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Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave is a high performance portable music player, made for discerning ears.

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Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave: A No-compromise Portable Music Player

Geek Wave is a high performance portable music player, made for discerning ears.

Geek Wave is a high performance portable music player, made for discerning ears.

Geek Wave is a high performance portable music player, made for discerning ears.

Geek Wave is a high performance portable music player, made for discerning ears.

LH Labs
LH Labs
LH Labs
LH Labs
9 Campaigns |
Berkeley, United States
$1,665,254 USD by 9,559 backers
$1,321,851 USD by 7,007 backers on Jul 13, 2014
Highlights
Mountain Filled 9 Projects Mountain Filled 9 Projects

Introducing Geek Wave: Something Different

Apple has completely abandoned iPod, the original portable music player. Their vision is to integrate music playback into the iPhone. That's great for everyday music listeners, but what about those of us who don't want our music interrupted when a phone call, email, or text comes in? What about those of us who want the highest quality sound? We know when you start mashing up devices, compromises have to be made. What about those of us who love what high-resolution digital audio sounds like? We know iPhone just can't cut it.

We're trying to save the portable music player, and we're not alone. Along with friends like Sony, Pono, and Astell & Kern, we're dedicated to making a small, portable device that's created for one task: to uncompromisingly playback high resolution music.

 

 

 

 

Geek Wave is the evolution of the portable player. It provides uncompromised sound quality, while also loading you up with the portability, functionality, tech specs, and features LH Labs is known for. It plays PCM formats natively at up to 384 kHz sample rates in pure 32 bit depth. Beyond PCM, it plays DSD formats at up to 128 times the sample rate of a standard CD. Geek Wave doesn't mess around.

Whether you're just looking to replace that old iPod you've been carrying since the early 2000's or you're a hardcorde, dyed-in-the-wool audio aficionado, Geek Wave mixes work with play, and is ready to party. Beer, cheeseburgers, and giddiness sold separately.

The Highest Resolution Audio Available

Being the first company to bring the world a 32 bit/384 kHz plus DSD 128 component has it's advantages. Like it's predecessor, Da Vinci Dual DAC, Geek Wave is the only 32 bit / 384 kHz PCM capable, native DSD player in the world. What does that mean to you? It means you can feed it anything. From MP3's all the way up to DSD128 files.

Geek Wave Architecture

 

Future proof Digital processing stage

After 4 months the campaign ended, we decided to upgrade the center piece of our digital audio to the new architecture that allow "System On Module" to work directly with the whole player. SOM looks like the example here.

 

 

What is the benefit?  That mean if we want, we could even upgrade your CPU inside Geek Wave without desoldering anything.Just pop one system "card" out, and plug the new one. Using the SOM architecture will increase our overall cost and integration design time, but definitely will provide the much better FUTURE PROOF capability.

Sweet and rock solid Analog stage

From the analysis and data from all other respectful competitors. Geek Wave is still one on the TOP. There are  few players could offer both Single-ended and Balanced output. But Geek Wave is the leading one at such a high output wattage. Also, by sharing the same the successful analog design of Geek Out V2/V2+ and Geek Pulse DAC, we prove this analog design could handle both power demanding headphones and noise sensitive IEMs very well.

 

 

 

 

 

Flexible Configurations

As one of the senior digital audio player owners, you know what you want. We designed a flexible configuration that could fulfill different hopes and dreams.

So there are hundreds of possibilities for Geek Wave's configuration. With five different set of modules or components.

Module 1: Mother Board

Module 2: Flash memory module

 

Module 3: Battery module

 

Module 4: Chassis with different back material (main frame is T6061 Aluminum)

 

Module 5: Dock Station

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geek Wave Chassis Design

Geek Wave has the future proof SOM digital structure, with optional dual mono DAC engine and Femto clocks. It's definitely one of the kind. It took us a lot of reversions to find a sleep and nice chassis to fit its internal guts. 
All the physical buttons will be on the side. And most of the units will be thicker than current samples due to battery. We add some nice touch on chamfer and with a "Wave" concept on software user interface. 
 

Geek Wave Highlighted Features

 

Pure Class A Amplification

Geek Wave has the most powerful pure Class A amplifier than any of its competitors. With different models to choose from, you can use Geek Wave with any headphone that's out there— from sensitive IEM's all the way up to large, esoteric cans.

Touch Control + Physical Buttons

Geek Wave's intuitive design allows you to control it in multiple ways. First, you can touch its screen to easily move from song to song, through playlists. Second, you will still have nice design physical buttons to give you the best user experience from both worlds. 

 

 

Drag & Drop Music Management with Expandable Storage

Easily manage your music files by dragging them from your computer's hard drive onto, and is expandable via an SDXC port, which supports up to 2 additional terabytes.

