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Fittingly considering the time line, first comments on Sonata sonics came from Vinnie Rossi who received his CES units before Hannes got his batch or I my loaner: "Hi Hannes, Merry Christmas! The Sonata is fantastic sounding - but when I connected the Isabella with built-in DAC, holy shit! What an 'ear-gasm'! This is an incredible combo and now I understand why you like it so much! As long as the customer does not need more than 30 watts per channel, this is going to be impossible to beat! You did a very nice job with the enclosure design and Sasa has the most impressive sounding EL34 amp design I have ever heard. I have always liked the EL34 sound but never heard it like this before..."

Top plate-mounted Sonata assemblies in Mladenovac
Sonata guts prior to insertion into the WLM enclosure
Fully assembled Sonata - this image opens to 2000 x 15000 at 391KB in a new window

What had begun as a confident prototype duckling at Trafomatic in search of a contract and looking like this when Hannes Frick slipped it into his Austrian rig for evaluation...

... turned into this GoldPoint-knob attired, Macassar-striped swan a few months later:

And bless the Serbians for the dense shrink-wrap skin over the cardboard outers (which prevents water damage should a carrier mistreat the box in transit) and protruding handles for convenient manoeuvring. Sasa meanwhile had invested
€12,000 of Trafomatic-branded electronic sales from the previous month into a CNC router and new WLM amplifier assembly area. Hannes was keen on hitting the Munich HighEnd 2009 show in May with an expanded WLM Acoustics lineup. His Serbian collaborators were hard at work building out a dedicated zone for it. And one of the next designs had already been christened Phonata and conceptualized in this computer rendering.

"Misha and I should take a quick vacation now that the CES and review shipments are completed. Somehow I think we won't get much of a break throughout 2009 if Hannes keeps up this pressure and enthusiasm. Know anywhere with sunny beaches this time a year?" Sasa sounded exhausted but much pleased with recent developments.

Then Vinnie checked in again. He was helping Hannes with the English owner's manual translation. "I didn't know this but just learned from Sasa's specs that the Sonata's twenty first watts operate in class A before the bias turns to class A/B. No wonder this thing sounds as it does..."


Hannes: "Sasa is already whispering in my ear about very interesting new projects we'll tackle shortly in the new year."


This covers the gestation of the Trafomatic/WLM collaboration and the first fruit of this labor. Sonics in due course...
WLM website