Attached is a shot of my 6AS7G making music.
Just a note to thank everybody - especially "the Pauls," Birkeland and Joppa, and of course Doc - who chimed in on my posts here as I worked my way through my first-ever electronics build. (Still gotta finish the base, but...)
I'm sure some of my solder joints would get scoffs, but late last night I got through the resistance and voltage checks with only one hiccup, Terminal 22, which from the search results seems to be a tricky one for a lot of people. (It was reading 1.6 ohms, but after reading a few threads I re-crimped and re-soldered Terminal 12, muscled down the transformer bolts a bit, and sure enough 22 read safe n sane 0.3).
This thing sounds great, you guys.
There's space, separation, touch and texture. I stayed up late last night just buzzing through a universe of different material via Roon - Jazz to soul to hip hop to psych rock. Miles to Aretha to Talk Talk to Tinariwen to the Violent Femmes. If I *had* to pick nits, maybe rock mixes get a bit squashed when the amp drives a big crescendo through the cans. (Something I imagine the speedball tackles, standby for an order.) And this is from a laptop plugged into a monitor plugged into a Meridian dongle dac. Soon the amp will move into the big rack - with cleaner power, better cables and semi-serious analog gear upstream.
But right now, Coltrane's Ole is coming through my 6xx's and I'm marveling at the shifting textures as Art Davis and Reggie Workman both play bass on the title track. If you don't know the piece, it's unique in that you've got two big double basses trading plucked and bowed phrases back and forth. So you've got the tone of each instrument, the rosin-y drone of the bows, the fleshy attack and woody, harmonic decay of the plucked notes... and I'm hearing a completely distinct tone and style from each bass - and bassist.
When a piece of gear can illuminate not just the sense of an instrument, but a sense of what that instrument is made of and a sense of an actual human being playing it -- Hifi doesn't get much better.
I'm going to hit "post" before I give myself a chance to stop and think over the fact that this thing is a sub $450 kit that can be assembled by a total noob. It doesn't matter: The Crack delivers the goods.
Cheers, Bottlehead folks. I'm converted.
