You’ll see Wheatstone in studios everywhere, but you know where you won’t see Wheat? On the slow boat from… anywhere. All our consoles, all our processors, and every single one of our I/O Blades are proudly built in our factory in North Carolina, using parts we’ve had in stock long before container ships got expensive.
We do all our engineering designs and prototyping, and all the fabrication and tooling for every one of our products that we manufacture right here in New Bern, NC, where we live and work. We mill and laser etch our faceplates and powder coat them here, as well as surface mount, solder, and assemble all the electronics for every Wheatstone and Audioarts console, talent station, voice processor, streaming appliance and Blade product we sell.
We wouldn’t know what to do with a shipping container if it floated up the Neuse River and landed in one of our boat slips.
Here’s a quick photo walkthrough of the Wheat factory. To schedule your tour of the Wheatstone factory, contact our sales team at [email protected].
Our 5,000-square-foot stock room contains rows of parts that go all the way to the ceiling. Semiconductors are excluded from excessive tariffs as of this writing, but even a 145% tariff on a 10-cent transistor has very little impact considering that semiconductors account for only 21 percent of the total cost of a Wheatstone product. “We are far more concerned with price fluctuations and the availability of components than the tariffs on those components, which is why we doubled down on parts inventory,” commented our founder Gary Snow in a recent interview with Radio World’s Elle Kehres.
We buy from parts distributors in the U.S. that we’ve known for years and have direct relationships with all our major semiconductor manufacturers.
An overview of the soldering machine.
Here we are in the paint room, where Wheatstone Blades and console panels are powder coat painted. We buy all our paint from U.S. companies.
Quality inspection of finished surface mount cards is done photographically by this dedicated computer with specialized high-resolution camera and software, which detects solder failures or bridged components.
Wheatstone invested in surface mount technology early on. Components are mounted directly onto the surface of printed circuit boards used in Wheatstone and Audioarts consoles and WheatNet IP Blades. This pick and place machine is capable of placing dozens of components per sweep within an accuracy of 0.0001 inches. Machines like this are the beating heart of electronics production at Wheatstone.
This computerized press machine is the newest addition to Wheatstone’s machine shop. Darrin Paley is shown here holding a Blade I/O unit that just came off the press. We buy all our metal from suppliers in the United States and, in fact, 99 percent of all our metal extrusions were made in the U.S.
We have finished products on the shelf and ready to ship at the same price now as before tariffs began.
Company
600 Industrial Dr.
New Bern, NC 28562 USA
Main office +1 (252) 638-7000
Fax main office +1 (252) 637-1285
We are open Monday through Friday,
8:30 AM to 8:30 PM EST
Company
600 Industrial Dr.
New Bern, NC 28562 USA
Main office +1 (252) 638-7000
Fax main office +1 (252) 637-1285
We are open Monday through Friday,
9:00 AM to 5:30 PM EST
