Just a reminder, we will be spending the first couple months of the year clearing out the shop of all backlog, including all mic mods, repairs, and new custom builds. This will take a couple months and may even spill over into March. If you are curious where you are at in the queue, just be aware that I'm working around the clock over the next few months to clear everything out, and that if I have to stop to find a particular order and its place in the queue, it can slow down that order and many others... so please just be patient.
I certainly don't like the prospect of losing revenue; but it just made no sense for me to continue accepting orders that won't be looked at until, at the very earliest, sometime in March. I will continue to accept orders for the U47 and U48 hand-built mics; but be aware also on these that they will not be built until, at the very earliest, March. ReAmps are already mostly built and in stock, and so those will continue to sell until the current inventory is ran out.
There were a large number of hand-built 47/48 orders placed toward the end of the year (thank you!), so be aware that I'm working on them and trying to get a couple out per week, along with all the other things; but these too will spill over into March before I am fully caught up on them all.
There will be some cool news to share soon; but it will have to wait a bit longer before we get into it. Suffice it to say, Signal Art was originally a hand-made mic manufacturer... Even before the name was settled on, we started out around 2015 making handmade replicas of the U47, U48, U67, U87, Fet47, M269, C12, M49, and others; often affixed with an aftermarket Neumann or Telefunken badge (or no badge) in lieu of having our own brand identity. Obviously, by the time we became a legitimate company, this behavior was straightened out. :) The modification and upgrade service became, accidentally, sort of a major part of our business and wound up being what kept the lights on many months out of the year. And as much as I love turning some of these mass produced mics into true studio showpieces, our passion really is for handcrafting original microphones so that there are either no or as few compromises as humanly possible. To be honest also, as some of these mics (particularly Sterling) get older and more difficult to work on (some of those are a quarter century old, and compounded by being cheaply made), the warranty and liability questions around that begin to really linger over the them, coupled with them taking more and more time to fix. To be honest, this is one reason why I have been hesitant to really add more mods to the menu, and in fact have taken several away. The BLUE Bottle is one really good example, as some may have noticed that mod disappeared almost as fast as it arrived. The reason is that, even though I was very proud of the upgrade, I almost immediately began getting messages... not from people who cared about the mod, but from people with dead and defective BOTTLEs who had already had issues with and locked horns with BLUE's service department, and were just looking for someone to fix their mic or sell them a replacement power supply (and who 'needed it yesterday', as if that wasn't bad enough). We are decidedly not a repair shop, and don't want to become the aftermarket repair shop for any of the companies that we do mods on. That's why I removed every mention of BLUE and the BOTTLE from my website.
So in the future, we are going to start phasing out many of the mods, and that's one thing I can share now. Probably Sterling by the end of the year due to their age and the liability of working on them. Warm, we will probably keep going for a few more years, as they are much newer constructions and, as the developer on those products, I can work on them with extreme confidence. We will start focusing more on being an original mic manufacturer and even (dare to dream!) try to reach a point where we have product on the shelf at some point. I will know and share more about this in the coming months...
...oh, and hopefully have a better website this year finally! LOL
Chad
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