Charles1: I agree, the AirTight is hard to move away from. It's very dynamic - for a low-powered SET, and that's a hard-to-get-quality in such an amp - but I've always thought that it lacked a certain low-level nuance in the mids, some subtle harmonic complexity...[and which, I assume, is explained by the richness of the Mullard ECC83s, f91, goal post getters, that I have in my line and phono stages...]. I'm quite sure that it's not the Tamura transformers, so I assume its a designer bias...then again, maybe I'm just remembering what it sounded like years ago before I started working on it, because the GL B749s really made it come to life...then again, why should someone have to "work" on something if it possesses a given quality innately?
I've looked for an end-point speaker for five years now and am captivated by the LMs (formerly Quad US63s and ESP Concert Grands)....
OK, just realized that I'm WAY OFF thread - but, ya know, its hard to find anyone who knows the LMs...
OK, Edoit, if you must know. Cut to the quick: so, if you just can't quite choke down a pair of Shindo 300B Limiteds (with a loaded in pair of engraved base WE300Bs off of ebay at $7K), then you should maybe get a hold of Aldo via Deja Vu Audio and scrape up some WE171 output transformers and WE618B input transformers and beg him to do some magic with them...and if that doesn't work, maybe you should get a hold of Jeffrey Jackson at Experience Audio and see what he could cook up for you...
Ah, the dream of the dreamers...