Articles

Why the NEEDs for Modifications?

Having designed all manners of digital audio products for the better part of my career (see my CV), I am convinced that we are now seeing unprecedented value for money products in the market.   

The basic building blocks and architecture of these products are just unimaginable a few years back.  With the now better understanding PCB designs and cheaper multi-layer PCB board availability that enables ground planes, it has to take a real lousy designer to screw things up.

Having said this, these fundamentally excellent products are still handicapped by mainly cost constraints and design know how into bringing their products to the ultimate (or Optimal) level in performance. 

There is also another aspect to the equation.  Do look at this chart below that shows you the costing towards a normal retail product:

From the chart, we can see that only a small percentage (15~25% ) of what we pay for the equipment directly contributes towards the sound we hear, that is the electronic and hardware components, assuming given a capable R&D team.
Modding your equipment means directly upgrading the electronic and hardware content of your product without all the other frills. You will have the best-graded components for your equipment and with the optimal design consideration to bring out the true listening pleasure your expect from your equipment .

What do we do in the mod ?

  1. We REALLY focus on lowering down the noise levels and distortion of the product that we mod. We focus on fulfilling the real potential of the equipment that we mod. With more than a decades of design experience on hundreds of modded equipment, we ensure that you will enjoy your modded gears for the long term. 
  2. We use our own in-house designed ultra-low noise voltage regulators, low jitter clocks as well as other modules to achieve our goal. All modifications are done in-house by skilled technician with own design jig. This is the only way that we can ensure the performance of our modifications and that our modules are installed properly.
  3. We VERIFY our mods with measurements done on an Audio Precision machine.

 

What we do not do..

  1. ….is to mod every equipment under the sun. Only products that we deemed to have unique potential, fundamentally sound basic design and qualities gets endorsed and modded by us. 
  2. …. is to drastically alter the sound signature of the basic product. You have done your research and bought your equipment based on the sound you like. You want to improve on the sound, with better resolution and low noise floor, yet retain the basic sonic signature of the original product. This is what we excel in. We figured, for example, that if you like a tube DAC sound, you will be better served just buying a tube DAC, rather than modding (to the death) a solid state DAC to sound like tubes!
  3. …. is modding just for modding’s sake. Meaning just blindly throwing in expensive off-the-shelf mod products in order to pump up the modification’s total price.

 

Bottom line is that if you are looking for the most value for money audio products (aesthetics aside) in terms of performance, nothing beats a well modded Sound Affairs product. Ultimately, customer reviews are our best testimonials.