bobine said:
Where are the capsules being manufactured?
The components of the Q47-D are manufactured in the United States and Asia and QA'd in the United States. The capsule backplate and membrane are manufactured in Asia and the elastomeric shock mount is made in the USA. The complete system is assembled and packaged at our shop in the USA. We have extensively tested the results and would like to share the manufacturing considerations listed below:
Products made in Asia have a bad reputation due to a variety of issues that can be summarized as follows:
• Bad product design
• Cheap, low quality materials
• Incorrect or poorly executed assembly
• Poor or no product testing / quality assurance
The product flaws mentioned above are by no means specific to products made in Asia but often seem to be present in a large portion of products coming out of Asia. I'd like to briefly talk about each of the points above:
Product Design: Many companies that get product from Asia do not design their own products. These companies choose an "off-the-shelf" product from an Asian manufacturer's catalog and resell it. Often these companies do not have the talent, time, or funds to design their own products. Many of the off-the-shelf products are poorly designed and will never sound or look good even if manufactured to exact specification. Equinox Systems designed the Q47-D as well as the EQU47 microphone body by combining our own knowledge & experience with, where applicable, existing, proven platforms (namely the M7/K47 hole pattern and U47 headbasket). The Q47-D is a custom product where not only the hardware was custom-designed but also the build process in order to meet our performance and QA requirements. We use an iterative process for design which means extensive testing between multiple product revisions. In fact, I have been working on and revising K47 capsule designs over last two years. With four versions before it, the Q47-D is the final design that we ended up approving for production.
Material Quality: Many products made in Asia use the cheapest available materials and sub-components to save on cost, often without the buyer's consent. We have learned (the hard way) that close monitoring and control of the component supply chain is required for quality manufacturing (and really, that goes for anywhere—not just Asia). For the Q47-D Capsule, Equinox specified all materials for construction and tested extensively to make sure the standards we established were adhered to.
Assembly: We believe assembly is the most critical as well as most difficult task in producing a microphone capsule. Assembling purely by hand can be a long and tedious process with notoriously unreliable results. To make good capsules consistently, it is necessary to use assembly jigs and fixtures to deposit uniform amounts of gold, accurately center and tension the membrane, fasten screws, etc. Doing these operations by hand results in a wide variation of the sound of usable parts as well as large numbers of defective capsules. Due to our specifications and serialization + testing requirements, the assembly process for the Q47-D had to be designed from the ground-up.
Testing & Quality Assurance: Capsule assembly is a difficult and error-prone task. Capsules which look perfect visually can have small defects in the mylar or gold deposition, incorrect tensioning, or small particles under the membrane that can drastically affect the sound or even render a capsule useless. Regardless of if capsules are made in the USA, Asia, Australia, Germany, Canada, or elsewhere, some of them are going to be defective due to flaws in materials or assembly. If the only testing process these parts are subjected to is visual inspection, it is very likely that sub-par capsules will end up in user's hands. By performing rigorous testing and multiple frequency sweeps on every capsule we produce (our proprietary process is being prepared for patent application), we ensure that every unit we ship to customers is within spec, and nobody gets a bad unit. This means we recycle or sell as B-stock some of our inventory, but it guarantees a consistent quality and superb sound that we hope will impress you.
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