My first Tube Amp.

[EJB14]

Bottlehead S.E.X amplifier (really a headphone amp, but it has speaker outs as well, a whole 2 watts per channel - which is actually plenty for my small office)...finally finished it. Listening to it now on HD-650s. Wow... - I thought the headphone amps in my NAD preamps were good..this thing is sooooooo smooooth and sooooo quiet. Very impressed...

 

[thornev]

Uh oh... You're on your way to FM receivers and amps. That's how I started - a Little Dot headphone amp whose sound amazed me. And then I had to restore more tube units. Now I've got 3 Fishers, a Scott and a Marantz. Enjoy!

 

[ToxicTele]

yes, sweet unit. So, the journey begins,,,,enjoy.

 

[Lavane]

Yup, you just slipped and fell into the rabbit hole. Congrats on the new amp!

 

[illinoisteve]

It looks so cool!

 

[exee]

That looks awesome! Welcome to the tube side!

 

[vintage 5.0]

Congrats that looks like a great amp you go there. Like said above looks like you are going down that tube road. Well I started with receivers and then some solid state gear. I then went to tube stuff and more solid state. I now am back to mostly listening to tube gear and to me it just sounds really nice. It seems for me no matter what I get I always end up back at tubes.

 

[grindfix]

Tube bug is definitely contagious.
My analogy is if someone introduced you to a bottle of cheap generic scotch and you liked it...

 

[Steve.]

Congrats.... my first tube amp was a used VTL stereo 50/50 and it almost turned me off tubes forever.... sounded great but after the third failure i dumped it eBay for parts. Fortunately I found a new Anthem Amp 1, a great 40w EL34 amp. It was reliable, easy on tubes and if one did fail and took out a resistor I could easily replace it. Then I sold that for a Sonic Frontiers SFS 40...awesome amp, one of my biggest regrets is selling that amp. Then I changed speakers and went SS for a while. Then I changed speakers again....to something easy to drive... About five years ago I picked up a tube pre and a pair of Quicksilver Mini Mono amps and haven't looked back. Oh, and then I changed speakers again, to very efficient Heresy III and now forty watts is overkill....

 

[Steve.]

I was interested in the Bottlehead....what phones are you driving with it? Nice job by the way, how long was the build?

 

[qdrone]

And you built it yourself,nice. Enjoy.