LH Labs Geek Out GO2A, V2, V2+, Infinity and SE Impressions and Reviews

To briefly derail this thread from LH Labs' historically terrible customer service, insane delay times, and wondering at the fact that anyone ever gives them money before their product is ready to ship...

I'm currently listening to some little red Geek Out device that you might be able to cook bacon on.

I've only tried it thus far with Future Sonics Spectrum G10s, which are fairly dark and very smooth.

I believe the GO Vsomething that I'm using has some sort of Sabre DAC in it? I don't know. I haven't done my research.

If this has a Sabre in it, it's the only Sabre DAC I've ever liked. Maybe the G10s simply aren't resolving enough for me to hear it, but I'm not getting digital nasties or skull piercing shards of sonic sadness from it.

Whatever the green filter is seems to be the best. The red is terrible. The blue is fine but seems a little smeary.

Is it worth dealing with a crappy company or paying $400 for the Geek Out 2A∞? Probably not, but it is a very good piece of kit.

Did I mention how hot this gets? It heats up the IEM connector enough that I put a heatsink on top of the GO.

 

I've had my GO2Pro Infinity or a month now and like it pretty well. I'll be honest, I can't hear a difference between the red/green/blue filters. I *think* I have a slight preference for this thing over the schiit jotunheim with most of my headphones, which doesn't make sense because the jot is a big desktop thing vs the LH being a portable. On the other hand I don't know if I could tell the difference reliably....the jot just sounds a little more brittle/cold to me, especially with the HD800, which I know isn't a great match with the Jot. Either one is going to drive any headphone I have to 110+ db most likely, enough to make me very deafer than I already am. I use the LH as the main rig for my laptop w/ HD800 at home and have the jot on bedroom duty with the Aeon.

Mine doesn't get that hot, especially when driving IEM's. The only thing slightly concerning about it is that the micro USB connections don't seem that solid with the iXCC usb cables I'm using, but that's probably a function of age/wear on the cables. I like that it's a semi-high end piece of gear that I can take on the road with me, since I have to spend about 2/3rds of my life away from home for work.

 

Tried the filters on a buddy's system with the V2+ and we both generally prefer blue, mostly. I DID like the green on his system though, because it mellowed out the sound and made the vocals a little more pleasing (but it was thinner). The blue sounded more full, with more depth to the soundstage, and pulled a lot of the instruments (specifically violins in this case) forward.

But again, this will all vary with your equipment and actual music, and will vary from song to song.

 

I've found the green better for warmer transducers and blue better for less forgiving/brighter transducers. Green will exacerbate sibilance issues on my monitors where blue will soften sheen and bring the mids a little forward at the expense of detail. Green does a better job of waking up the HD6XX, blue sounds smearey. The red filter is just there to piss you off and make you do another button press .

 

Has anyone hacked or set up the V2+ to have a continuous power supply so no re-charging is necessary? It's my understanding you can't charge and listen at the same time, correct?

 

Had a query with regards to the 2.1 firmware on my geekout v2+.

I'm going to use it on balanced out with my He-560. Have heard that the pairing works best on high gain mode. So, to achieve high gain, (I listen at low to medium volumes usually, around 70-80 db), should I decrease the software volume on the media player, and then increase the volume through my geekout v2+, to reach high gain mode?

Any other way to achieve this. The only problem is the approach which I'm looking at goes against the common recommendation of putting the software volume at 100% and then adjusting volume on the amp. Would really appreciate your help on this.

 

Unfortunately you don't have manual gain control on the 2.1 firmware like you do on the 1.5 firmware, so yes, your only option is to use your player's volume control and max out the GOV2+. Decent players tend to have decent volume control (JRiver, FB2K, Roon etc) so it's not absolutely terrible.

 

So at the moment I have a Geek Out V2+ with ver 2.1 firmware, does anyone think its worth it to go to a Go2Pro Infinity, or should I just be happy with what I have.

 

It's been two months that LH Labs has had my G02A Infinity, and after promising they'd send it back repaired within a few days of receiving it they haven't responded to any of my tickets. I think I'm just going to stop expecting it back. I really wanted to give this company a chance, but now I get what other people have gone through.

