Trinity update & transformers.

It pains me to have to push back the release of Trinity, but its necessary.  I need to spend a lot more time and money on trying to make it a less expensive product.  After building 3 in a row I realize its impossible to release it as a product for the target price of under $2000.  The cost in parts is nearly the asking price and then the labor... the labor - oh my.  It takes me 60 hours to build a Trinity channel strip, and then because its hand wired there is an additional 20-24 hours of trouble shooting to find and eliminate the errors in my work.  80 hours of labor?  I would need to charge well over $5K per channel for it to be even remotely profitable!  That's just insane.  

I decided the only way to make Trinity a viable product for under $2K is to eliminate as much wiring as possible, which means printed circuit boards.  Also, I'll have to say goodbye to my lovely paper in oil capacitors and adopt the much less expensive and more modern WIMA film caps that everyone else uses.  And no more NOS tubes.  Anyway, I designed some new boards, which I'm working on getting some prototypes of made.  Prototyping is expensive, let me tell you... and I'm not just talking about circuit boards!  The enclosure has seen its fair share of revisions and that's no 2 cent part!  Its really putting a major strain on my bank account.  Its simply too stressful and financially difficult to try to release this by the summer.  I think a more reasonable time for the official release is around December.   

Another thing I'm trying to figure out is the interstage transformer situation.  I made several toroidal transformers by hand, which sound very nice and perform perfectly, but they take 4 hours each to make.  That's also insane.  I can't possibly make a product with such labor intensive parts.  So, I bought an inexpensive Jensen transformer to test in the circuit and it performed very poorly (frequency response looked like a camel's back).  This is not a shot at Jensen.  I'm using other transformers from them in Trinity and those transformers perform excellent.  That particular one did not work out.  Next, I tried a Carnhill transformer and it performed with flying colors, but it rattles when I shake it.  That's odd!  I took the transformer apart (enclosed in a metal can) to see what was up with that.  Looks like they used some brittle glue to hold it in place and the glue broke free - presumably during shipping.  I can't have that in a product either!  Reached out to Cinemag, about a custom transformer after that.  They're usually really cool about doing custom things, but from my experience, a long wait is always to be expected.  Meanwhile, I'm working on "the plan" and I'm thinking Cinemag is my backup plan.  "The plan" is to buy a toroidal transformer winding machine (which I found) and start producing my own toroidal audio transformers in bulk.  I'm in talks with a company about manufacturing custom cores for my transformers.  The type of toroidal transformer I'm making is a style known for being as close to electrically perfect as a transformer could possibly be.  My hand-made jobbies fall a bit short of perfect (not at all bad), but I'm sure the winding machine will ace it.  The bottom line is I need a specific transformer for the interstage job and there aren't a lot of options.  The off-the-shelf options are above average in terms of transformer prices... nearly $140 each.  In theory, I can make a better transformer for less money with the machine I have in mind.  My ultimate goal is to decrease the price of my product so I can sell it at a competitive price and still have room to make some sort of profit.  Where it stands now I'm losing money every time I build one.  My Great Uncle Joe put me on to the toroidal transformers and he thinks I could make a business out of that alone.  That was his business back in the old days.  I'll keep it in the back of my mind for now... one step at a time!