Hello, I just joined, primarily for the audiophile products. Looking at purchasing the NHT C3 speakers for our new living room. Space is about 15 feet wide by 33 long and they will fire long ways. Space is just for general listening, music room with all equipment is downstairs, so hoping they will fill it with sound nicely. Cheers.
Mar 18, 2024
Original Post: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/massdrop-x-airist-audio-r-2r-dac-a-discrete-resistor-ladder-dac-for-350.881315/page-12#post-14294445
after all these days and even Will himself admits one of the engineers that Airist hired, got inspired by sosolars‘ work. What matters right now is such inspiration legal or not and it is not up to us to judge.
Meanwhile, any decent company would suspend the drop to save their reputation, though MD is doing quite the opposite. Also I am sorry to see how they responded to @inorbit8’s questions...
My question here would be, what is the benefit of that layout? Is it simply a nice layout for an 'R-2R' design, and a different one (eg as shown in William Tse's post) could, essentially, be substituted? Or is there a tangible benefit to this product in using that layout?
Regardless of the answer to that, the part of your post that doesn't sit well with me is "If he had interest in compensation for this, he has plenty of avenues available to express that". Considering you have discovered his design was indeed used, to any meaningful degree, in this product and freely admit that, is it not on you (or your side as a whole) to approach him about compensation? If my above reasoning is correct, I do not feel that it is right to call this product 'IP theft' or a 'copy', but nor does it feel right to simply act as if sosolar was never involved and leaving it entirely up to him to force you to do otherwise.
I remain interested in this because I have sufficient trust in those who have heard it and posted about it, the whole debacle has informed me about the concept and point of R-2R (all publicity = good publicity, etc etc), and it is simply a cheaper (but therefore, of course, potentially inferior) way to experience R-2R than other products (such as from sosolar himself, if his posts elsewhere hold true). Please continue communications with both sosolar and the public.
This all blew up about 2 days before it went live on a couple of headphone forums. The drop went live anyway.
Stealing someone's engineering work and profiting off of it is an ethical problem. But so is accusing someone of intellectual theft, if it's not true. It looks like MD took a hit on sales here, and maybe rightly so - I'm OK with the market making that decision when there is doubt. But I'm also respectful of the fact that there are real people who work for Massdrop that, like most of us, are trying to make an honest living in a competitive world. Calling, or implying that, people are thieves is a crappy thing to do too, if they aren't.
I'm satisfied with MD's offer to share their work with an independent third party to test what's under the hood and compare it to sosolar's. If the similarities are ultimately superficial, as MD claims, then people can respond appropriately based on verified information. They could buy comfortably knowing it wasn't a stolen board, or choose not to buy because it used the visible layout of another product. Either would be a perfectly legitimate response.
I hope I've just missed the part where sosolar took Massdrop up on their offer. Because otherwise, it would look an awful lot like smearing someone's character, then vanishing when called on to verify it or set the record straight. I want to presume the good intentions of all parties here, so hopefully the third party verification happens. But if sosolar vanishes, that would speak volumes.
I have no doubt that the board was fairly closely copied, whether from the source files or gerbers, or just manually traced out. There's no other way it would end up that similar. Anyone who's done any PCB design can tell you that.
Who knows what Sosolar wanted. I don't think he was after any money, or he would have made a bigger deal of it. Probably he just popped in to say WTF when he saw his work copied. I know if I saw one of my board designs show up in someone else's device, I would certainly pop in to ask some questions.
I'm glad he dropped by, because it tells me some things about Airist which are good to know, before deciding what to spend my money on.
This is completely different than where people manufacture products to take advantage of another's reputation, brand or market by claiming their appearance without delivering the performance and selling at a price to skim the market. As I understand this product, the source is a long-term technology with a generally available template and with numerous entities looking to produce their vision of a product that uses the techniques and factors of the technology. The only way to protect "proprietary" development is with a patent! I get that it is expensive and hard to justify, but otherwise there is no claim to "ownership". Period, End game.
Now, if you engineers or others with more of your life force invested in the deep places of this business want to have your own personal calculations and philosophies to determine what is "best" for you - then you should use those to decide - for you. Otherwise, it seems to me that Airist (in their determination) have just built a better mousetrap and are presenting it in their own right for customers to decide with no interest in relating their product to what sosolar did or didn't do to create their separate product. I wish you technical experts, who I respect your objective knowledge and information, would concentrate on specific analysis of performance items and not provide so much "color commentary" which is diminishing your potential contribution and making you seem spiteful and full of agenda in your discussions. It actually makes me greatly discount any of your (hopefully) legitimate input.
Thanks for your consideration.