Thanks Heath. I'd love to check out your new room. I'm glad to see your keeping your finger in the pie. I thought you were giving it all up.
The bottom end of these mics is truly astounding. I have never heard such clarity. I setup a blumlein this morning and ran it through my pair of BA1073's. These have never been frequency matched so not sure how accurate the image was. Regardless, the sound is so clear. I don't want to over sell too much just in case I look like a dick at the shootout. But I really am enjoying these mics.
Oliver has now finished the first 100. I'll copy his comments from the PSW thread in case anyone is interested.
Here are some official counts, from 103 (counting the prototypes) capsules there was only one with a defect (DC bleeding), and the rest of them are within 5% of the tolerance of the master CS-1. A big thank you to David to help you us out with those incredible capsules.
For the 103 CS-1s there were only 15 microphonic and 5 noise reject (before shipping) tubes and about 10 failures after shipping.
There were three drifting IC for the protection circuit. Three mic that came back for rework (most likely due to shipping damage), one mic was completely replaced (after UPS shipping treatment) one PSU came back for rework (faulty zehner/one out of 400 used).
Still have to get the swivels yoke replaced. (Will start right after AES.
With a bunch of delay, my daughter born and a hell of an ear infection as well as a bunch of production issues, we finally did it.
The CS-x project took over the majority of the production here in Gaylord and right now we have 25 sub suppliers for components (took a while to work out the bugs), original I thought that Terry and I would need at least three years to sell them all, my idea was to build everything but the mic body in house and how wrong I was with my estimations.
To loosely quote the Neumann guys, building one mic is not a problem, building a mic as a series is! How right those guys are.
With shutting the Gaylord production down right around serial# 30 to get everything I build by hand catalogued, drawn up and turned over to a sub supplier, was the 2nd scariest part and at times I thought we never get them all done. But a super thank you to Joe for getting it all figured out.
Since we started on a crazy idea to make a few mics, we set AMI up to make mics now, 200 CS-1 to go an about 300 CS-4. Terry has already some prototypes for the missing digits (2 and 3) but we will keep them on ice at Compass Point up to the point we have the current mics delivered.
I posted several times during this nearly two years time that I or better my company desperately looking for a Tech to help out with production and repair, from the bunch of people that contacted me or Joe only a handful liked the idea of Gaylord in Kansas after they figured out the location, nearly three hours from a real airport and the closest beacon of civilisation (I learned that this is considered a Walmart these days) is 120 miles away in any direction. So to make a long story short, one guy did showed up here in Gaylord and he thought that it was to rural. So I am still looking!!!
My thank you to all that ordered the mics and for the ones that they had to let them go out of health or finical reasons my best wishes that your situations will get better fast.
A bunch of babies were born and daughter Johanna that was born around the time when we shipped the first mics can walk and talk by now.
Thank you Terry for being crazy enough and thanks to Jeff for all the work.
Best regards to all and thank you!