Steve wrote: 04 Dec 2022 21:32
@exxos not sure if this is your forte or not but have you ever considered looking into DACs and headphone amplifiers? From a business perspective I think you can do very well in the 'bespoke' audio market, headphone amps and dacs are all the rage.
Thanks for the suggestion though I've not done a lot of that stuff. I do actually have a DAC headphone amp on my new PC. But it would be a phenomenal amount of work to get to a sellable product of such. Mostly just comes down to whatever chip is popular at the time and how fancy you can make the case and power supply.
But is the problem of making a brand name for yourself in terms of the market. As I found ,you can sell incredible amounts of garbage if you have the correct marketing and financial backing to push it out of the door and spam people until they buy it. All people just solely go for cheap china crap. The market is just simply saturated beyond belief.
That first amp I posted in my blog had massive amounts of good reviews and people hacking it to make it better and all sorts. A complete amateur designed that amplifier but gained much respect in recent years and I believe is still going strong. But I mean that amplifier used a 555 timer to generate a triangle wave which you cannot do. It will basically just charging and discharging a capacitor which is not linear to start with. So right from the start that design was just fundamentally flawed. It killed my speakers because the output filter was garbage despite using relatively large inductors as well. The whole thing was just completely inadequate. So I kind of gave up on my audio business and just decided it wasn't worth the effort any more. You can see a lot of the amps I made in my blog.
viewtopic.php?f=116&t=5900 . I reluctantly decided not to renew my audio website domain as well a few weeks ago. I just don't see me trying to compete in that world again.
I do see audio stuff mentioned on linus tech tips, various sorts of audio stuff now and then. But I can pretty much guarantee all the high-end stuff they are buying is probably garbage. Ordinarily back in the day you would send your amplifier to one of the hi-fi magazines to review. But that sort of thing is just annoying because I don't really have any respect for anyone in the audio world. People should be sending *me* their products to review not the other way around. Not trying to sound like a bigheaded know it all, but I've seen so much bad audio gear over the years it really does make me cringe. It's user base are mostly deranged people believe me. They are just not worth the effort.
Then like many things in the world, if I speak up against any sort of well-known big brand which has a massive loyal user base and point out all the shortfalls.. Well you can pretty much guess how that will ultimately end. Hence why I just don't bother any more. Again this also backs onto why I started this forum because I just got sick of arguing with idiots all the time. If I started in the audio world I would be up against thousands of self educated experts. But anyway going off into a tangent rant as usual.
The way I look at things these days it is like if I was to start selling toothbrushes. Have the potential to sell them to billions of people. But you also getting into a already saturated market where it would be impossible to compete in. Basically just comes down to marketing where you need a lot of funds to make a difference. This is pretty much why I just diverged into Atari stuff. Near non-existent market but at least I can make a bit of a difference in that world. Me selling audio stuff to the masses Is the same as toothbrushes. It is just not going to happen regardless how good the product may be.
So I was more thinking of smaller projects which would not really take much time or effort on my part. I'm getting too old for doing 15 hour unpaid days doing electronics stuff all day every day. Plus again because of my RSI it is greatly limiting what I can get done.
It is little-known my father and I tried to start up a website a long time ago, sort of similar to eBay, but for people to sell their art on. At the time my dad knew several people which were doing fantastic artwork but had no way to advertise or sell it. He actually brought a couple of pieces and were not really that much. So we had the idea of setting up a website for people to sell stuff on. Basically we would only take a small commission on things which sold. We had a couple of people listing stuff.. BUT...
My father was a lot more of a positive person then I will ever be. I remember he spent an entire day I think going through the yellow pages or hunting out phone numbers to ring people if they would be interested in advertising on our website will basically free. It was actually a bit shocking to see my dad after the end of the day how pi$$sed off he ended up. He basically concluded that they were mostly overall, total nutters. I think the last one he rang up basically said her artwork is far too good to be advertised on the Internet. My dad basically admitted defeat and we just gave up on the idea. I mean, considering we had good intentions of helping people out because people had no way to advertise their artwork to the masses.. And got thrown in our faces the entire time..
Always boils down to the fact that a lot of people are simply just not worth the effort. It is comes down to the power of advertising. Of course if anyone wants to pay me big money to do such work then I may consider it but I really don't have enthusiasm for a lot of things these days. Again this is why I was just thinking more of doing more introductory type of stuff. Little projects which people may find interesting and enjoyable to do.