You win... the upgrades are back! Signal Art returns to Joshua Tree...

I'm proud to announce something I've been working on behind the scenes for a little while... and announce that the long-beloved and recently discontinued tube mic upgrades, will now have a permanent home and live on under the domain of our sister company, www.tubemicmods.com. Antonio, who was the principle tech during my time at WA, and is the single only person I would trust to continue on this work (and who also was doing much of it at SAE for the last 3 years that we were doing the work), has been coaxed out of retirement to carry on this work now full time.

I want to also clarify that any of the final WA tube mics that have already been set up under Signal Art and are here to be worked on by me, are STILL going to be worked on by me, including ones that haven't shipped to me yet. Nothing about that has changed. In fact, I'll be photographing some of these final units to demonstrate our latest methods and upgrade details. This is only for units going forward. I wanted to keep the SAE website very 'clean' and to focus exclusively on my handcrafted builds, so we decided to create a whole new company, or sister company if you will, and to let Antonio and team take over in Joshua Tree. All new mic mod orders placed will happen over at the TubeMicMods page, while I focus here on the handcrafted builds. I also want to say that over time I hope we can bring back the other mods we were doing (Sterling, Shure, Alctron, and more); but we just have to start slowly. While we have a shared history in the development of the WA mics and having both spent time there, the site was never meant to be exclusive to those models... Over time, I hope we can bring more back.

Considering the rise of shipping costs and duties and other reasons, we decided it makes sense to start off purely local and only offer these services currently for the USA. International shipping costs plus duties both ways on these mics just no longer seems to make any financial sense because it now almost exceeds the cost of the mod and just seems impractical at this time; and so we are going at least for now keep this local. We apologize to any of our past international customers.

You can check out the blog post I just made below, with both the link and text below.

https://www.tubemicmods.com/post/signal-art-returns-to-joshua-tree

I'm delighted to start this new site off with the first blog entry, and proud to announce the launch of TubeMicMods.com, an extension of the Signal Art brand and family... TubeMicMods was created to take over the beloved and longstanding comprehensive/holistic upgrade services for (mostly but not exclusively) Warm Audio tube microphones by yours truly at Signal Art Electronics. We hope that other mic brand mods will also follow and that there may even be some original products under that brand in the future.

As many know, we (as in me) over at the Signal Art page and side of things had to discontinue the tube mic upgrades just because we completely ran out of time/space/real estate/bandwidth to deal with it. I work full time as the chief nerd and administrator for United Studio Tech, which is enough to keep any normal human fully occupied... I still mananged to find some free time for SAE but wanted to focus that exclusively on the handcrafted builds. Even finding the time and space for that has been a severe challenge, and so the upgrades had to go. I, at times, vented my frustration about the situation and just the fact that our customers would simply not let this service die, and sometimes really would not take no for an answer... I would often buckle and offer folks a one-time-service for the mod, with this sometimes taking 3/4 of a year to get around to doing... It was frustrating, to say the least. Part of that frustration was my possessiveness of the project... I am so particular about this work and how it must be carried out, that I could (and would) have never just turned it over to any old tech just to keep it going... I would have rather let it die, and tried to do just that for the past year+.

Thankfully, as fate would decide, Antonio, who was at WA during the development of most of these mics and whom was already doing a lot of this work for us before other duties called, has agreed to come out of retirement, as it were, and continue on this important work. I will remain on staff as a 'senior consultant' and advisor to ensure that this process goes smoothly in all possible regards; but otherwise from this point forward will be 'hands off' of the process. All WA tube mic mods will now ship to Joshua Tree and be fully in Antonio's capable hands. There is no one else I would trust to continue this work... literally no one. So, I'm excited to help launch this new chapter and equally excited to see where he can take it.

I have helped to do the initial setup for this site, taking photos of many of the 'final' Signal Art mods that are still currently being processed here. Antonio will be doing an exact 'mirroring' of our current work and methods. I have started off the site with listings for the WA-47, WA-67, and WA-8000, with the CX12, CX24, and 251 coming up shortly as I get time to photograph and re-document their current processes. All of the mods have been updated from the original SAE documentation; sometimes things that were a bit extraneous have been streamlined where it made sense, and in other cases still we have even further imrpoved the process (such as now doing complete film cap bypassing on all electrolytic caps everywhere, including power supply).

On the plus side also, now I have a convenient write-off excuse to visit Joshua Tree again and enjoy some great desert hiking and good meals.

Best regards,

Chad