This post really is full of bad information & ignorance about business / the history of Sundown Audio. I guess not everyone has followed us since the beginning so it happens.
Let's start at the beginning... I started this company with a $50k person-to-person loan in 2006 at 23-years old. There was no flashy "big money" startup... nobody in my family is or ever has been rich. I've worked HARD to build Sundown to what it is today and really worked my butt off to gain additional financing over the years to grow the company. You don't just pop out of nowhere with full US production capacity -- Scott certainly didn't as he had the sale of RE to fund what he does with Fi & AA. And I say... great for him! He should be proud of that & I think they make a good product as well.
For that matter I also think IA makes a great product -- Nick is a personal friend of mine. We each have our own design ideas but certainly respect what one-another has done.
I dare you to find ANY small company in car audio that spends what I do on prototyping and tooling. I'll wait... That is not free by any means. I've had literally 100s of samples produced & expressed in since I founded Sundown to continuously offer improvements to our customers. I am the first "small time" / "founded online" brand to tool an ENTIRE series of frames *AND* and ENTIRE series of cones (THREE series at that... Mega-Roll v.1 and v.2 and the SPL version) all on our own dime... these are not "build house pays for it / sells it to everyone else too" -- I paid 100% of these tooling charges.
This certainly doesn't matter for forum-goers but I've also shifted Sundown more towards focusing on our local dealers. This requires changes in pricing & they appreciate what we've done. Before you go on spouting "Sundown got greedy" you should recognize that you are BUYING from a dealer and our pricing has shifted to increase our dealers margins more than our own. The "got greedy" comments are simply ignorant of the business as a whole.
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Now... as for the SA series & why it is the way it is I'll explain & it has been touched on a bit by papermaker.
I wanted a certain level of stiffness for the SA sub to have the perfect balance of mechanical power handling & reasonably low FS to meet my expectations. So I started here with the SA series -- my compliance level. Looking at a 3" coil an aluminum coil is too light & thus requires a suspension that is too soft and simply doesn't agree with my design goals; this results in a driver like a DC Level-3. If you go with a 3" copper coil then it's too heavy & thus results in a driver too stiff for what I was going for; this results in a driver like the American Bass XFL.
Going to a 3" coil also requires an 8" spider for the level of mechanical travel I wanted -- and I was not interested in doing an 8" spider on the 4-spoke for mechanical clearance reasons & the 4-spoke is required to use my preferred venting technique (our tooled ring). Frankly this venting method puts the SA on par with many 3" coil drivers on the market today as well.
In terms of "sound quality" -- I have equipped the SA with a big magnet ID shorting ring. Something rarely found in other drivers it is compared to as well since it's not cheap to do.
It also uses a full 100% Nomex spider -- which costs ALOT more than a poly-cotton spider. We've also equipped the SA spider with full 84-strand tinsel leads (not cheap).
Now... if you don't care about the delicate balancing act that is MY personal design take on a driver at this level... the American Bass subs in this range are certainly very *durable* options especially at their price. If you just want to come out cheap and beat the **** out of a sub they are a great choice. I would 100% of the time ANY DAY put the SA up against them in any form of measurable distortion test, though.
As far as assembling the SA line in the US -- there would be no performance gain from doing so. I have the design down-pat where it's bullet-proof regardless of where assembly takes place.
We also don't have the production capacity in-house due to the massive volume of SA series that we sell nor the capacity to even package that many drivers with US materials (and importing empty packing makes no sense). Touching back on the first section of my post -- sourcing packaging is the other hurdle I need to overcome for full X v.2 production in-house. I've been in touch with several vendors about it and it IS something I plan to do but, again, it's expensive to get started. But something that will be happening hopefully in 2016. This will also speed up packing of the Z, NS, TEAM, etc.
Frankly... if I had unlimited money I would probably add the SA to our US production anyway whether it was 100% financially viable or not just to have an extra level of control. I'd also love to go as far as even making my own cones, spiders, etc... but it's not viable at this time.
Building units below the SA in the US really doesn't make ANY sense in the current economic climate by any measure, though, and I really doubt I'd ever do that UNLESS there was a massive shift in the economic balance of the world.
