I built the Elekit TU-8600S kit with all the upgrades and put the new Western Electric 300Bs in it. It’s fabulous and drives my 94dB speakers with ease.
highly recommended!
Your journey with lower-watt tube amps -- Can a kit be good enough?
Looking for stories about your low-watt amp journeys.
Here's the situation: I have new speakers, 97 db. Trying them with lower watt tube amps (45/211, 300b, etc) seems generally wise. I am attempting to borrow some from audiophiles in the area.
The horizon beyond trying these things involves actually buying some. I'm looking at a budget limit of about $5k.
Curious as to folks' experience with lower-watt amp kits vs. those of good makers (e.g. Dennis Had, etc.).
If you have any thoughts about the following, I'd be interested:
Did you start out with a kit and then get dissatisfied? Why?
Did you compare kits vs. pre-made and find big differences?
Did you find you could get the equivalent level of quality in a kit for much less than the same pre-made version? How about kit vs. used?
Also: did you find there was a difference between "point to point wiring" vs. "PCB" in these various permutations?
I realize that there are good kits and bad ones, good pre-made amps and bad ones. I'm hoping you'll be comparing units which seem at comparable levels of quality and price-points.
Thanks.
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Thanks for the comments. Had a busy day. Need to think about @atmasphere comments bc the speakers I currently own have been driven pretty nicely with an 8w Sun Valley amp in a room larger than mine. (24 x 15 x 8 approx.). That said, there may have been additional tweaks that helped mitigate some issues you're mentioning. Here’s a photo of them driving very similar (nearly identical) speakers to mine with the sun valley in the center. I’ll get back to the thread with more details when I can. |
I always thought the Audio Note Kits looked pretty nice:
https://ankaudiokits.com/product/kit1-kit1-10-300b-integrated-amplifier/ |
I had DIY 300B amp that I tweaked and in the end rebuild it from scratch. For 300B is very important the driver tube (more powerful is better) and driver inter-stage transformer works much better compared to RC coupling. How many maximal dB do we need for classical, rock, jazz music? It looks like the distortions from 50Watt heat on the speaker's voice coil and crossover parts should be much more horrible then 10% SET distortion on maximal power distortions.
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- 95 posts total