We have been doing another big push to try to get kits on the shelf ready to ship. We are not quite there, but a LOT of kits have been heading out of here every day. We have just about caught up on the BeePre orders, the Crack backlog is down from something like an average of 80 kits to more like 20, and other kits are catching up at a steady pace. I have adjusted the delivery status page three times today to reflect the latest updates. BeeQuiet will probably begin shipping mid to late next week.
As a part of speeding up our packing and shipping process we are streamlining the operation a bit. All of us here now are employed primarily to work on two things - get kits out and get new designs ready for market. We stopped our fixed price kit assembly a while back, but still had a few folks who were willing to pay our regular hourly shop rate for assembly. We have realized that that still demands more time than we can afford to take away from our primary objective and thus we have now discontinued all kit assembly. Sorry to do this, but we only have so many hours in the day. As I have mentioned before the number of people who wanted assembled products was always minuscule compared to the number of kits that go out of here, something on the order of 1% or less. Which I am kinda proud of, first timers all over the world prove that anyone really can build and enjoy these kits.
On other fronts, we have received a truly gorgeous natural color Orca/BUFsub combo from Blumenstein Audio and we are in the process of getting it set up in the front room. Hope to have it running in the next week or two and everyone is most welcome to come by and give it a listen. Unlike my whacked out big system upstairs this is a real world system that can fit in a home and delivers really natural, enveloping sound. We will have both a S.E.X. amp and Stereomour amp available to audition with the speakers. Since the S.E.X. amp will also drive headphones and since we remodeled a bit and sacrificed our dedicated headphone listening station a while back there will also be headphones and a Crack amp with this setup. For starters I will have a Mac mini running Amarra/Itunes for source, and when I find a turntable and maybe a tape deck I like I will probably add those as well.
Oh, and though I haven't mentioned much lately we are working on getting the new DAC prototype together too. It will still be a couple weeks before we actually start putting it together, but it's getting closer.
Eileen and I will be at AXPONA in Chicago the weekend of March 8-10. I will be on a panel discussion about reel to reel tape on Saturday and Sunday and Tape Project tapes will be rolling on a Bottlehead modded Technics RS1500 and Eros tape head preamp in the Lowther America/First Watt room, 823.
OK, we've had a busy few days and more to come. I'm gonna go home, have a martini, and mess around with my new jazzbox.