A Large, Serviceable Battery

One the biggest complaints against many portable music players is that they don't have a replaceable battery. When the battery dies, the whole device dies with it, forcing users to pay for repair.

Geek Wave's battery is user-accessible. After the expected two year lifespan of the rechargeable lithium ion battery, you can easily swap in a new one.

Instant Power Technology

Geek Wave analog output stage holds power in reserve for sonic events that have more "boom." It doubles the power of the amplifier when it's needed.

 

 

Our Powerful Duet Engine

Our company has been developing the most cutting-edge ways to enhance audio from MP3's, CD's, and other low-resolution streams since 2010. In our $31,000 Da Vinci Dual DAC, we have a sophisticated technology called Duet Engine, which is a timing technology that effectively doubles the quality of a music file without artificial "up-sampling" by merging two wave patterns of sound. No gaps, no air, just pure audio. Duet Engine dramatically improves audio quality, making the experience more lifelike.

 

 

 

A Three-layer Elastic Buffer

In digital signal conversion, timing is everything! To ensure computer speed fluctuations won't influence Geek Wave, we're adding the same proprietary (and patent-pending) three-layer buffer we developed for Da Vinci DAC to Geek Wave.

Features vs other competitors

We got really quite some requests from Geek Force hope we could put Geek Wave against the state-of-the-art digital audio players currently on the market. I agree with you, during past few months, we see few respectable competitors have launched good products there.  All we want is to have a clean chart for our backers to know where we are.

 

 

Join Our Geek Force

We've had such good fortune with Crowdfunding that we decided to open up parts of our product development process to YOU.

Geek Force is a forum that allows members to put in their "2 cents" and have a voice as we develop Geek Wave. We're a small company and our Geek Force is an amazing resource for us. It's a pretty cool group. Becoming a member of our Geek Force is free and easy to do. Just visit lhlabs.com.

 

About LH Labs

LH Labs is an amalgamation of audio geeks and engineers who have partnered together with one sole purpose in mind: bringing the sound of high-end audio to the masses.

Based in Northern California, the epicenter of the high-end audio industry, LH Labs was founded on the principle that music lovers deserve something better than just the "usual." We've made it our mission to create the best products possible for both audiophiles and music enthusiasts.

We've earned all kinds of awards, including a CES Innovations Honoree Award, A Publisher's Choice Award from TONEAudio, a Greatest Bits Award from Audio Stream, a Writer's Choice Award from Positive Feedback Online, and a Blue Moon Award from sixmoons.com. We've been featured in Forbes Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Street, Stereophile Magazine, The Absolute Sound, The Business Journals, and The Daily Swarm, among many other publications.

In the years that we've been creating audio products, we've had some pretty nice things said about our gear.

Sonic Satori - Michael Mercer
"Man, that thing was so airy, tight, and downright exciting to listen to. I don't think I've heard a USB dongle-type head-amp/DAC with the overall authority and SLAM of the Light Harmonic GEEK yet. That's why all I can say is WoW!!"
 
Inner Fidelity - Tyll Hertsens
"Boy, this little gadget's got some balls!"
 
Part-Time Audiophile - Scot Hull
"Me? I have two of 'em [Geek Out] on the way. Can't wait... I'm a dork. I ordered an extra."
 
Stereophile - John Atkinson
"Da Vinci produced a sound that thrilled."
 
The Absolute Sound - Steven Stone
"The visually striking Light Harmonic Da Vinci Dual DAC was a CES Innovations Award honoree, but its real beauty is inside."
 
CNET - Philip Wong
"Purists should find the Light Harmonic's DAC's ultra-low noise power supply a welcomed feature..."
 
CEPro - Robert Archer
"With the music industry evolving from a medium of physical discs into a world of digital downloads and cloud computing products like the newly introduced Da Vinci digital-to-analog converter (DAC) take on a greater importance.

"Light Harmonic's latest DAC is engineered to provide audio enthusiasts with a state-of-the-art digital audio solution that incorporates a contemporary industrial design that matches its performance."
 

Current Design Progress

The whole development progress is a long journey. Thanks for the support from our backers. We are able to focus on the technology improvement and make the best portable music player on the market. 

 

There are seven more key items need to be finished as we saw in the chart. And we are working with our WiFi module provider to make sure what is the problem. Software part is very time consuming but our plan is to ship something has core function smooth and add the new features via software upgrades. 
Another worth mention here is we add USB "OTG" functions there. It will be very helpful in near future. ;-)
 

Frequently Asked Questions

 
What amount of continuous play time is anticipated on the various models?

Playback time will vary depending on what type of music file you play. But as a general rule, we project at least 10 hours of playback time for each model. Our Engineering prototype has run 10 hours continuously with max volume without any problem.

 

What is the TRRS connector specification you follow?

Here is our specification in 3.5mm connector.

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