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Lets see how many likes we can get on this layout. We want to offer some more "in style" colors, we are thinking dark purple, sapphire blue and black. Here is the purple design. Also, if you are at SBN, hunt us down, you will get a free shirt while supplies last "Like" (right hand side of post) this post if you like the design!

Thanks to all that have chimed in on this one. I agree that our lead times have been excessive and are truly sorry for the delays. Just when we dig out of one delay we get right back into another. The current issues are multiple and are being worked through as rapidly as possible. Customers are currently being contacted about delays via phone (or email if messages are left). Now to address the overall issues: Adding employees... 2 new ones over the past month. Neither of which are office staff and are not currently building drivers. It is impossible to find skilled staff that can simply sit down and a build table and go. New staff is handling other aspects of production besides building drivers. They are already alleviating some back up. Need more machines... we just purchased another hydrolathe and will be receiving it later next week. While not an instant cure, it will go onto the shop floor and help our other massively overburdened hydrolathe once it is set up and dialed in. (These are the task specific lathes that run the profiles of all back plates and top plates) Our current one runs non-stop and is backed up. Need more customer service... Again, not the easiest of tasks. We have people tell us simply to hire teens to handle email and phones. Having this approach in the past set us up for significant issues. Only some of the emails are straight forward and can be handled by a tracking number or simple confirmation. Most emails entail something tech related as well and then need to be sent to someone that can handle them. The overall customer service need is for skilled audio industry individuals and not just a warm body. We are working on this one as well. Implementing a new email system will help keep track of emails/tasks that will let everyone quickly know if it can be answered by anyone or if it needs staff with a specific skill set. Seasonal... for us this is normally a busy time, but internationally as well as domestically we have be hit by massive orders. It seems that distributors have really upped the orders and we didn't see this coming. As Fi customers, distributors get put into line with everyone else, but when there turn comes... its a big turn. OEM... while most do not know, we do manufacturing for other companies as well. This normally isnt as big of an issue as we schedule most OEM runs ahead of time and can shuffle them around some when needed. But, OEM has exploded for some of our companies as well and when their turn comes, it takes a toll on the scheduling board. We have seen this coming and are working with our customers on long term solutions for their needs. This will greatly ease the increasing demand from our long term OEM customers keeping the Fi customers rolling along smoothly. And there are other issues that add up... I truly appreciate our customers patience for a quality US manufactured sub. It would be a simple solution to get speakers made in China or to have steel made overseas, but it truly goes against what I believe in (in doing as much work in house and supporting the US economy through manufacturing). In spite of this we are doing everything we physically can to up our efficiency and lower our lead times. I am disappointed too... but look at this as an opportunity to dial in our processes and streamline things for the long term. We are working hard in the meantime to get things back to our normal 10-15 business day lead time (and then back to the older 7-10 day time). Again, I do share your frustration, but thank you whole heartedly for putting your faith in us and our products. Thanks, Scott

I havent recieved a warning or pm or anything? All I do is share my videos, I dont troll or anything That is just it, you only come over to spam your D4S logo all over your videos. We do not approve of this type of behavior. You are only here to promote you own site. We don't let anyone else get away with this, and you shouldn't be any exception. If you remove all of your logos etc in your video's we have no problem with you posting them here. I am sure you can understand this, it would be like us coming to your site simply to promote our store or subwoofer line with out paying your vendor fee's etc. Especially since you have now moved up to "competitor" status selling XS Power, I am sure you see where we are coming from. We protect the house we built here.

Well this is odd. My parents called me from back home to tell me my package from SSA came some time last week; only I haven't ordered anything. A 15" DCON was sent to me at my address and I didn't order it. I went to the order status for my account to see if someone had hacked my account and ordered one and... sent it to my house?? But that wasn't the case. Order #5455 and order #5182 were indeed for 15" DCON's, but I've already received them a long time ago. Aaron, what the heck do you want me to do with this?! My old man opened it up and there was nothing on the inside of the top of the box (i was hoping for a receipt to be there). Thanks!

