What is wrong with SOZO?

[Reeltarded]

STOP! THAT IS ENOUGH!

Next you'll all be wanting to grow your own food, and then we are all living in cabins and wearing coon skins. Stop this foolishness. Effin Daniel Boone of amps.

Prohibition? Bath tub capacitors? No, not me.

Gentlemen, you can all go to Hell. I am going to Mouser.

[dorrisant]

STOP! THAT IS ENOUGH!

Next you'll all be wanting to grow your own food, and then we are all living in cabins and wearing coon skins. Stop this foolishness. Effin Daniel Boone of amps.

Prohibition? Bath tub capacitors? No, not me.

Gentlemen, you can all go to Hell. I am going to Mouser.

You are nuts! ....But I love it! Please keep it coming.

Seriously though... Someone thought the same thing once.... and it turned into Sozo or Jupiter. Right? How hard could it be to tool up to build these caps? Once you have the r&d out of the way... Tool up... And give it a go.
There seems to plenty of people that can't seem to get them easy enough?
Its just a thought... I'd really like to try to make some. Does that sound crazy to you guys?

[Reeltarded]

Waste your time. I have a personal space program to tend, see ya.

[diagrammatiks]

STOP! THAT IS ENOUGH!

Next you'll all be wanting to grow your own food, and then we are all living in cabins and wearing coon skins. Stop this foolishness. Effin Daniel Boone of amps.

Prohibition? Bath tub capacitors? No, not me.

Gentlemen, you can all go to Hell. I am going to Mouser.

You are nuts! ....But I love it! Please keep it coming.

Seriously though... Someone thought the same thing once.... and it turned into Sozo or Jupiter. Right? How hard could it be to tool up to build these caps? Once you have the r&d out of the way... Tool up... And give it a go.
There seems to plenty of people that can't seem to get them easy enough?
Its just a thought... I'd really like to try to make some. Does that sound crazy to you guys?

The mistake is to think that Sozo and Jupiter are winding caps exactly the same way that a person making a DIY cap would do it if they were just going to make one cap.

No way in hell.

[dorrisant]

I'm not talking about just a couple and I'm definitely not planning to waste time.

Out of all of the resourceful members here, I'm sure someone (doesn't have to be me) has the gumption to produce some caps that we could all appreciate... Well maybe not all.

If enough info gets compiled someone may take the torch and run. Any of us could probably compile enough info to take a crack at it. Failure... Maybe, maybe not. Others here could point out the flaws and help streamline the design... that kind of thing... It might even reveal some of the magic in these caps.

[diagrammatiks]

Ya for sure.

I'm just pointing out that if you want to make a line of capacitors, or really anything that are consistently packaged and uniformly constructed you would need to be machine assisted in the construction process.

[SoundPerf]

you would need to be machine assisted in the construction process.

And this is such an outrageous concept?

One thing I've been realizing lately is that there is a lot of smaller scalable technologies out there to put to use. And necessity is always the mother of invention...or atleast inovation.

I imagine there's lots of guys like me, getting close to 50 yrs. of age with many levels of experience in R&D and manufacturing who are presently in limbo due to the crashed economy.

[LeftyStrat]

I think a better approach might be to contact RTI. They make most of the audiophile caps on the market. Send them a mustard or anything you're interested in, and see if they could repro it.

<scary-mojo-non-scientific-mode>
I've often wondered if the encasing material had anything to do with the sound. Caps have resonance, and the outer material might have an affect on damping. I was disappointed that the Sozo's looked like a Mallory 150.
</scary-mojo-non-scientific-mode>

Anyway, I have always found this diagram helpful when thinking about caps.

[LeftyStrat]

you would need to be machine assisted in the construction process.

And this is such an outrageous concept?

One thing I've been realizing lately is that there is a lot of smaller scalable technologies out there to put to use. And necessity is always the mother of invention...or atleast inovation.

I imagine there's lots of guys like me, getting close to 50 yrs. of age with many levels of experience in R&D and manufacturing who are presently in limbo due to the crashed economy.

I hear you. When I started my career, we used incredibly expensive CNC machines. Today you can build a personal one for your own use.

I think there is a trend afoot for finding markets the big boys won't touch because it won't make them a billion, but the small businessman can cater to and make good money. Don't know how many of you frequent sparkfun.com, but what started as a hobby now has revenue in excess of a million a year.

There was recently an article in the NY Times about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magaz ... iness.html

Large corporations aren't interested in smaller markets, but there is still markets out there waiting to be tapped by some creative person who might settle for a million or two a year.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

[SoundPerf]

LeftyStrat...Yes exactly, I was trying to express this very thing.

The MBA's out there want to see huge $$ numbers on paper before they touch something. OR it seems that way. Hopefully what good comes out of a crashed economy and society in many ways will be a more reasonable and honest approach to business again.

Well, that's my hope anyway. Who knows....

P.S. oh, and Sparkfun is very cool.

[LeftyStrat]

LeftyStrat...Yes exactly, I was trying to express this very thing.

The MBA's out there want to see huge $$ numbers on paper before they touch something. OR it seems that way. Hopefully what good comes out of a crashed economy and society in many ways will be a more reasonable and honest approach to business again.

Well, that's my hope anyway. Who knows....

P.S. oh, and Sparkfun is very cool.

Seems to me that a lot of things in the boutique market could be automated. A scatter wound pickup could be produced with a couple of stepper motors and some clever programming. It might even be possible to capture the exact wind of a great sounding pickup by sacrificing it to an easily built machine that could record the scatter as it was being unwound.

Here's a home made pick and place machine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3bxiy7J ... re=related

[diagrammatiks]

No of course you it's cool to use machines to do a lot of that stuff.

I'm sure sozo does.

[katopan]

Two ways to look at it: Try out rolling your own as a bit of an experiment. Work it all out with the vision of machine assisted longer term. Stepper motors, rollers, support chassis, etc are easily recovered from old printers. Making up machines at home is no where near as costly as it used to be. If you make some successfully then it's a matter of R&D time to get it to be easy and consistent. A bit of passion to keep the process moving and you could easily be making them to sell. Many people wouldn't/couldn't be bothered. It would have to be very automated to be worth your time. You'd set up to roll multiple in parallel. But the existing companies have already shown there's a market. Also the materials are dirt cheap and very easy to get. It'd be a lot of work to get going but after that margins on this sort of item are much better than on building amps. And there's the old saying about that you're much better off selling thousands of $1 items (like caps) than selling a few $1,000 items (like amps);
Second way is as already mentioned. Find someone who already does this stuff and get them to make a line of what you want and put your name on it. That is less appealing to someone who likes making things, but is a lower risk, smarter business choice.

[RevD]

Perhaps put to work those guys in they're early 50's I'm sure some of them used to roll things with they're hands... A few yards of foil, a few rolling machines and some oil, tubing, wax the ends.. Voila...


Regards,

Don

[NickC]

Made caps out of aluminum foil and wax-paper in electronics school back around 1969. They were very primitive and not something I would actually use.

I recall a salesman came into class one day touting how the little LED he held up would "revolutionize' the electronics industry.

Gosh, that seems like a long time ago.