Trident the right choice for me? Priority: low noise

[tschaboo]

Hello all,

since I'm new here, a short INTRODUCTION, feel free to skip:
I have some years of 3D printing experience, all with Prusa i3 style printers. For the first one I sourced everything seperately and the build took months. Maybe some of you remember such ancient words like "Wade extruder", "Merlin Hotend", "A4988" or "RAMPs board". 3M Blue Tape on glass sheets was the way to go, heated beds exotic and manual bed leveling a regular ritual. It took months to source and build, I tried every mod on the planet, it was fun and it actually worked (some of the time). Then my time as a student ended and I switched to "commercial" printers: first a genuine Prusa i3 Mk2, later a Mk3S+ with MMU2S. The latter one is still stock - no time to experiment much. Some other things that might be important to know: 1.) I'm living in the European Union and prefer to source from within there, because the whole customs/tax thing on imports is super annoying and expensive. 2.) FOSS/OHW is very important to me. I'm okay with some proprietary components, but the general design should be open. 3.) I probably can't afford the best of the best in all components but it doesn't have to be the cheapest stuff either.
</INTRODUCTION>

Wanting to build a true open source machine and getting my hands "dirty" again, I ended up here. And now my question is: is the Trident the right printer for me?

These are my priorities - sorted:
1.) low noise. (My Mk3 is way too loud to run it through the night)
2.) print quality
3.) speed
4.) reliability

Regarding (1) I guess the electronics/stepper drivers are the most important part, besides everything that moves, obviously. What are the most silent Trinamic drivers to buy? Which electronics would you suggest to get as base for those drivers?

I'm considering getting a Formbots kit, building it and then researching the upgrade options. Are there some upgrades/mods that in your opinion are better to incorporate from the get go?

Regarding (3): I want a hotend which can push more material than an E3D V6 or REVO. Which options do I have there? Are there even any hotends that can handle small, slow, detailed parts printed with a 0,25mm nozzle and high flow with an 0.8mm nozzle equally well? Or do I need two separate hotends for those scenarios?

Thanks for reading that far and looking forward to your suggestions!

 

[claudermilk]

I went from a Mini+ to a Trident and am very happy with both printers.
1) The Trident isn't a quiet as the Mini, but for me it isn't all that much louder. If the i3 is too loud, then the Trident will be too. But, Prusas are really quiet printers so I'm not sure you're going to find what you want there.
2) Print quality on my Trident is exceptional. It's doing stuff I wasn't sure FDM could even accomplish right now.
3) You can run it fast, certainly faster than Prusa speeds. It's not a speedboatrace machine though.
4) It's been amazingly reliable for me. Most of the issues have been self-inflicted and relatively easy to repair. Mine is now sitting at about 1660 hours run time and still going like a champ.

I'm running a Revo myself, so no I'm not chasing ultimate speed. I read that the Rapido is a good high flow hot end. As for the nozzles, I have everything from 0.15 to 0.8. I've run all but the 0.8 and the Revo goes from one to the other without a hitch. I can speed things up for the 0.6 and can keep my 0.4 speeds for the 0.25. The 0.15 does need to slow down--it's tiny.