Wow, I go out of town for an alumni event for the weekend, and BLAM! It should be obvious why I don't say what our costs are, but yes, they are drastically more costly to build our sub woofers here in the USA then overseas. It is a mixture of comical and frustrating when competitor's sub woofers that are built overseas. As mentioned earlier, there is few aspects that really effect our build costs that others are not doing. The CNC machining of motors/poles is a huge portion of our build cost per sub woofers. Many brands will just use nuts as spacers between the motor stack and the basket, but our sub woofers are using spiral axis cooling channels on the pole. This does a number of things for superior cooling of the coil, but that is a different topic, what maters here is the time and cost on the CNC machine for each one built. Because of that extra care, time and effort, it cannot be easily done in mass quantities. Also, when not turning a large margin on our products, it means we have less to play with when it comes to expanding our company. It does piss me off when some fool says our products are over priced, they truly haven't a clue and need to be slapped. People have been asking me for a number of years now why we don't have amps or a full line up of mid's and highs etc. This is because the standard now is for someone with no audio background, to just call up a build house overseas, use a credit card and a pre-order, and TADA with in 18-24 months they have a full line up of sub woofers, amplifiers and more. I don't want our brand to be like that. Sure, our growth has been much less rapid as all the new offerings that show up every year, and sure Mark and I are not putting anywhere near what we would like into our pockets due to the higher build cost and much lower volume of sales, but we have near-ZERO warranty failure, a very strong return customer base, and the assurance of one of the highest levels of quality of materials and performance from our sub woofers to every customer that picks SSA for their sub woofer needs. We are trying to take the superior, long term thinking approach to these other brands that show up out of no where, as there is much more time and effort invested into each and every one of our sub woofers. It means we are not killing it in the bank account or hitting the golf course in the middle of the day, or expanding into new major markets overseas etc.. One perfect example, was the beautifully explained break down of the Xcon above. In short, the CNC machining, the addition of a shorting ring (long coil, so inductance was brought down a little) and the much more steel used (instead of a simple triple stack), creates a better sub all around and that is a powerful piece of mind. It is a very good thing to know and to have, even if we are not making much from each unit sold. We run with a very low overhead and keep our expenses to a minimum. Having our sub's machined and built here in the USA (even using steel from California), just does not matter to the masses anymore. The wildfire virus of the American consumer, is the extreme short shortsightedness and only seeing initial price to them, and not the long term. It is more then about keeping more of the money from the purchase price here in the USA, it is also understanding the higher level of quality and performance they are getting. We do gain a number of customers who had a shorter then liked, life span of their prior sub woofer that was made overseas. So in short, to sort of answer the first question, the factors that go into the costs of our products: place of build (USA) {cost of labor etc.}source of materialsquality of materialsquality of partsextra steps taken for better performancethe details in many of the modelslow volume salesmade-to-order production

While I agree there are some things purchasers in preorders have to deal with, such as the ETA being pushed back some due to customs or raw material outages, I think being given an initial ETA and then being told that there is an indefinite time frame for delivery is way outside of acceptable. We only have 1 side of the story right now, so it's tough to say.....but if they are waiting "indefinitely" for the price of Neo to drop back down to where they are happy with the profit margin then that is complete and total bullshit. They ran the preorder knowing the price of raw materials may change, they are liable to honor that preorder with a reasonable time of delivery regardless of whether or not they lose their ass on the deal due to the cost of materials rising. According to the OP it's not that they don't have access to Neo due to a lack of materials....they simply don't want to pay for it because it's too expensive and they'll either not make enough money or lose money. That's not acceptable. Build the subs you agreed and were paid to build. If that means you lose money because you made a bad business decision, then tough shit. Build the fucking subs.

