Building the Audio Note Kit 1 SET amp...

Looking forward to the update. Finger's crossed.

Tomorrow is Skype day. Wish us luck! :-)

Hi, folks,
Well, I got a personal message from one of you asking what's going on, so here's the latest.
Brian and I spent a total of about an hour and a half on Skype yesterday, spread over a couple of sessions. We went through all the static AC and DC voltages as well as some resistance measurements and everything that we checked looks good, except for one value (can't remember which one) that seems to drop precipitously after being measured. I don't remember exactly what we concluded about that one – sometimes it's just not easy to get a good reading on a solder joint.
We also tried putting a speaker load on one channel to check some AC voltages as the volume potentiometer is moved with a CD playing.
I have a few more measurements to do. Brian sent me a file of a sine wave (pure tone) that I have burned to a CD so I can play it while taking some measurements and adjusting the volume control.
Brian explained to me, again, that everything in the driver stage looks good. But when the technician here in Austin to whom I had sent the amplifier measured the output voltage with his scope, everything looked "squashed." "Like an elephant was sitting on the waveform," Brian said. So something weird is going on with the power stage not putting out full power.
If we cannot sort this out ourselves in another day or two, Brian is going to pay to have the amp shipped to Digital Pete, his assembly guy in Florida. Pete has built and done troubleshooting a bunch of these kits (and others) and has all the parts on hand. If, for example, I have a bad transformer or a bad 300B tube, he will be able to swap it then and there.
As much as I am eager to get back to listening to music again, I am again grateful to Sebrof for giving me the opportunity to use his speakers and determine that a speaker mismatch was not the issue. I am also very, very grateful to Brian, whose customer service is above and beyond amazing. He clearly gets a kick out of working on these things and keeping his customers happy.
And in the category of making lemonade out of lemons, so to speak, I am learning even more about electronics and how this amplifier works through this process. I'll be kind of disappointed if Brian and I can't figure it out long-distance, but as I said, I am also eager to get back to hearing that beautiful music. Brian said that Pete will turn it around really quickly if we do end up sending it to him.
When I run the additional tests, I'll let you know what I find. And I am hoping to see all of this resolved within the next week or so.

Oh, I also want to mention, for those of you who are interested, that Brian said that he is super curious to figure out what's going on because this is not typical of a build problem. Usually, he told me, either the amp is working fine or there's something really pronounced that goes wrong, like one very noisy channel or the amp frying due to a major wiring error or reversed electrolytic capacitor. But having an amp that "almost" or "sort of" works is just plain weird. I'm sure we're going to get to the bottom of it, though.

I wonder if Brian at A-Note could send you an amp that he knows is working properly to see if it does work with the Decapos. If it does work, then you know you'll still need to troubleshoot, if it doesn't, then you could save everyone a lot of time and trouble trying to diagnose a problem that may not exist.

Like most of us here, I'm pulling for you to get this sorted out to the point where when it's all over, you are absolutely thrilled with the outcome.

Best of luck and thanks for keeping us all in the loop.