Van Alstine: Anyone heard of them?

Sure, Audio by Van Alstine has been around since at least the late 1970's. Van Alstine has made a nice living doing complete re-builds of tube equipment originally made by other manufacturers, such as Dynaco. His products perform well, although they are not state-of-the-art, and they offer solid value. I have not listened to any AVA products in a number of years, but a good friend of mine had a preamp and power amp from AVA that sounded very nice.

You might post this on Audio Asylum where there are some AVA devotees who could give you a lot of good information. From what others have said, Sdcampbell is correct; not perfection, but real quality and value and top notch service.

http://www.AudioAsylum.com/forums/amp/bbs.html

I owned a Van Alstine Pre (Hybrid Fet-value) and their 440 (220 per ch.)Power amp for many years. Both were excellent for the money. The Pre was very transparent with excellent lows and very dynamic. The only negative was it did not throw a hugh soundstage nor present clear imaging. The amp was clean, powerful and I even used it do drive ML's. Yet for the money (less than $1K each used) you can't beat the value.