I wanted to say Thanks to Mark and LaFountain Designs for the hard work and awesome website he designed and did for me. We had a nice site for the last 4 years through someone else and wanted a change. Figured it was a good opportunity to work with Mark and since SSA and his other sites are so nice I knew I wanted to go this route. If anyone has a business and wants a new look definitely give LaFountain Designs a shot. Here is my site http://zoom-moving.com/

Actually he said outwardly the motors appeared to be similar. That says nothing about similarities within the motor, and frankly he doesn't even give any external measurements of the motor itself to confirm they are anything more than similar in appearance. Also, if you look at the actual measured T/S parameters you can see they are different drivers. The Xcon has a higher Q, lower Fs, lower Le and higher Mms. Plus the Xcon has slightly more linear excursion and I believe higher thermal power handling as well. It is still an Fi copy with a couple alterations. Quoted "Any differences from the Q are probably in the voice coil itself and the gap geometry and possibly the pole piece machining." Coil is different, suspension is different, magnet ID is different, dust cap is different, gap is different, pole piece is different, back plate is different, cooling is different. You can step off of your soap box now. -the guy thats built hundreds of them.

Close to half the vibration damping/noise mitigation threads on other forums are debates about using asphalt based materials as a vibration damper. I’ve spent way too much time during the last 5 years typing and re-typing responses to these questions. Let’s keep it in one place to reduce litter and redundancy. This topic was my introduction to aftermarket “sound deadening”. I had a noisy car, wanted to quiet it down and started to do research. This was 2005. Several respected “authorities” were vocal advocates for asphalt. Part of this came from the belief that products like Dynamat Xtreme were part of a conspiracy to fleece consumers. Part of it was the often repeated “fact” that roofing materials and vibration dampers sold specifically for aftermarket automotive use were exactly the same thing. One cost pennies per ft² and the other dollars so it was worth investigating. Some of you may remember that Sound Deadener Showdown used to be a testing and review site. Since I wasn’t able to find any conclusive answers on the forums, I decided to buy small quantities of every product I could. Two things were immediately apparent: Nobody had ever had their hands on all of these products at the same time or they would have seen the obvious differences. The people claiming that Dynamat Xtreme and roofing materials were exactly the same thing didn’t know what they were talking about. I discovered a few other things very quickly. Many sellers were making outrageous claims. Some were wildly overstating obvious physical characteristics like thickness and mass/area. Others were either claiming outright that their asphalt products were butyl or were using intentionally deceptive descriptions like “rubberized compound” to describe their adhesive layer. Nobody seemed to be drawing the right conclusion from sellers’ attempts to hide the fact that they were selling asphalt. For several years the argument was about durability. Asphalt had an unhappy tendency to melt or fall off. At the time, there were no reports of butyl adhesive failure – that had to wait a few years until one seller decided to re-purpose some low quality butyl roofing material. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this was happening. All of these materials are asphalt with some sort of rubber added to increase heat tolerance. The generally accepted melting point for these compounds is 180°F. That seemed high enough for use in a vehicle, so what was going on? Our perception of the heat these products are subjected to was wrong. We thought in terms of air temperature inside the vehicle, maybe 140°F-150°F? It turns out things are very different at the sheet metal. Park a car in the sun during the summer, south of the Mason-Dixon line and you can easily get to 180°F+. That explains immediate failures in hot climates. An insidious part of this problem is that many failures were reported during the second or third summer, many in fairly mild regions. The explanation was pretty simple. The rubber added to asphalt deteriorates over time when exposed to temperatures much lower than those required to melt the fresh material. As the rubber deteriorates, the melting temperature drops. Suddenly it doesn’t take much heat anymore. The durability question has been answered to my satisfaction. Many high profile asphalt devotees, including some who went to almost insane extremes to install the material “properly” have had their installations fail over the years. A few of the brave ones have come forward and made their results public. The pennies vs. dollars argument still nags. What if you plan to junk your vehicle after a few years (worse, plan to trade it in and don’t care what problem you are passing on)? Is asphalt a reasonable choice when durability isn’t a factor? Nope. There are two main reasons people believe they can substitute asphalt roofing materials for CLDs: They look alike – shiny on one side, black and gooey on the other. They don’t understand how a constrained layer vibration damper works. See: Caddy Shack, swimming pool scene for all you need to know about point 1. Point 2 needs more consideration. I used to believe that vibration dampers work by adding mass to a panel and lowering its resonant frequency below the audible range. This is completely wrong. They work through a fairly complex sequence of events that occur in the adhesive layer and between the adhesive layer and the constraining layer and substrate. I won’t go into the details here, please see: Vibration Damping By Ahid D. Nashif, David I. G. Jones, John Phillips Henderson The important point is that everything depends on the material property viscoelasticity. Basically this describes something that can be deformed and will then return to its original shape more slowly than it was deformed. The strains created during these events account for the conversion of vibration to heat that we’ve all heard about. Butyl adhesives formulated for vibration damping are viscoelastic. Asphalt isn’t – it doesn’t need to be to seal a roof. Asphalt adds mass to a panel. It may stiffen the panel, but since stiffening raises resonant frequency, the two mechanisms are offsetting and reduce effectiveness even further. Those who claim to have used it and had good results aren’t giving you the full picture. These claims can be better stated as: I used asphalt. It was better than nothing. I haven’t used a proper purpose designed vibration damper so I have no basis for comparison. It hasn’t failed yet. Sometimes the endorsement is explicitly stated: I used asphalt and it hasn’t fallen off. Not falling off is a pathetically low standard of performance. Testing I’ve done has convinced me that it takes between 6 and 10 times as much asphalt to achieve something approaching the same result you will get with a real vibration damper. This puts the pennies/dollars question on its head. Add the durability concerns and the huge amount of extra work required and the answer is pretty obvious. I’m sure some will want to argue the points I’ve made here. If that’s you, please stay away from “I used it and it worked for me”. That’s how we got into trouble in the first place and doesn’t make any more sense than concluding that cigarettes are good for you because your grandfather smoked a pack a day and lived to be 90. If you want to go there, please show us some evidence.

