Zolton

I'd never heard of bax-shop before, but trying to find more info (I like Melda stuff!), the recent reviews seem... mixed on several sites, including the company's Facebook page. The folks at "other site" also have some questions about their pricing/discount rates, though at least one who vouches for the store: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8202347#p8202347 Tread carefully, perhaps.

Nah, I'm not predicting; I'm just watching the pretty numbers go by. Speaking of which, there were more signups by noon today than all of yesterday, but the (significant) blip seems to have... um, unblipped in the last couple of hours: Seems a fair chance the September ride is going to be all roller-coastery throughout.

Twenty-four hours into September, it looks like the current pace is around 9 signups/hour, which would land right around 17 freebies if nothing changes*. * Everything changes. All the time. (Plus, Peter may have something up his sleeve.) (Besides pizza grease.) (Aw, now I'm hungry. Booo.)

Yeah, the post counts are pretty different - 1,791 to 1,323 at the moment. Most people seem to be focused on the page count, though. Maybe there's a message in there about Cakewalkers willing to work 33% harder? Or something?

The sane and reasonable part of me understands you two are kidding. Asked to comment, the other 95% of me said: The score's 90 to 89 right now, home team winning. Keep swinging, sluggers.

Oh, no no no. One of my dearest sayings is "Prediction is futile". (It goes hand in hand with another favorite, "Hope is for babies". I'm super fun at parties.) We're in the third phase of the group buy, and the "rampdown data" from the wild rock-all-night throw-your-panties phase was only 8 hours old, or about 1% of the time to come. Here's what those numbers and 14 hours more look like (note the gap in "Hrs left"; all rate calcs are per-hour averages): In a couple of days, we'll have a better idea of the current rate, which should be a decent ballpark to play in -- future disasters, curveballs, additions, subtractions and night-rockin' bouts of panty-throwin' notwithstanding.

It turns out I have one more nerdy spreadsheet left in me. (Who am I kidding? I've always got a nerdy spreadsheet left in me. The laxatives never help.) For still-interested parties / my own amusement, I want to track how far into 25-for-1 territory we may expect to get. The starting point for that is this: As of midnight, the count is 10537. Thirty bonus days times 24 hours means 720 hours to accumulate more signups. The signup rate from the very beginning (9am EST on 8/5, I think) to the "race to 10k" announcement (around noon on 8/26) was 14.6/hour, or about one signup every four minutes. (The rate from start to finish is higher -- 26.4/hour -- due to the mad rush from around midnight on the 29th through early afternoon on the 31th, a period averaging 33.4 signups/hour, better than one every two minutes. Assuming we're not due -- at least in the next four weeks -- for another mad scramble, the "pre-race" rate seems more realistic.) It may also be useful to track the September-only signup rate, which could be -- or not? -- a little or a lot slower. That rate doesn't exist yet, but as a starting point, I used the average rate over the past 9 hours, when signups have slowed considerably. That's 12.44/hour, or around one every five minutes. The last two columns show the estimated final count, based on either the "pre-race" 8/5 rate or the post-10k 9/1 rate of signups. Right now, we're in 19ish-for-1 territory, but with almost no relevant data to lean on. If anyone's interested, I'll post updates periodically to show how the trend is meandering over the course of the month.

The official list of qualifying products is here: https://www.ikmultimedia.com/25gb/ Basically, whatever price you see for an item listed on that page is your signup level. Purchase one, and any other product of that listed price or lower is available as a freebie, up to 10 (right now, but it should grow higher over the next month). Just be careful of two things: (1) you can use Jam Points and/or Gear Credits to shave some cash off most items, if you have them -- but your "signup level" will remain the listed price, regardless of the discount; and (b) a few items are available as purchases to get into the group buy, but not selectable as freebies in quite the same form -- like the 4-item Electromagnetik package, which you could buy to enter at the $149 level, but can only select the 4 individual components as freebies, at the $49 level or higher. I'm not so savvy about the Custom Shop, but that's where you'd buy the Gear Credits to buy items available in the Custom Shop, which gives you an advantage because higher Gear Credit levels can be bought at a discount and further reduced with Jam Points, if you have them. Not all qualifying items are available in the Custom Shop, though -- including Modo Drum -- so it's best to strategize if you go that route.

10,001! Huzzah!

