Light Harmonic (LH Labs). Scam? USD$6 million not delivered since 2014

[labjr]

A couple weeks after I gave them $2,500 for two Pulse DACs and other items. I had a disagreement with Gavin Fish on the telephone and he agreed to refund my money if I stayed off of his forum. Basically, he didn't want anyone hearing the truth. Thank God! But I feel bad for people who got screwed.   They were spending money like they had three days to live with dozens of people jet-setting to trade shows all over the globe, staying in fancy hotels and renting high-end sports cars. 

 

I can't believe LH Labs is still stringing them along with the same defensive attitude. There is no excuse for that. They had banned me and other people from their forum because we were becoming suspicious that something wasn't right. I'm surprised that someone hasn't gone after them yet.

[labjr]

The site still shows the DaVinci DAC. There are probably DAC's now for  couple hundred $ that are better than that $20,000 digital bathroom scale.

[labjr]

Larry Ho and Gavin Fish deliberately used Indiego as a tool to defraud people by removing any recourse they would have. They even changed from Kickstarter to IndieGogo so buyers couldn't change their minds before the end of the campaign. And constantly added items to each campaign to be certain it meet the small goal. Thus making it impossible for anyone to back out, even a second after they pledged.  

[labjr]

Judging by the way they changed from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo, leads me to believe it was a deliberate switch to deprive people of any opportunity to change their mind. Larry and Gavin were flying all over the world to trade shows and renting luxury automobiles. They didn't just get in over their heads. They were spending money like they had three days to live! LH & Co.should be the subject of an episode of American Greed.

[labjr]

2 hours ago, LHCommSquad said:

 

No, I just simply didn't bill them.

This is preposterous. Typical LH Labs bullshit. Nobody works for free. And they certainly wouldn't work for free, claiming to represent a company that can;t even show their face.

 

This reminds me of a piece on American Greed, where this young age man somehow bought a number of small insurance companies in Southern states. He then took all the assets and spent tens of millions buying luxury homes and high end sport cars. When they finally caught up to him, he was afraid to face the music and his mother had to go to court with him.

[labjr]

1 hour ago, jsiegel said:

It is amazing how many products were unfinished. 

If they had been finished he could have teamed up with a chinese manufacturer or Drop (MassDrop) to execute production.  Instead we have a few sample products in the wild that are reported to have sort of worked at one time. 

 It would be nice to know how the "money" was spent. 

Did he get caught in the "we can make it still better" spiral?

Did he lose interest in each project before the troubling "production" details were finished?

Did the prototypes prove unproducible or way over production "budget"?

 

It seems that one project could have been finished with the 3-5 million and it would have funded the company thru each product in turn.  

 

Schiit Audio has boot strapped a very successful company in the same state with currently 29 products and have evolved/discontinued another dozen products in the same time we have waited for larry to finish one.   And Schiit didn't have the "benefit" of pre selling 10 products to get the cycle started.

 

Indiegogo should share some blame in keeping their 10% with no follow up.

Interesting article. I called and emailed Indiegogo while the LH campaign was going on, to inform them that this seemed like fraud. I even trolled the Indiegogo CEO on Twitter. They did absolutely nothing. They do not care. I was so outspoken about it everywhere, that my money(thousands) was refunded. I was lucky. I will never participate on anything on Indiegogo again. Hopefully new laws will prevent this from happening.

[labjr]

Enough with the small talk! When are the refunds gonna start? Why would anyone want a DAC from LH at this point? You obviously have no intention of delivering anything. Bedsides, these days you can get a $99 DAC that sounds better than anything that existed five years ago.

[labjr]

6 hours ago, buonassi said:

While legal matters aren't allowed, general sentiments about LHL abound and it's well understood that 'buyer beware'.

 

It's sort of a shame, because I feel headfi should be in support of the community of enthusiasts (consumers) above all other stakeholders.  They have a banned list of manufacturers, and we're not even allowed to discussing those products, let alone link to them.  Why they haven't placed LH on this list is baffling.

 

 

I wouldn't use their forum. Period. 

 

[labjr]

You can also buy a Chi-Fi DAC for $100 that performs about as well as anything else on the market. No need for crowd funding anymore.

[labjr]

30 minutes ago, erniejade said:

Went

I went with the 

L.K.S audio MH Da004 with Dual ES9038 and upgraded USB.  Fantastic Dac I might add.    If we ever get the Vi Tube dac is it will be outdated and almost no resale value due to everything that has went on from bad support on down.

 

There's almost certainly a better value than your LKS DAC out by now. The Chi-fi DACs seem to continually improve.  

[labjr]

37 minutes ago, erniejade said:

Lks is chi fi. They have improved quite a bit on this model in the past year.  

I know what it is. However, without testing, there's no way to know how good it is. You can't go by specs or chipsets etc. And how did they improve on your DAC? Send you a new main board? A lot has changed since that model came out.

[labjr]

26 minutes ago, erniejade said:

I understand  and what you are saying makes sense.  When i chatted with Chris from LKS * went direct instead of a distributer) he stated the usb a a few things in the board were upgraded but, i never went into  too much detail in what else was changed from the original  design. I can say  i like it better then the PS audio direct stream jr  and grant fidelity tube dac11 i was running.  

 

Most of the high end gear reviewed in the usual publications is just mediocre. All marketing lingo. It's like a cult. You need deprogramming to get away from it. 

[labjr]

Should be on an episode of American Greed!

[labjr]

1 hour ago, Mike Rubin said:

The State AG is a lost cause right now.  We got zero traction with the previous case and the AG has zero jurisdiction over the PPA violations. We have a pending complaint at the FTC.  I may forward this new information to my contact there and see if I can't convince him to forward the complain to the US DOJ, which has been prosecuting PPA violations.  It is a Hail Mary but it couldn't hurt to ask.

 

Grifters gonna grift.

I know.  You read and see on TV about how aggressively they go after crooks but this flagrant violator is never pursued.  Then again, it's California where everything goes under the radar and nobody cares about anything.

[labjr]

Just shows the entire industry is full of corruption. Nobody should deal with those scumbags but they're all greedy. So consumers should boycott anyone who hires them or who is associated with them in any way. 

[labjr]

I was fortunate to get my money back in the middle of the campaign, because Gavin wanted to shut me up. I was in every forum complaining about them and JA from Stereophile, forwarded an email to Gavin about my complaint. 

 

I wouldn't buy anything on crowdfunding anymore. Not worth the risk. And I'm not waiting for a year so save a little bit. I'll wait to buy a product when it comes out on the retail market. If YOU don't have the capital to make a product, then don't expect everyone else to take all the risk.