Sometimes people just post what's on their minds. Maybe he wants to see if people agree with his decision? I donno. It's not annoying to me. Kyle, take your negative ass post somewhere else. Not every post has to have pics or technical info.

They are getting old and can't run the business forever. So they were seeking someone honest and trustworthy to give the business to. Congratulations, you passed the test. You won Jake, you won! Now get in the Wonkavator and press the red button.

Well Travis is getting a new amp.....that way no mistake can be made, no middle problems if something were to happen in a re-boarding process. It will be an A stock brand new amp, that has been on our bench for a few weeks running every speaker setup under the rainbow, currently a single tower running bridged at 2 ohms both channels. Using all HPF combos, and bandpass too,,,,,we replaced the amp with travis' 1100.4 JUST the same way. After about 3 hours of play time, its gotten fairly warm, as it definitely should be running at 1 ohm a channel, and its working as it should. So we've tried to find the problem, multiple times, the only thing we've seen could be a possible cause was a good sized dent on the heatsink as if it was dropped before. Other then that, hopefully the new 1100.4 recieved works as should, otherwise must be an install problem Thanks for the understanding.

i like to break mine in with a little, wine, perhaps a candle lite bubble bath, some kenny G in then back ground,... i like to relax them.. then poundem hard. no really. just pound them.

That leads to 3 questions: 1) What are these "actual higher results"? 2) What was the test methodology for determining these "actual higher results"? 3) Why is the amplifier not rated at the "actual higher results" if that is the level of their true performance and you're just going to add a disclaimer that the rated power is less than their actual power anyways?

Benefit Raffle for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Raffle with all proceeds going to St Jude Childrens Research Hospital$10 a ticketSend gift through PayPal to Saint Jude Childrens HospitalOne lucky person will win a 15" SSA XCON D2Raffle will last one month and end on July 15th, 2013.Link to the original raffle: http://www.soundsolutionsaudio.com/forum/topic/58082-benefit-raffle-for-st-jude-childrens-research-hospital/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raffle Each ticket will cost $10 each. A number will accompany each ticket you buy. Each number will be written on a bottle cap and placed into a jar. Every bottle cap will be the same size and shape to ensure equal odds for everyone. The deadline for purchasing tickets will be Saturday July 14th, 2013 @ 11:59pm. The next day, July 15th, I will make a video of the drawing and I will post it here on SSA in this thread. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to buy tickets Please send a gift through PayPal to Saint Jude Children's HospitalMake sure to send me a screen shot and the paypal confirmation number to deyoung86@gmail.comAn acknowledgement of the gift received will be sent and I will provide you with your raffle number/s.Please allow one or two days for me to respond. I will be updating the second post of this thread with a list of who has donated. If you prefer to be an anonymous donor please let me know.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Prize One 15" SSA XCON D2 http://www.soundsolutionsaudio.com/index.php/product-information/xcon.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital www.stjude.org The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family's ability to pay. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first raffle did very well. Please support this great cause again and donate! Please share with everyone you know. Thank you -------------------------- People who have donated:

Thanks for watching.

no doubt if you ask him a technical question you will be ignored... and if you ask on a public place other then SSA your post will be deleted !

