antique sound 1009

I had a pair and sold them for four reasons:

1)I discovered I don't want to bias

2)The thought of of dropping $2k on NOS 845's alone didn't appeal to me

3)Too much heat output for my application

4)Too heavy to move around

They were used on Merlin MX's and Vandy 5A's to good effect.

There appear to be some uninformed answers above.
I owned the 1009's for a while and they were quite impressive in my system. They are not knockoffs of anything. While the some of the amps listed above may have better fit and finish and a fancier chassis, most of them simply don't perform as well as the 1009. NOS 845's are completely unnecessary with this amp. I found however that substituting the EL34's for the Svetlana winged C offered a more even tonal balance in my system.
I have owned several of the amps listed above and the 1009 was the best of the bunch. (CAT and Lamm would be better choices but at several times the price of the ASL). The review of these amps on Salvatore's High-End Audio website is mostly accurate in my opinion.

Great amps. I regret selling them from time to time. It drove Avalon Diamonds and Quad ESL well. I did not have maintenance problem and they sounded great with Shuguang 845B and 845M. Very good texture and a lot of inner detail. It bettered Audio Research and Rogue amps that I had. I did not think they give up much comparing to Nagra VPA. I tried many tubes and ended up with Ei EL34 and Bugleboy 12AU7.

Nutella
I read Salvatore's review. Parts have to be changed to get them up to speed(The dealer installed Jensens in his 1006's). There's a company that does this to the tune of $1800. As I said before, biasing was a no-no for me as one amp would constantly drift. I guess I'll never own Joules to experience the Variac.

I've purchased 2 pairs of new ASL poweramps the last couple years. The Explorer 805s and Hurricanes were and are reliable and sound great. Having just built a high-sensitivity speaker system and not needing 120 Watts of triode power, I've ordered another pair, the 25-Watt SET AQ1006, in the new, taller version.

The 1009 is all triode (the EL34 drivers are wired as triodes), push-pull of course, uses fairly conventional design concepts, is mostly hardwired (ie does not use printed-circuit boards for audio circuitry), and uses tubes (12AU7s, EL34s, and Shuguang/ValveArt 845s) that are highly available and affordable. It also has separate low- and high-Voltage power transformers and powersupplies and uses NO negative feedback. If 60 Watts is enough power for you and the concept of push-pull amplification doesn't bother you*, go for them.
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* Some of us nutty fans of triode amplification also 'need' our amps to be single-ended.
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