Five or six, probably. Things have slowed down a little from the max, but still kicking along at a relatively high rate. If you take the average signup rate (around 26/hour) from the 7k mark when the "race" started until now, you'd expect to reach 10,470+ by midnight tomorrow. Overall, the average rate of signups today is ~39/hour. We may be in "unstoppable force" territory at this point.

Counter update: 9693 / 307 to go. And 50+ signups/hour (on average) over the past 8 hours. Chugging right along!

It only updates once an hour -- but happily, it just did. I'm seeing 9639 / 361 to go.

I'm seeing 9583 / 417 to go here, and the numbers add up the way they should. I think the website failed to update around 4pm EST, probably due to the insane traffic. It'll likely be more than a couple of hours to hit 10k, but the average since noon is > 50/hour, so not that long. Probably. Barring catastrophe. I think.

Welp, there's that last-minute bump, woo hoo! So long as the deadline is 23:59 EST on the 31st (there are questions about that in some... less data-driven corners of the interwebs, but all of Peter's communication here has been spot on with that assumption), the curve is humping way up over the line. 600 left to go in 33 hours, and 400+ signed up in the past 6 hours. My nerdy numbers are definitely no longer of interest. Or put another way:

With 44 hours to go, the count is at 9054. That's now (just) ahead of the average pace that would take the number from 7075 when the "race to 10k" was announced on the 26th to 10k in the final hour of the 31st. (Assuming midnight EST, as Peter has kindly said is the "official" time zone.) To get over the hump requires an average of 22 signups every hour. Getting to the first 7k happened at a pace of around 14/hour, while 7075 turned into 9054 at a ~22.5/hour clip. In the past 18 hours, there have been 473 signups, or around 28/hour. So the overall trend is good. A last-minute surge would hit the mark comfortably; a drop-off could screw the proverbial pooch. The time, she will tell.

Overall, the numbers look really good -- as long as the weekend rate holds steady or thereabouts. Peter said somewheres that the official clock is Eastern time, which means we're 3 hours away from two days left. If we were at 8800 with two days left, we'd need 600/24hours over each of those days to hit the mark. If we look at a few 24h time periods from the past couple of days: Midnight 8/28 (7734) - Midnight 8/29 (8302): 568 participants Noon 8/28 (7989) - Noon 8/29 (8581): 592 participants 4pm 8/28 (8106) - 4pm 8/29 (8715): 609 participants 6pm 8/28 (8156) - 6pm 8/29 (8768): 612 participants 9pm 8/28 (8244) - 9pm 8/29 (8872): 628 participants So we're currently chugging along at the rate we need -- and still speeding up, apparently -- but (a) there are three "extra" hours to work with and (2) also an "extra" 72 participants. Sprint to the finish!

Sadly, any math ability I have goes out the window when money is involved. Stick one dollar sign in a spreadsheet and logic goes higgledy-piggledy and it's all 2+2=7, up is down, black is white and WUP makes perfect sense. Okay, not the last one. Let's not be ridiculous.

Looks like 30+ each hour since noon today. That'd boogie us up the proverbial mesa in a hurry, if it sticks:

My nerdy datasheet has evolved into its (hopefully) final form, which looks like this: I'm looking only at the time since the "race to 10k" announcement, which jumped the rate of signups quite a bit -- but there's a lag of about a day before that happened, so we started out "behind" the rate of ~23/hour needed to get from 7075 to 10k in 126 hours. We haven't hit that rate yet, though the numbers are steadily creeping up. The "ideal count" shows how many signups we'd have if we smoothly got the ~23 signups per hour -- by that metric, we're about 140 people "behind", and the rate we need to catch up is now ~26/hour. That's the bad news. There is some good news, though. I'm assuming a GMT deadline, so if it's later (likely EST, if so), then we've got another 5 hours to play with, give or take. Also, we've hit the 25+ rate and more in quite a few hours/spans, so it wouldn't take a huge surge to get there consistently. The final column shows where the current rate would get us, and that number creeps closer to 10k nearly every update, with a gap of around 250 now for the first time. So we're not home and dry at this point, nor quite home and vigorously toweling off. But we're headed in the right direction, while the clock ticks away. That's a thing, right?

I happened across this eerily similar thread from 6 1/2 years ago (first I've seen the site, so I couldn't vouch for it) that discusses the same model in the same SDOD sale: https://www.tdpri.com/threads/sdotd-anyone-know-anything-about-these-cant-find-one-review-online.557043/ Folks there seem fairly down on them and may have figured out the equivalent listed model, but I'm not so familiar with the headphone scene myself.

