end capacitors offered. The circuit boards looked great. Wiring was top notch. Top end ceramic tube sockets with gold plated receptacles. It sounded good but my new DAC easily bested it both in sound and rhythm and pace. Of course my new DAC was twice the price. And yes, the new DAC looks great inside too. Not being an Electrical Engineer I do not know the price of the components in my DAC or the Antipodies but based on my team of rocket scientists that I had at work who are EEs and spec out circuit boards for flight controls I know that most electronic components are small change. Although circuit boards can be populated with a lot of those small components.
Another good example are tube amps. Some of the best sounding tube amps are a rats nest of wires under the chassis. Turns out point to point wiring vs neat and tidy circuit boards work better for tube amps. Partly why I have never owned tube amps. The other reason being cost of tubes.
I also know that, and this was a big headache for me as a manager, electronic components have variation. So assembling two identicle circuit boards with these special esoteric film capacitors and resistors will not necessarily have the same input/output gain. I can imagine this high end hifi gear that is hand built requires some significant time tweaking and adjusting to meet the final test requirements. It typically took my techs several days to build and test an LVDT test box to meet all of the spec requirements. They had to sort through 1% rated components to get a combination that meet the spec requirements. To the accountants it looks so simple on paper. Glad I am retired.
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Dear Tony, you’re preaching to the choir.
I own a tech company and I know how it works.
I’m not retired yet. It’s a daily struggle.
Since i read in the forum that some enthusiasts were having doubts, i took the liberty of highlighting the fact that these doubts must disappear.
You, Mark, Luigi, and i are doing it too, that’s all.
I’ve found myself in a similar situation in my work and i’ve realized that people without specific experience in the sector draw conclusions that don’t align with reality and become fixated on erroneous concepts. Helping people understand isn’t easy, but it’s necessary, for better or worse.
Antipodes has decided to create a public forum to offer support, discuss, etc.
This is a great thing, a great opportunity that I greatly appreciate.
This demonstrates that sharing a problem or a doubt and resolving it is the purpose of such a well-designed forum.
Enjoy the listening, my friends.
Nick
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Thank you so much for all your input. I have appreciated all your thoughts. Just to be clear:
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I don’t think anyone on this thread is complaining, or suddenly becoming less happy with the sound of their streamer, or doubting their original purchasing decision. I am still getting a lot of enjoyment listening to my K22 and that hasn’t changed at all.
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I also don’t think anyone is judging any products by their individual components or the costs of the components. Nor is anyone attributing the nice sound quality of their streamer to particular components. Conversely, I don’t think anyone is saying that the said component isn’t important.
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I also don’t doubt the genius of the designers at Antipodes to have considered all the resources available to them to make great products. And yes, this forum is one of the best of its kind.
I guess this thread all started with a curiosity to get some insights as to how a relatively cheap, off the shelf component which forms an important part of digital streaming (most high-end streamer manufacturers would agree on the importance of the power supply) can deliver all the demanding requirements of a good power supply. Maybe good design is far more important than the use of high-cost components. Maybe we have overestimated the role of expensive power supplies. Maybe there are many more plausible explanations.
Any yes, happy listening!
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I think this hits the nail on the head.
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This is very disappointing! I always praised Antipodes for the progression on their power supplies. If they have ended up with an off the shelf cheap smps for the price increase on their products I would be a little pissed. I would expect they would build their own. I guess most of the cost you pay for these products is for their excellent back office support and R&D.
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Hi @GrantAdam,
this is just my perception, but I hope it helps clarify things.
The PSU you see is just the first stage. The complete power section includes regulation, filtering, isolation, and carefully tuned distribution to different parts of the system. Antipodes’ design and tuning on top of the commercial PSU is what really determines sound quality, not the raw module itself.
Building a PSU in-house doesn’t automatically improve sound and comes with huge cost and practical challenges. Every in-house PSU must be safety certified to prevent shock or fire, costing tens of thousands of dollars, with every design update requiring re-approval. That slows development and innovation, making it much harder to stay a frontrunner in high-end audio.
Using a proven commercial PSU like Mean Well, which simply cannot easily be bettered in reliability or baseline performance, lets Antipodes focus on the stages that truly matter for sound and we can hear that 
So, you are not hearing a commercial PSU, you are hearing the complete power architecture Antipodes has built around it. In high-end audio, performance comes from smart system design, integration, and tuning, not reinventing every component from scratch.
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Cheers Paul, I guess I find the pricing a bit steep now. Easy to get a little hot under the collar when you see what you are paying for… I would love to compare the Oladra with a $20,000 CDplayer
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Even if you have a top-of-the-line CD player, feel free to compare it to an Oladra or K50. The €20,000 CD player or drive will also sound fantastic. But these are different sonic characteristics. A server simply sounds different than a CD. And who says that CD is the “right” sound? Even a €20,000 turntable sounds different than an Oladra or K50. Does vinyl even sound “right”? Personally, I find vinyl lacking in bass. The future is clear, and it’s heading towards streaming and server/player solutions. The ease of use of servers alone is so brilliant (apps, tablets, Roon, soon Audirvana). I wouldn’t want to go back to anything else. Hi-Res is a thousand times better than CD quality. But this technology also needed time to develop and sound good. Topics like network noise, various SSDs, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, USB DAC, synchronous or asynchronous, streaming or local storage, power supplies, cables, server/player apps. So I think we’ve come quite far and Antipodes is now doing the fine-tuning, I’m very sure of that.
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