Your journey with lower-watt tube amps -- Can a kit be good enough?

Speaking of "how far they can push it", I wish I had photos on hand of my local 55-year tech [now retired], he let me borrow his self named "FrankenDyna" ST35 loaner amp once.

It sorta looked like its original self in some ways, but not really, Kinda Fugly actually.  Super heavy for a small footprint.  It was really fun to play. Very-very musical, beautiful midrange, not overly dynamic, or overly detailed.  Just nice.  I could have listened to that amp ongoing. His Modded AudioNote amps are over the top, look nothing like the originals.  Its fun to try amps from mad scientists who create cool stuff just for fun.   

Highs pretty clear, though perhaps some slight roll off.

@hilde45 I was curious about this so I looked at the schematic of the amp.

The input resistor is 500KOhms (or 470K) to ground. With an input impedance that high, the amp can be sensitive to interconnect cables. If the resistor were changed to 100K, the amp’s character would be unchanged and it would still work with any preamp but the cable sensitivity would be vastly reduced.

So you might consider getting that resistor changed in each channel and see if you still think there’s a slight roll off.

BTW, the older amps have an input coupling capacitor which can usually be replaced with a bit of wire as the input circuit is at zero Volts.

@atmasphere Thanks! I am passing along to my tech 

@atmasphere We tested the amp for distortion and found that the left channel had a magnitude more distortion than the right; @5 watts it was 3.5%! So, we opened the amp up and there was a mis-wired tube socket with reversed leads. Green went to blue and vice versa. Someone did not do due diligence. After fixing that, everything was fantastic -- very low distortion and balanced between channels.

@hilde45 +1

Its amazing it did as well as it did initially! It's my surmise the prior owner never played the amp that much due to the error. So it might sound a bit better with some break-in.