Plans for the future.

It is my goal to slowly phase out the pedals as I inch closer to the release of my Trinity channel strip.  I want to focus all my energy on my pride and joy, especially when its ready for production.  The main reason for phasing out the pedals is because they simply aren't profitable.  The biggest reason for them not being profitable is because there's too much hand wiring involved in their assembly.  Possibly in the future I may redesign them to be more profitable or maybe even just a new pedal that's profitable, but as for these, they are on the chopping block.  The NuVision will be the last to get phased out, since I have enough materials to build quite a few of those and its more profitable than the other 2 pedals.  Probably that one will continue on for a couple years.  The Thunder Knob and Op-2 have about a 1/2-1 year of life left in my inventory.  Both of them are almost no profit.  I will be sad to see those two go for the sake of their tone.  Over the past year they have both developed into rather special devices IMO.  I'm sorry to say, but phasing out the pedals is a necessary step to growing my company.  As a one-man operation, time is absolutely everything and the pedals eat up a lot of time with very little pay.  In order to move forward I have to focus on designs that can generate more profit.  That's not to say designs that aren't as good!  I just need to design things in a way that takes much less time to construct and with components that meet some compromise between quality and cost.  It doesn't make much sense anymore to use the best components possible.  Using the best components and hand wiring makes for a product that either generates next to no profit or is so darn expensive few will buy it.  Sure it might sound better, but if few people are buying it then it was not the right move. 

Trinity.  This is my main focus right now and has been for quite some time.  The channel strip design was roughly completed about a year ago.  I've since been field testing with the aid of other studios, and working on reducing the price and build time.  Trinity number 009 (installed at the Bamboo Room studio) was built a couple months ago and took me 80 hours to build.  That was just an insane amount of time.  I realized then it would only be possible for Trinity to be profitable if I could build it in 12 hours or less.  Since then I have been working diligently on getting custom transformers made and on designing more complex circuit boards for the Trinity in order to get the build time down.  Last month I built #010 for Black Rock Studio in Buffalo, NY.  That took 26 hours to build and was the last to feature one of my hand wound toroidal transformers and 11-position stepped output attenuator.  Trinity #011 was built about a week ago and is the first to have one of the new custom transformers mounted on the PCB and a new low cost fully variable output attenuator.  The new attenuator works just as good, but costs $5 instead of $140 and takes a minute to assemble instead of 2 hours!  It took just 18 hours to build #011!  A ton of hand wiring was eliminated from the design by having it all on printed circuit boards.  There are still 4 more audio transformers that need to be designed for PCB mounting and my PCB design is still evolving, but it seems fully possible that I can get the build time under 12 hours.  Getting much closer to the final product and I'm very excited.  If the build time is under 12 hours, I can set the sale price of a Trinity channel strip at $1600 USD.  Much better than the $3000 it would have cost for the labor intensive original version.  $1600 is a highly competitive price for what you're getting.  I'm darn sure that price tag will spark some interest.  This product excites me, so this is the right thing to be working on.  More to come!