Is the 9100 perfect NO, but its not $500 its $179 and I think at that price point its a pretty good product.
Agreed. Sorry if you felt like I was being overly critical.
I have always worked hard to do updates to the circuit but this is one thing I just cant fix with out spending a lot of money and changing the size of the box. Two things that most of my customers dont want.
+T for the honesty. Is this a problem across all of your pre-amps? Something to be addressed in the transformer-based pre?
I totaly dont feel like your being over critical at all. You had questions and I have answers. Everything I sell has been looked at by me 1000 different ways.. Objectively there is not much I can do to fix this would out increasing the price and size of the product. But I cant expect everyone to understand unless you design and build things and sell 1000's of preamps all built by hand one at a time.
Its hard for me to do this business because I cant buy 1000 potentiometers at a time.. I cant wait 2 months for a company to make them for me. So I am limited by what is available and I rely heavily on my suppliers to stock parts so that when the demand is there for my product, I can pick up the phone and with in 5 days have enough parts to build what ever is needed.
I am just at the level where I really should have someone else working for me. But where I live there is no people that I could hire that would have the skills.. So I stay low profile I dont advertise as much as I could. Right now I build about 30-40 preamps a month.. That's a lot for one person I also sell about 25 pairs of mics a month. All built by me. I cant really build to much more then that by hand.
So I have to stay the size I am until its time to do my next major move.. Mass production of certain things. Luckily I have great customers like you * not trying to kiss your ass * people that are willing to wait for my product and I am very grateful for your business and your comments. They push me to do better. I remember when people wanted a clip light on my preamp.. I resisted and said I really could not do that. Well its done.. Its there a clip light does not sound like a big deal, but to me it was because all of the parts of that circuit had to fit inside my existing preamp enclosure and my existing circuit board and they had to have ZERO effect on the performance of my preamp. I will work on this problem.. I will try to find a solution because of people like you my products are better.
This problem is only with the st-9100 preamp and not with the ugly or the 9000 preamp.
The transformer based preamp will not have any issues because its a no compromise product.
Chris