Point to Point vs Circuit Board

Well, for what it is worth, I built both a Dynaco tube amp (Stereo 70 as I remember) and a Hafler 500 at my desk in my shop in the 1970's.

I followed the directions and soldered a ton of wires in both kits.  Of course, the Hafler had several printed circuit boards as I remember.  (I still use it and it sounds fine.)

I don't remember if the Dynaco had one as well, but probably.  There are some things that are just easier with boards, I guess.

The Dynaco was fine for its day--pretty noisy on Stax Headphones.  The Hafler is a monster to this day.

Cheers!

Fact is most products are a compromise. Some gold platers sound half as good as they should due to designers lack of understanding of / effort at selecting and tuning components for a circuit

The distinctions go much finer than PCB or P2P. FRP, ceramic, bakelite / platings, thickness, routing / solid, stranded, silicone, PVC, teflon, silver, copper / SMT or PTH ad infinitum all have an effect both on cost and sonics. There is never a free lunch.

Like anything, there are biases and prejudices in audio design. Take 10 great sounding amps and 10 highly skilled designers. Rotate the amps through the designers and you will have 100 new amplifiers. Some improved, some not... all of which will depend on the rest of the system used to evaluate the design. Nothing is designed in isolation.

We use hand wiring for our tube power amps. But we use circuit boards for our preamps. This is because in a preamp you have to control stray capacitance much more carefully and consistency is important. Preamps (especially if a phono section is involved) can have a lot of gain and everything has to be right. There's a lot of nuance to circuit board design- making sure traces don't introduce noise where they shouldn't, how pads are designed so they will hold up properly if the board requires service, making sure that parts that get hot can't degrade the board over time and of course controlling stray capacitance. If you design the board properly you simply won't be able to tell the difference between a properly hand wired example vs the same circuit on a circuit board.

This can go both ways; for years we made a kit version of our M-60 amplifier. Some people would do really well with it (you can see its layout in a video on the landing page of our website) and some people don't do so well- I've seen some that look like a rat's nest inside (quite often people who do this ask for more wire....). Its a simple fact that if the hand wired layout isn't clean and well thought out that it will not perform as well; the results can be highly variable.


Of course people like to open up a product and see a hand wired interior that is a work of art. I can safely say that we do that really well. But actually I think the internal appearance of our preamps is actually better than that of our amps.

If you design the board properly you simply won't be able to tell the difference between a properly hand wired example vs the same circuit on a circuit board.

Some may not but some may. Many times we played beat the proto...

Some may not but some may. Many times we played beat the proto...

This is why I was careful to use the word 'properly'.