Disappearing components

[Kendrix]

EveAnna and Fletcher,
Great to have you here this month.

Since you both design and manufacture audio stuff I thought it would be interesting to hear what you have to say about the fact that consumer market dymanics are causing a "hollowing out" of the electrical component supplier base that feeds the high quality audio industry. Without high volume consumer applications driving demand for the compoinents - they are simply disappearing.

Discrete transistors are perhaps the most obvious example.

I see that manley does its own transformers. Willl you expect to be doing more component level design/manufacture to keep your equiment designs humming? This seems impractical for many solid state components that require a fooundary to produce. Even if its possible to work this way it would seem to involve much higher costs at some point.
Will boutique ish low volume/high quality component suppliers be around able to fill the space?
Do you expect the quality of the mass produced op amps etc to improve to a level that will satisfy your applications anytine soon?

How do you see this all evolving?

[EveAnna Manley]

Willl you expect to be doing more component level design/manufacture to keep your equiment designs humming?

Our stuff doesn't hum!

All I can say is Thank God for Fender, Marshall, et al who keep the remaining vacuum tube factories busy enough to stay open. We piss-ant little boutique companies could not support a vacuum tube factory. I have been to the Yugoslav Ei tube factory and the Svetlana factory. They are huge, complex, and multi-disciplined operations. I ain't crazy enough to try to build vacuum tubes. Or transistors! Yow!

We battle some obsolescence concerns with very large quanity purchases of critical or highly desired parts. Lifetime buys. Other times of course one can find a good currently made sub and make design changes for it, and sometimes even it works out to be a beneficial move.

As for op amps, there are some really nice parts out there that we use here and there, INA103, OP2604's, and LT1028's, LT1010's etc. Hutch has done some nice sounding op amp designs.

[Fletcher]

Small clarification... our shop neither designs, nor manufactures anything... we just pimp it. We are often involved with the 'alpha' and 'beta' testing of some products... but no one at our place has any business in the design nor manufacture end of the industry.

Those things are best left to professionals.

[Kendrix]

Originally posted by Fletcher
Small clarification... our shop neither designs, nor manufactures anything... we just pimp it. We are often involved with the 'alpha' and 'beta' testing of some products... but no one at our place has any business in the design nor manufacture end of the industry.

Those things are best left to professionals.

Fletcher, Thanks for the clarificaion. Ive seen "mercenary edition" on some models and thought I recalled a thread somewhere in which you were credited with designng some stuff.
I guess this is related to your consultative role in the evaluation of the gear while the designs are still evolving.

Eveanna, Lifetime buys of soon to be discontinued components is a scary thing to have to do. Where I work we've had to do some of this a well - as chips and particular disc drives go out of existence. It can be a big bet. Dont want to end up with a warehouse full of useless stuff and also dont want to prematurely kill a successful product line due to lack of components. Time for the forecasting wizards to earn their pay.

Given the stock market outlook perhaps this is a good place to invest. rollz
Hey fella- wanna buy a truckload of NPN transitors?

[EveAnna Manley]

Actually anybody wanna buy a coupla thousand MPS-U56?
They are PNP transistors...

[cram]

Actually anybody wanna buy a coupla thousand MPS-U56?

EveAnna, I'll talk to our service manager and get back to you.