Thanks, DA. I'm only capable of doing math when I'm supposed to be doing something else -- like actually making music from these goodies I'm turning into a museum curator of. (You should see my plugin spreadsheet. I need an intervention. Or possibly an abacus.) Speaking of which, a nerdier but more practical way to look at the home stretch. Around 8pm GMT on the 26th (count = 7075), the "race to 10k" was announced and we had, I think, 126 hours to go. Looking at both the rate between data points ("current rate", some just an hour apart at this point) and the rate since the announcement (the "10k race rate"), here's where things stand as of noon-plus EST: So with about 2/3 of the hours left, not on pace for 10k -- but generally increasing the pace going into the weekend, and above the rate needed for some stretches. If the final day or so gets the boost some are expecting, it's within reach -- especially if the overall rate keeps inching up in the meantime. Stay strong. Be well. Nerd out.

In case anyone else is interested in an extremely nerdy and unofficial look at the numbers: Using timestamps of posts in this thread (and from a couple other "interested" forums) that mention specific counts, I found ~60 data points from early on the 5th through about noon today, plus a handful of my own this evening. Comparing the gaps of time and counts between pairs of posts, I can work out the approximate signups/hour over various periods of time. Here's the quick rundown: From the "start" (counting the 8/5 early-morning announcement) to now: 14.2 signups / hour Since the "race to 10k" announcement, approximately (5pm GMT yesterday, if my calc from EST is right, with the count at 7075) to now: 19.3 signups / hour Needed from now (04:00 GMT) to the end of the 31st: 24.6 signups / hour It's a bump in the average, for sure -- and we've already seen a bit of bump since the extension announcement. But the rate has been > 25 / hour for several stretches during the GB, including a full day near the beginning and at least a 10-hour stretch today. This is my first IKGB rodeo, so I'll defer to others with experience about how high, far, wide and long the numbers might or might not jump, but 10k seems plausible if enthusiasm holds. In the meantime, the numbers are fun for a data nerd to fiddle with.

I think husker's right that buying Syntronik Deluxe (with or without JP) would qualify for a higher level of freebie choice, but there are a couple of things to note about that specific case: 1. At least for me, it's listed at $269, rather than $250. 2. As pointed out on the KVR thread, Deluxe might not be a great GB value, because there aren't many (or any?) potential freebies in the range between $199 and $269. 3. If you buy Syntronik (regular), you should be eligible for the "Syntronik Deluxe Upgrade" as a single freebie that bridges the gap between (vanilla) Syntronik and Deluxe. So you lose one freebie, but save some cash. Or JamPoints. Or something. Definitely not sanity at this point, as it all makes our heads spin.

I'm still no mathematologist, but it might be interesting to revisit the numbers from ten days ago. Specifically: The ~300-and-a-little/day rate has held pretty steady overall, in that the GB hit 4000 right around the end of day 11, and 300 even would have taken 12 days. At the updated rate, with 15 days left, we'd expect to hit 9000 by the end with no extension -- and no bump of people joining later, no one doubling up, etc. I'm sure there's some day-of-the-week variability, but it's perhaps interesting to note that today the rate looks to be around 500, which is a fair jump above the average. Perhaps the quickening begins? (Edit: And I'm certainly no mathematologist, because I said 300x12 = 4000, when I was thinking of 333. The rest is probably maybe somewhat reasonable, though.)

I'm no mathematicist, but this thread was started early yesterday morning, which I believe was soon after the buy was announced. I'm led to believe -- and it makes intuitive sense -- that a fair proportion of people will jump in at the end, once they've seen how things are shaping up. Short of that, if the current rate holds of (slightly more than) 600 people joining in (less than) two full days, or 300/day with 25 days remaining, you'd expect to hit the middle of the 7000 tier by the end, without any eleventh-hour (or twenty-fourth-day) bump. Given the recent... <vague arm-waving motions> all *this* happening in the world, it may be that there are more first- or second-time buyers looking to add to their new-ish music production activities -- or maybe there's generally less disposable income to sling around. A couple of weeks may narrow the trend, but so far it seems consistent with getting at least a 6- or 7-for-1 deal out of it, just from the numbers available.