Rosa Vidal
Designs every voice card and still signs off each batch by ear. Previously designed tube amps in Valencia for nine years.
01 / The workshop / detroit, mi
A former auto-parts warehouse with very good light.
9,000 square feet, five bays, one long bench that runs most of the building. We bought it in 2019 at auction and spent eight months rewiring it ourselves before a single board came through.
02 / Process
From blank board to your bench, in eight days.
DAY 01-02
Population
Through-hole parts are placed and soldered by hand in small runs. No contract manufacturer has ever touched a KVA board, and the people placing parts are the people who will fix them.
DAY 03-04
Wave solder + rework
Boards go through our 1987 Electrovert wave machine, then every joint is inspected at 10x. A joint that fails the eye test never reaches Bay 4.
DAY 05
Calibration
Forty minutes on the scope per instrument: oscillator trims, filter tracking, envelope shape. The signed calibration sheet ships in the box, and we keep a copy on file forever.
DAY 06
The burn-in
Each unit plays a shuffled sequence for six hours straight. Anything that gets hot, cold, or quiet in an interesting way gets pulled apart and understood before it ships.
DAY 07-08
Walnut, pack, play
Sides are oiled, the unit is played by a human for ten minutes, packed with the schematic and service manual, and logged. The log entry is the last thing, and it says who built it.
03 / People
Eleven of us, six shown.
Marek Hale
Owns the panel language: every pot position, every label, every millimeter of walnut. Built bike frames before this.
Denise Okafor
Runs Bay 2 and trains everyone who picks up a soldering iron. Thirty thousand boards and counting, zero returned for a cold joint.
Sam Iwata
Lives at the scope. Keeps the calibration archive, which now holds 9,400 signed sheets, one per instrument shipped.
Priya Nair
Every repair ticket crosses her bench. She has fixed instruments from batch 1 and keeps the parts wall for everything we ever shipped.
Leo Brandt
Writes the manuals, the schematics hand-off, and the monthly bench notes. If a document is unclear, that is on him.
First Friday is open studio.
First Friday of each month, 12 to 6, tours at 2. Come hear batch units before they ship and drink bad coffee with good people.
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