 

My GO V2+ has developed an issue with the power button. It seems the power button is no longer functioning and the device is always on.
Has anyone faced this issue, and fixed it by themselves.
I'm in India, and sending this to the company for fixing would be very difficult for me :/

Any help or suggestion or workaround to fix this would be great, and highly appreciated.

 

Hi guys! I just wanted to pop in and say "hi' to everyone. I'm Jarek, the new social media guy for Larry/LH Labs. The insiders may have heard of me already -- not sure. I did post a 3 part update on the IGG platform, so if you're signed up, you probably got alerts. (I'm also not new here, I also post as synthwavefan)

So I'll be around the forums (here, HF, and LH Forums) and IGG of course. Already I'm getting complaints from IGG backers about my unreliabilty regarding posting on the LH Forums. I'm locked out, actually -- zero way to register. So, we're waiting on that, and I'm anxious to get started using the forum.

Other than that, I'm working with Larry to keep everyone updated on the IGG projects. I'm hoping to start diving deeper into the back-end and ticket system. If anyone has any issues with anything, like a ticket or something else, I will be glad to assist. Just drop me a PM or tag me or something. I can't promise when your ticket will get looked at/resolved, but I'm definitely going to be investigating or bringing to the attention of the team the notices I get. Any normal post with a tag will be looked at and I'll try to get an answer for you.

I'm also going to be around Facebook, but I'm still waiting on access to that, so if you DO post on Facebook and don't get an immediate response --- I'm not ignoring you, I just literally cannot respond until we get the access figured out.

I'm really just here to help out, keep people informed, and relieve some tension and pressure. Right now, understandably, talk is cheap, especially coming from LH company, but I'm here to keep my word and work hard and let everyone know they've got a friend in the organization. I really hope the backers give us/me a chance to improve the relationship between them and LH.

 

Welcome to SBAF, Jarek.

I don't mean you any ill-will whatsoever, so please don't take this the wrong way, but there is an inherent problem with the company you work for, and no amount of downstream customer support can possibly fix that.

Without going specifically into names, members of your upper hierarchy have shown an appalling lack of business integrity and ethics. I can completely understand if it takes months (years?) to iron out the kinks of a start-up company, but we are now at a stage where products backed in the original campaign are 300% (at minimum) past its expected fulfillment date, and that's not counting the incredible amount of surveys / application forms / pledging confirmation forms that have been thrown our way - measures that at the time seemed as though progress was surely being made, but eventually proved to be nothing more than an exercise in pointlessness, or at worst a deliberate attempt to mislead and stall for time.

I have created a folder in my email to archive all the emails that LHLabs has sent through the years. Something I rarely ever do, and if so, only for critical work related projects or family correspondence. It's almost hilarious to see how many iterations of charts / models / schedules that have been conjured up to reassure backers that some semblance of advancements there has been for each product line, but yet at the end of the day when you take a step back to survey the situation, the end result (or lack of) speaks for itself.

It wasn't even an unprecedented case of unforeseen business phenomena. There was a certain point years ago where large swathes of your backers were pleading LHLabs to cut back on the over-promising, to scale down on their next 'Tesla' project, or Geek-Wave-Ultimate-Xtreme-Giga Femto-Platinum-100-left-in-the-wild-Wave-XX-v2.1 (Limited Edition Carbon Fibre chassis posthumously signed by Freddy Mercury) release, etc. Did LHLabs listen? No! Which is the greatest irony of all, that for a supposed crowdfunded, customer input generated (remember Geek Force?) product, LHLabs chose to remain selectively deaf.

I took a peek into Head-Fi's threads after a year long hiatus. I feel almost sad for you folks. Even the most ardent supporters who rigorously defended you have become completely disillusioned.

Casey might have left LHLabs. Michael might have left LHLabs. New staff seems to be coming in periodically -- it doesn't matter to the average backer any longer. Even if LHLabs eventually assembles the greatest CS / backend support in history, nothing can possibly change the fact that LHLabs has deliberately led backers on a merry-go-round chase and treated us all as fools.

Some bridges are burnt forever. I'm afraid to say that LHLabs has run out of chances, whichever direction the smoke blows next. You could literally deliver all completed, terrific sounding, fully functioning, bug-free products to every single backer within a day, and nobody with half a mind would invest more time and money on a company like this.

