Jolida FX-10 or...?

Thanks Mikirob

I owned this little integrated for a period of time. Excellent bang for the buck, but more importantly it was very good sounding. Nice mids, reasonably extended highs, never bright or fatiguing, bass was quick and tight. Of course you need speakers that are efficient, I generally used Tekton 4.5 or Lore, 93db and 98db respectively, 8 Ohm load.

To get the best out of this unit get 7189 tubes or Amperex EL 84s which in my system were the two best. You also need to swap out the EH 12Ax7s for something like the Psvane. Read Jeff Day's review of EL 84s and 12Ax7s in his review of Almarro in 6 Moons. His points really apply to both amps (I also owned the Almarro).

Thanks Sfar

I'm not really qualified to speculate on how much better he could do with a couple of hundred more dollars. That's usually the case but especially would be true if he were buying used at $700 rather than new at $500.

Having said that, I bought the Jolida FX-10 used at $375, I think, for an office system and have been very happy playing it a few hours every day for a couple of years. It's not a lot of watts but works extremely well for me with a pair of relatively inefficient JohnBlue JB3 speakers.

It's been completely reliable and the auto bias is great. I don't use the glass case and clipped the leads to the blue LEDs under each tube. He might like the blue glow but it was just annoying to me.