Building our Cafe Sound speakers

Earlier this year I wrote an update on our Cafe Sound speakers. The conclusion was that we came out of the gate too optimistic about the type of market we were targeting. Since then we've talked to a lot of people in the commercial listening bar and commercial audio industry in general. My feeling is there is a some hesitation to go "all-in" right now given the instability in hospitality in general.

Increased costs seems to be an industry wide problem. Rents, wages, and materials costs have all been increasing and not everyone is able to transfer those costs to their customers.  I myself have run the numbers in multiple markets on the listening bars, and given the costs it is hard to eek out a profit.

With that said, we've had a lot of positive feedback and interest in what we are doing. Also my own interests have changed.

Cathode Bias is a hobby that sort of grew out of control. One thing I realized is sitting on a bunch of speaker inventory makes me uncomfortable, as it should. Storing inventory has real costs and depreciates as it sits. To get the ball rolling, I think it was necessary to build some systems on spec, but earlier this year we had 3 significant multi-cell horn systems sitting in inventory. Fortunately we did install 1, but we are still sitting on 2 more systems. We invested significantly into our A5 system, so it is a bit disappointing to have little commercial interest in that system – which again points to the hesitation by many in the market to commit.

My original plan for Cathode Bias was to outsource all production, and that's how we started out. But overtime I've become more interested in the production process of building speaker cabinets. Rather than shy away from production, I've elected to embrace it. I don't make any guarantees that I will hand make all our speakers, but I do feel it is important early on.

Our objective is to make La Modesta (and its variants) to the highest standard we are capable of and price accordingly. What that means is we will be shifting exclusively to Baltic Birch and Hardwood cabinets, and building the speakers one at a time. Basically Cathode Bias will be low production with high amount of handwork for the foreseeable future.

If you are working on a larger project and would still like to work with just, DM me. We do have some options to scale short term if needed, but we won't be stocking a lot of speakers in our inventory going forward.