 

I get all that and I'm not here to defend anyone or make excuses or point fingers. I'm just here to help the company move on and get people the things they need from this point forward. There's a lot of things that happened behind the scenes, and hopefully a lot of it will come out eventually. Larry and I had some discussions about the behind the scenes stuff and there will be more we'll discuss. I don't really know at this point. I did let Larry know a lot of facts about the community and their attitude towards the company, and he completely gets it. I've even told him some of my thoughts and disappointment regarding the company, and he seems to really understand the frustration and what needs to be changed.

He's just trying to deliver what they promised. Like I said in another forum, I don't think Larry is a bad guy and he certainly is eager to make the customers whole. There was a lot of issues behind the scenes and there's a lot of things people don't know. Hopefully, if there is a culture or attitude at the company itself, I hope we can start to make a change at the company. Will it help in the long run? It may not help LH Labs specifically, but I hope it will make good things happen for the customers, which is really all that matters at this point.

 

It's crazy to me that a company that clearly makes the best in class product (the GO) has been able to damage it's reputation with customers so fundamentally (and deservedly). I hope for our sake as audio consumers LH gets it's shit together soon.

 

Fully understand your position.

I don't think it's unfair to suggest that... Larry should already have gotten it a long time ago. I'm no definitive expert in product development and/or supply chain, but it's somewhat intuitive to me that running a campaign which allowed for TONS of product iterations (not a math guy either but there must be almost 100 total different permutations of products) with your backend staff not having the technical means let alone manpower to cope was a fatal mistake.

Shit invariably happens when building a product or service from scratch. The onus lies with the organization to forecast and factor in potential delays in production when coming up with a schedule.

And yet the ridiculous promises kept pouring in. Every deadline that passed was met by "2-3 months time", over and over again. Would it not have been better at some point to abandon the falsified sense of positivism and just give the worst case scenario estimate? Sure, the initial reaction to having to wait more than a year would have been tremendously negative at first, but we've learnt through the Schiit philosophy of 'under promise, over deliver', customers are generally intelligent and discerning enough to be practicably reasonable. It was genuinely cringeworthy at times to see updates painted in a rosy picture contrasted directly against the shitstorm that had long been brewing on the forums.

One instance of "at worst up to 2 years more" is a whole lot better than 10 instances of "only 2-3 months more". It is better to be perceived as a mismanaged company with some balls, rather than a mismanaged company with no integrity.

You literally cannot try to "deliver what they promised" when 'they' have already failed. Even the purest and most patient of audiophiles whose sole priority is audio fidelity would find it hard-pressed to stay the course after being misled / misinformed time and over again by a company that has not seemed to learn from its shortcomings. Even if Emilia Clarke came up to you each time and promised she'd hook up with you in 'just a few months time', you'd inevitably quit waiting after a while because you wouldn't want to be associated with a lying POS*.

Jarek, the truth is that we've seen your introductory post a number of times before. Same flavor, different time, different person, different platform.

If this is supposed to be a critical turning point, 'start afresh' moment, all power to LHL but it's certainly not going to resonate amongst your customer base. The reason the forums are mute and the geek squad is dead is because people are tired and jaded. Hell, I'm not even in for an "all-in" purchase, and can barely comprehend how those who are in for multiple maxed-out configurations must be feeling.

I sense your sincerity in trying to make good (amends?) to your backers, and I wholeheartedly wish that this time, finally this time, you'll be able to institute a radical change, someway, somehow.

Just don't blame us for not buying in...

*P.S. I lied. Would totally be worth the wait.

 

Really, that's what it boils down to. If LH goes down, we all lose out. That includes future customers, current customers, and people who are waiting for tickets to be resolved and products to be delivered. Anyway, there are those we won't be able to please at all but if we gave up completely, then those who are still waiting will have lost out 100%.

Thanks. No one is trying to make excuses for Larry and Co. but rather just get the facts out there and help those who need it.

 

I get you are trying to say that you share the concern of many of your customers, but bringing up hypotheticals like these are worrisome.

And surely they are not threats, right?

 

Speculation is pointless. We can only wait and see. Adding to the drama does nothing useful.

 

One dead GO2A SE. Two tickets 'auto-closed'. One still open and unanswered for three months. I gave up a while ago...

 

OK. Right now I am not taking any more requests for tickets. I have a healthy handful and I am going to present them to Larry and Matt and whoever else to see if we can get through those.