Here was the highlight of the Mitek Factory Tour, checking out the amplifier assembly line. Xtant amps and MTX thunder amps are made in this facility, with Coustic and MTX RT lines built offshore.

I'll begin my rant now. I have heard people complain that new Xtant amplifiers aren't as good as the old ones. That everything went downhill since Mitek bought them out. Well, the old Xtant stuff wasn't assembled with computer controlled stuff like the new ones. As you can see below, there are a lot of things that are no longer being left to human contact (and human error). So a big computer controlled saw cuts the pieces out to length. The next step is drilling and tapping holes into the heatsink for the badges, end plates, bottom cover and hold down bars for the output transistors.

The amps start out as a simple circuit board. Some of the smaller amps are actually assembled 4 boards at a a time and then cut later in the assembly process (its harder to stuff 4 small boards than 1 large board, and loading and unloading the machines take up quite a bit of time compared to stuffing the board itself. Even some of the biggest Thunder amps start out as two amps on one board that are seperated later.

The next step is that you take a blank board, and stuff it into a board "stuffing" machine. It is a computer controlled machine that can place surface mount resistors, capacitors, etc. precisely on a circuit board. They can only put so many different types of parts into one machine, so the boards have to pass through more than 1 machine to get all the parts they need. These machines obviously run off of a computer and can be programmed to make a number of differnt products just by changing the electronics that the machine is loaded with. The small parts usually come in long roll with hundreds if not thousands of pieces.

These big machines are like a mechanical typewriter that places parts on the board where they need to be. These machines can load pretty small parts extremely accurately, but for larger parts, they have to be inserted by hand.

After the board gets stuff with the parts that can be stuff by machine, it gets run through a temperature controlled oven (heats up and cools down gradually) to get the solder that is on the components to melt and stick to the board. The oven is computer controlled as well, as you can see from the terminal.

The oven is computer controlled as well, as you can see from the terminal. The machine on the right does QC on the finished boards. It is basically a big scanner that scans the boards, looking for misplaced parts based on a blueprint that is loaded into the computer.

The next step is they insert the parts that are too big to insert by machine. Typically these are the through hole parts (parts that aren't surface mounted). To reduce assembly time, the torroid is mounted to another assembly that makes it a drop in piece (on some other amps, the person assembling the amp has to fish the wires into the individual holes). After all the bits and pieces are put in, the amp is run through a wave soldering machine (instead of soldering by hand each components, the board runs over a pool of solder and everything is soldered).

So that is how the circuit boards are built. We then went to the area where the heatsinks are being prepared. Most of the MTX amps use the same type of heatsink, to try to eliminate waste. The heatsink arrives in long, extruded aluminum blanks that are cut to size. The cool thing is that the blanks are set up in such a way that they almost eliminated waste (they used to turn them into the amp spacers on older series amps, the new amps leave less than an inch of scrap at the end of a 8 foot (as far as I can remember) plug.

After being cut to length, the heatsinks are put into a machine that drills and taps the holes. The drilling and tapping machine has several different tips (again, this thing is computer controlled as well) so one tip has drill bits of a number of different sizes, the other has taps to put screw threads into the various holes. As you can see, the machine can support up to 10 different drill bits and taps and they have another that supports up to 14 as you can see from the second picture.

We each built our own amplifiers. We start with a heatsink, and grab a board. I think we built MTX's big 4 channel amp (I forget). I built an amp as well, but I couldn't build an amp and take pictures at the same time. Here is Jeromy putting the screws that hold down the bars that hold the output transistors to the heatsink. It is a pneumatic screw gun with a retractor that keeps people from suffering from repetitive stress injuries.

Here some adjustments are made before the amp gets bench tested.

After the adjustments, but before the amp is finished getting put together (you don't want to fully assemble an amp if it doesn't pass inspection), the amp is put on the bench and burned in for about 5 minutes. EVERY AMP! Yup, so if an amp is bad out of the box, more likely than not you are looking at user error. They use little digital timers (like the kind you use in your kitchen) to keep track of how long the amp has been burning in.

After burn in, the amp is put on some sort of AP amp analyzer (it runs a bunch of full load, short circuit protection tests, full power, low voltage types of tests). Only after then does the amp get the OK to go out the door. Keep in mind these are "warm" amps that have been running for 5 minutes so some of the ratings might be affected. As you can see from the picture, they have a quick release jig set up that makes putting amps on and off an easy task. A full size wire instead of the jig they are using would probably yield a better connection and more power.

The printer prints out a test report, then it is transfered to a birth sheet that is dropped into every box. After that, Jeromy finished assembly of the amp (put on the top and side panels) and away we went. It took quite a bit of taking to get Jeromy to give the amp back (seems that he figured finders keepers) but it doesn't work out that way.