"Hand built without compromise to perform without equal". Such is the official motto of one transformer vendor, Magnequest, of Philadelphia, PA. It's pretty safe to say no other transformer maker would make that assertion, because no engineer or component buyer would be ordering from that vendor.
They'd be laughing too hard!
Years ago I was into another hobby activity which is, like transformer design, mostly the province of degreed engineers. I was talking to such an engineer and I was going over the drawbacks and advantages of some of the various designs available, and I said, "Boy, I'd like to design one right, with no compromises." He sprayed the Coke he was drinking all over himself laughing at my stupidity, for stupidity it was. When he got done cleaning himself up and regaining his composture, he said something that has stuck in my brain ever since. "ALL ENGINEERING IS COMPROMISE. All designs are a matter of trading off one thing for another. What separates a good design from a bad one is knowing what to trade off for what else, when, and how.."
Boy, was he right. I've learned that lesson in studying and DOING THINGS in several fields and anything requiring what can be called design really is a compromise. You NEVER have an infinite supply of anything, ever. Any real world implementation of something is always a series of tradeoffs.
Look up the properties of a perfect transformer sometime. It can not exist in the real world, because transformers are made out of actual materials that do nothing perfectly.
So how does Magnequest carry off a motto like that? Simple. It does not do business with engineers or commercial component buyers, only with technically unsophisticated and gullible people. Magnequest is not a transformer wind shop in the usual sense of the word: it is one individual, with no engineering degree nor any hands-on experience in the workaday transformer manufacturing business, who bought up some old blueprints (or salvaged them from a dumpster) and got a few of the many retired transformer winders in eastern Pennsylvania to show him how to run a winding machine.
As it happens, I actually have worked in a transformer plant, and I know enough to know that one guy with an old Universal winding machine does not constitute a facility capable of putting out the kind of transformers he is claiming to be able to offer. In a real transformer plant, you have a lot of women who wind transformers all day, under the direct supervision of both their wind line supervisors and an engineering QC staff who continually test the product. It takes a fair amount of time for an one of them to learn to wind any given transformer, when dealing with complex interleaved designs as most good audio transformers are, and each of them is in effect certified to wind one or a limited number of parts. You would no more hand a winder an unfamiliar wind sheet and have her wind one on her own than you would take a 737 captain who has never seen an Airbus, hand him the pilot's manual and checklists and send him out to an Airbus full of passengers on a revenue flight.
It's telling that with a "design library" with dozens of in demand designs for matching and line transformers highly sought by the recording industry, he refuses their business and winds mostly his own designs aimed at the single-ended-triode, no-feedback cultists. There, a part can be pretty flawed and no one would know the difference, since the amplifiers perform so marginally anyway, and the builders usually have no test equipment nor would they care to use it if they did. The proprietor isn't a 737 captain trying to fly an Airbus: he doesn't even have a pilot's license.
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