I rebuilt the circuits contained in the tone stage PECs with discrete components mounted on perf board. They are demarcated by dotted lines on the schematic. The replacements are not much bigger than the originals, as you can see from the attached pics.
It depends on your skill level and more importantly your ability to troubleshoot. Learning to troubleshoot is something i acquired over the years as my knowledge of what caused the issue/s can lead to a quick solution. Building is the easy part and hopefully you won't make any mistakes. But without a mentor to give you advice and notice the small things which can cause hum issues and other problems your success will be a factor of the complexity of the project. Because of that i suggest you start your first scratch build with a single ended amp like a Magnavox console which has maybe only 10 to 20% of the parts of an eico st40. But as i said, it depends on your skill level.
I seem to remember a discussion wid Keg about doing exactly what he did to it. The 7199 PEC can basically be copied off any other 7199 circuit, and .22 uF coupling caps will do jus' fine. IMO, bumping the split load a wee bit, say use 39 kOhm resistors instead of 47k is a fine thing to do.
