Judegate (formerly: STOLEN ITEMS ALERT)

I think I remember the boot babes telling me that Jeff is bigger than Jude. Taller too.

All joking aside. I've meet both Jude and Jeff in person and in deeds, as far as I can tell, the boot babes are right.

 

Honestly @No_One411 was the reason why the HFM booth sounded the best I have ever heard it sound. Liked a lot of the HFM stuff including the Shangra-La. He had great music on the players.

 

WTF does this even mean?!?!?

 

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

Highly emotionally abusive and manipulative people keep these things relegated to clandestine phone conversations and communications. This is all one person's control issues manifesting as abusive behavior toward individuals and an entire community.

I'm sure everyone on the other side hears about how Marv and others are plotting and scheming spending all their lives and all of their time trying to ruin his. The reality is the people who run this site tend to have families, incredibly busy careers, and close friend groups who take up the bulk of our time. We give what we can to SBAF and assholes get maybe an hour of attention every six months when something unbelievably petty with such significant impact on someone's life occurs such as this.

I know this thread is being read by Jude. I hope he can see that he did something really incredibly evil here; just truly despicable. He let his own emotional issues with control and paranoia lead to a gross abuse of his significant influence over the industry and one vendor in particular resulting in HURTING an incredibly kind hearted, generous person; a person who f'ing spent hours of his time to make the HFM booth at CanJam AWESOME because of his personal desire to give the personal audio community a phenomenal experience.

This goes beyond childish schoolyard stupid pranks like naming of measurement rigs; this is an act that has caused a non-trivial negative impact on someone's actual LIFE and the community itself. This is really a f'ing shame. I hope I never do anything 1/10 this evil because I would never in a million years want my kids to follow my example.

 

I don't want to drag things on, but I do need to make a short statement. The views expressed here are one-sided or are based on hearsay or conjecture. Neither HIFIMAN or Jude are here to defend themselves. Jeff has asked us not to point any fingers at HIFIMAN and that he holds no grudges against them. Please respect that. We don't know what actually happened.

Let's all forgot about this and move on. Hopefully no one drags this out further to other forums or Reddit. I know some of you guys. I'm asking you NOT to drag this on.

 

To be fair to HIFIMAN, I am posting their official response. Let's just put this behind us. Personally I don't hold any grudges against HIFIMAN and I encourage none of you to do so either. HIFIMAN has actually been very good to us.


To my friends:

Some recent statements made on SBAF and Reddit were brought to my attention and I found them quite disturbing. I wrote to Marv aka purrin here on SBAF and expressed my concerns and he kindly offered me the opportunity to address them.

Early in 2015, Jeff Han aka Nne411 talked to me in an audio show. He told me he respect our products, and he wished to work for us. I believe his top education experience and his English/Chinese bilingual speaker talent will benefit our business so that I hired him as a part time helper (He does have a decent, and busy full time job, he can only work for hifiman a few hours per week). A main part of his role was to work with the Head-Fi community to promote HiFiMAN as a brand, its people and its products. Jeff would also occasionally work with us at shows.

Head-Fi has been an important business partner for HiFiMAN since the beginning and in turn, we have been a key sponsor for them. I have no idea how much of our business is generated by Head-fi or where these quoted numbers came from, reality is we have no idea. As the company grows, it is clear that more and more of our business comes from mainstream consumers not just enthusiasts. Still Head-Fi, and communities like that, will continue to be important for the HiFiMAN brand. Jeff was clearly aware of that.

Despite our successful reputation, HiFiMAN remains a relatively small company and we all wear a lot of hats, meaning each of us is very busy. Add to that we have people located around the world and I trust each individual to do the job they were hired to do with minimal oversight.

Jeff is a bright, talented guy who did some good work for HiFiMAN. However it became apparent that his focus was not on Head-Fi and in fact, he seemed to be working at cross-purposes with that community. I have nothing against Changstar or now SBAF but there is obvious dislike between the communities and Jeff was caught in the middle of that. Shouldn't have happened but unfortunately it did.

So at the close of So Cal Can Jam, I told Jeff that our relationship was not working out the way it was intended and we would not be using his services any longer. It was not an angry conversation, he said he understood and promised to keep things between us positive. To make sure the story have a happy ending, I told him I will give him a hifiman product he like most as gift. He said he want a HE6, and I said OK. That is how we left it and how it should have remained as a private matter.

You can imagine my shock when I learned that within hours Jeff had posted here in SBAF that the reasons for his dismissal were:

1. A stolen Edition X from a meet in January which no one at HiFiMAN knew anything about. Reality: though it has been widely discussed here and people are outraged that the stolen headphone was a reason of his departure, still to this day, Jeff has not informed us it was stolen. We received payment for that headphone from Marv on Monday March 21, a day after Jeff was dismissed. We appreciate the payment but still there was no mention of why. Things get stolen all the time. Right before So Cal Can Jam, I had four high-end players stolen from my luggage.

2. Jeff had teased Jude about missing tubes from the Shangri-La sample he shipped to So Cal Can Jam. Reality: Jude and others there say that never happened.
Jude forced me to fire Jeff by threatening to withdraw HiFiMAN's sponsorship from Head-Fi. Reality: completely false. Jude had said from the beginning he wanted nothing to do with Jeff because he did not trust him but Jude has worked fine with me and my marketing team.

3. Bottom line is I parted ways with Jeff because he did not do the job he was hired to do. And now I see he has continued to work against HiFiMAN's interests so my decision has been validated. When all of these comments came out, I tried to contact Jeff and left him a wechat message and ask him not to do so. He did not so with all of these posts getting completely out of control, I decided I had to reach out to Marv.

I thank Marv for the opportunity and thank you for your consideration. If anyone has any questions or concerns, feel free to email me at [email protected]

Best Regards,
Fang

 

http://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/judegate-formerly-stolen-items-alert.1657/

@purrin Hold up. Wait a minute. WTF, Fang specifically said:

1. He didn't know about the unit (despite Jeff mentioning that he had communicated with Fang a while back and had a sense of the price of $1080).

2. He didn't expect payment. Why is that still a part of our costs?

 

No idea. I just wrote the $1080 off as a loss in our March 2016 monthly income / expense report. I haven't checked my paypal or reconciled the numbers yet. I assumed it went through.