Why do you want to put double rated power? Doing this, you void the warranty, and assume all responsibility for whatever damage happens. If you want to run something with 1500 watts, get something for 1500 watts. Pretty simple. You don't buy a sports car to pull a trailer do you? I'll give you a hint also; if the driver is able to handle a lot more power, it's simply because the driver has been underrated to begin with. The driver is made to handle 1000 watts, but the manufacturer rates it to handle 500 watts, then makes videos of it handling more power like it's some super woofer or better than other TRUE 500 watt drivers. People buy the bullshit, and buy the driver. That simple.

I want to apologize to any of you who have tried to help me or if i offended any of you in anyway. I hate being wrong and was being bone headed because of it. Could you guys forgive me? I realize you guys know infinitely more about this kind of stuff than I do and instead of arguing with you guys I need to listen and learn so someday i can be in your shoes. so once again i'm sorry guys

LOL....Exactly what I was thinking. Weren't they like $60 for a "6-pack" ? Aaron, I think you guys need to come out with an FPcon in honor of the Funky Pup. Would be a great addition to the SSA lineup I will put in a call to Krypton to see if they have any spider packs and surrounds left. There was rumors that before the Death Star was destroyed, that some special cones were jettisoned off into space for fear of the attack. Supposedly, Ray Liotta can get a hold of some nasty voice coils. That would leave only the unobtanium motor structure, last I saw, the Navi were pretty pissed when humans tried to take their rare metals. Just saying.

Consdiering a 20 dollar hunk of neo previously is now 114 dollars..I wouldn't be bitching if I were you. It's still cheaper then anybody else on the market, you can go pay 1800 dollars for a Z series woofer if you would like...that's known as raping the consumer. The price is only adjusted to the cost of materials going up..which EVERYTHING has gone up. We ate it for quite some time while I was there and the reason was waiting until the SP4 and Team versions of the subs were available, or near available. If you don't like it..it's as simple as not buying it. Go pay 1800 dollars for the Z series woofer or 1000-1200 dollars for the DC neo woofer. (and no, i don't work there any longer)

Chill- Lemme break it down as simple as I can on some of us here. The IHoP is like a big dysfunctional family. -M5 would be the uncle everyone respects and takes advice from. We may not like how he phrases certain things, but we know he has a point in what he says. He also has the cool toys most of the family doesn't. -Tirefryr is the cousin we talk to who is much like M5 but minus the toys and who doesn't drink so much. -Sand is the great uncle. A bit cranky and will tell you how it should be. No fucking filter, no sympathy. He lays it out for you and you get the advice you need to hear. If its also what you want to hear, cool. If not too fucking bad. -Nem is the crazy cousin who is ALWAYS doing something to make us say WTF in a good way. He is a jack of many trades and a master of terrifying the children. You.........your the new brother in law that somehow got in the house and drinks all the beer and bitches when we have none left even tho you brought nothing with you. Calls us cheap asses for not having more, while telling us of your life and how shit has fucked you up. Secretly we all wish she wouldn't of married you, but since we are now stuck with you we try to help you as best we can. Too bad you never fucking listen and always bitch when shit turns out so wrong. J

Also, To the "You need to sell at OEM prices" argument. Absolutely not. OEM work does not involve anywhere near as much work as the Fi product line does. OEM clients buy hundreds of speakers at a time and they are all the same which makes it easy to build and do. Margins are VERY VERY VERY slim doing OEM work in the USA so you have to sell hundreds and hundreds of them in order to make a dollar.. I don't know about you, but I don't think you would like to bust your ass for 10 hours a day and walk home with 50 bucks in your pocket. That doesn't exactly pay the bills and earn you a living.