Genuinely impressed with my how this turned out! This was my first kit and first tube amplifier. In preparation, I bought some soldering practice kits, built a small FM radio, a cmoy headphone amp, and StewMac guitar effects pedal. Once I felt confident enough, I dived in. Happy all the various tests passed on the first try, but when I first set it up I had an intermittent failure in the right channel that could be temporarily fixed by tapping the chassis ... I was able to track it down to some sloppily stripped foil insulation on the shielded twisted pair making contact with a resistor lead between the tube socket and one of the rails. Once I bent the twister pair our of the way, all was good!
I'm sure I'm biased after all this work, but I'm simply blown away with the sound. Partner and I both agreed the soundstage was wider and, oddly enough, more vertical (if that's a thing) and with greater separation than I get out of the two vintage Marantz amps I normally use (a restored 1060 and a resto-modded 140).
My go-to reference song is Stevie Ray Vaughn's Tin Pan Alley, and I loved how much separation there was and the incredible detail in the opening guitar notes ... you could make out the sound of the guitar strings rolling of the pick. Crazy. Great example of instrument separation in a recording with a more narrowly focused, or vertical soundstage.
The only place the Marantz duo outshined the SEX was on the low end, where the SEX seemed to have a little trouble with low end speed in some bass-heavy poppy stuff (Daft Punk/Pharrell Williams/Beastie Boys).
Anyhow, thanks to the Bottlehead team for building such a great kit! I'm also anxiously awaiting a set of Bluemstein Orcas, at which point the amp will shift to its permanent, desktop home. I'll report back on that set up when its up and running.
