Speaking of assembly, I'm wondering if Taiko wishes they'd used a chassis similar to the Extreme, less challenging to finish than the milled block.
How are the plans going for the Extreme upgrade, btw?
This may have shaved a few months off the start, but as it turns out, anodising quality issues are not limited to the Olympus chassis. For example, not only did it take our long-time anodising supplier nine weeks to process the latest batch of Extreme chassis, but out of 30 units, we had to reject 28 (!).
Fortunately, we are reasonably well-stocked on Extreme chassis, so in this case the impact is limited to a financial loss. But if you run the numbers: suppose the next batch of 30 is 100% acceptable — that gives us 32 usable chassis over 18 weeks, or just 1.77 chassis per week.
The issue seems to stem from the quality of the aluminium supply. The exact cause is still unclear. In Europe, Russia was previously the largest aluminium supplier; now it’s Norway. Perhaps supply shortages or pricing pressures have led to the use of lower-grade sources or increased reliance on recycled, less pure material.
This appears to be a much broader problem — it’s affecting our peer manufacturers as well. This is evident from the growing number of companies switching to coating. We’ve spoken to many manufacturers, and this is widely acknowledged as a relatively recent and widespread issue.
In addition to this, we’re limited in the number of Olympus servers we can produce — the same applies to the Extreme. The actual difference in assembly time between the two is not significant. However, the Olympus requires substantially more testing, fine-tuning, and programming.
This involves skilled labour, which only a few of us here are qualified to perform. These types of servers are inherently not suited for mass production, especially considering that using a standardized set of parameters across all units would compromise their sound quality potential.
Too much testing and component selection is required at various stages of the build process to allow for high-volume manufacturing.
The main hurdle has simply been the overwhelming — and completely unexpected — order volume. For example, we’ve sold more Olympus servers than we sold switches and network cards during their entire first year after launch.
We’re now approaching 200 orders, with over half of those including an I/O. That translates to around 300 complex builds. Due to the initial delays caused by having to find new anodisers and other suppliers, we’ve been working on fulfilling these orders for about a year now.
We’ve gradually ramped up to producing 6–7 units per week, but to reach that level, we had to expand our team from 5 to 11 people. Even so, it’s still not enough — those 11 are consistently working overtime and under high pressure. However it’s very difficult to source qualified staff, for assembly work, on a temporary basis - as this is a temporary situation. We are now “only” 28 anodised Olympus servers — which is still the most challenging object to complete — away from finishing all orders. Concurrent orders are highly unlikely to reach 6-7 a week.
After this, we’ll be able to start offering the Extreme upgrades we’ve developed. I’ll be starting a new thread on this topic soon, as there are several possible approaches, and we’d really appreciate your input on which direction you’d prefer us to take.
