Err actually the good ol SM was always intended to be a moderately priced accessory and not as a pre amp but admittedly many people tend to use it as a pre amp as it is 90% there in basic terms. Hey Soundfield, I am not sure where our publicity claims to be a pre amp- it was not written by me and the literary types can get things wrong sometimes as you would know!! I agree our not moving to an all in one 6 channel volume control on the output is a cop out and we will do it on the future super preamp.
Its one of the reasons Dave the Bitch has spent 60% of his time over the last year or so developing the mini pre amp as I believe it will form the core of the super pre amp less a bunch of fancy features. In addition, it ties into our new case and blends with the mini monster amp and new SM (Gosh darn wowsers they are looking good). I am thinking about what features to go in the next generation SM but its probably one or two years off given our schedule.
Please remember Involve is in fact 2 sister companies orbiting each other with Zenaji the solar battery company. Currently Involve is carrying $350K of bad debt and has a zero marketing budget with only Me (30%), Dave(100%), Chris(50%), Wayne(90%), John (30%), Dawson(30%) working on Involve stuff. On Zenaji Little Max (100%), Chris(50%), Kali (100%), Ben (100%), John(70%), Ron (100%), Parthe (100%), Perry (100%), Me (70%), Dawson (70%). So our teams are divided and in Involve its only 2 electronic engineers - me and Bitch.
Frankly these days I spend most of my time juggling all sorts of issues and trying to raise funds in a country that only understands sheep, rocks and property. In recent weeks I have personally been paying all wages for both companies as the banks are stuffing us around and high interest rates have crippled domestic sales. Oh, and on the Zenaji side, due to political corruption thats endemic here we are paying lobbyists $10K a month to get sales into government and spending over $100K getting UL approvals into USA. So that's my winge and moan but its the lot of a small R+D/ Manufacture company in a country in the arse end of the world that really has no development culture outside bio med, Bluetooth, cloths lines and lawn mowers.
Personally I really find it frustrating that in both companies we offer non "me too" products that are really superior but get ignored by both the media and politicians (I am not having a go at any one party ). So please understand it really is on the to do list but we also focus on getting product out the door and selling. In many ways I think we are faster than big companies as large teams take more time generally (except NASA going to the moon in 1969)
