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I'm so very happy to be able to make a progress report on our developement/resurection of the Wheatfield HA2. HeadRoom bought the design of this amp maybe five years ago from Pete Millett when he decided to get out of the amp manufacturing business. I loved this amp and I just couldn't resist. Well, my ears were bigger than our wallet and we haven't been able to justify the inventory increase needed to bring it in as a product in light of the other things we've been doing over the last few years. Aaarrgghh!
But things have been settling into place; we've got the new line up to speed after the logo change; we've got the balanced Desktop up and running; the new Micros and the Desktop Portable revisions are well into the loop and due out shortly; we see no problems in getting out the speaker stands and class-D amp out by the new year; and we've got a couple of big projects that we're working on that will bear fruit a couple of years down the road. So we've had a bit of time to go to the drawing board to figure out what kind of product we could drop in fairly easily in the 1-2 year time frame. What to do?
Hello HA2! After a bit of talk it seemed like the time had come to get a sweet tube amp out to the masses, and we knew the HA2 is a winner. The problem is that using the product as previously designed it wouldn't fit into a Desktop enclosure---too many power supply transformers. And putting it into a Max enclosure seemed overkill. Well ... how about putting the power supply into one Desktop enclosure and the audio section in the other. Ooops, no dice. The power supply is still too big to comfortable fit. What to do?
(Funny how you always seem to be in "What to do?" mode as a manufacturer.)
We gave Pete a call. Now pete's been playing around a lot lately with switching power supplies. And if you ever get the chance you should have a look at the sweet job he did on the Millett Portable's switching supply. He thought about it for a little while and came to the conclusion that a bitchen switching power supply could be built for the HA2 that would easily fit in the Destop enclosure. Not long thereafter, he had a schematic...and an evil grin. He told us the design would be sweet with the HA2, but could also be used in the future as a supply for some sexy tube monoblock power amps for our speaker stands. Oh goodness, when it rains it pours! "OK, OK," sez I, "Let's just work on the HA2 and we'll think about Desktop Tube Monoblocks some other time." (You'll notice that just mentioning it here means I'm still thinking about them.)
So, Joe and Pete have been furiously corresponding, and Pete is done with the first pass on the circuit board layout. We're expecting a prototype to be constructed in the not-near-enough-future to satisfy my bleeding audio geek heart, but it'll be soon enough. Obviously, I'll let you know how it sounds once it shows up. And before you guys start lining up double wide with offers as Beta testers, n_maher, as a current owner of an HA2, has kindly volunteered to do the thankless job of some Beta testing for us. (Not thankless because we won't thank him, but because I know you guys will galddly dole out some grumbling for getting an inside track on this little sweety.) So you're likely to hear a few coments from him in this thread some months hence.
Feel free to ask more questions and we'll try to get some more answers as we can. But we don't even have a preliminary guess on price at the moment.
But things have been settling into place; we've got the new line up to speed after the logo change; we've got the balanced Desktop up and running; the new Micros and the Desktop Portable revisions are well into the loop and due out shortly; we see no problems in getting out the speaker stands and class-D amp out by the new year; and we've got a couple of big projects that we're working on that will bear fruit a couple of years down the road. So we've had a bit of time to go to the drawing board to figure out what kind of product we could drop in fairly easily in the 1-2 year time frame. What to do?
Hello HA2! After a bit of talk it seemed like the time had come to get a sweet tube amp out to the masses, and we knew the HA2 is a winner. The problem is that using the product as previously designed it wouldn't fit into a Desktop enclosure---too many power supply transformers. And putting it into a Max enclosure seemed overkill. Well ... how about putting the power supply into one Desktop enclosure and the audio section in the other. Ooops, no dice. The power supply is still too big to comfortable fit. What to do?
(Funny how you always seem to be in "What to do?" mode as a manufacturer.)
We gave Pete a call. Now pete's been playing around a lot lately with switching power supplies. And if you ever get the chance you should have a look at the sweet job he did on the Millett Portable's switching supply. He thought about it for a little while and came to the conclusion that a bitchen switching power supply could be built for the HA2 that would easily fit in the Destop enclosure. Not long thereafter, he had a schematic...and an evil grin. He told us the design would be sweet with the HA2, but could also be used in the future as a supply for some sexy tube monoblock power amps for our speaker stands. Oh goodness, when it rains it pours! "OK, OK," sez I, "Let's just work on the HA2 and we'll think about Desktop Tube Monoblocks some other time." (You'll notice that just mentioning it here means I'm still thinking about them.)
So, Joe and Pete have been furiously corresponding, and Pete is done with the first pass on the circuit board layout. We're expecting a prototype to be constructed in the not-near-enough-future to satisfy my bleeding audio geek heart, but it'll be soon enough. Obviously, I'll let you know how it sounds once it shows up. And before you guys start lining up double wide with offers as Beta testers, n_maher, as a current owner of an HA2, has kindly volunteered to do the thankless job of some Beta testing for us. (Not thankless because we won't thank him, but because I know you guys will galddly dole out some grumbling for getting an inside track on this little sweety.) So you're likely to hear a few coments from him in this thread some months hence.
Feel free to ask more questions and we'll try to get some more answers as we can. But we don't even have a preliminary guess on price at the moment.
