Roger,
This sounds like a great project to introduce new audiophiles to your products, and/or a project for a bunch of us old guys to share with the next generation. Sto lat.
Steve
PS: How about providing suggested step by step assembly instructions like Heath & Dynaco did so many years ago? In this day of digital cameras and printers, costs would be minimal, and the benefits priceless.
My intent in offering this kit is twofold. One is to educate which is what the video is about. For that task, YouTube is a wonderful use of the internet and I am thankful for the this tool. The other is to provide a very good amplifier at a very good price by letting the owner do the casework, which is often half the cost of modern audio components.
Those step by step manuals from Heath took hundreds of hours of prep which I don't believe would be much faster today. A computer can help you write a book but you still have to write the book and do the research. Kits were their main business, however it is not mine. They also had hundreds of people to "kit up" the parts in a very efficient manner of their own creation. The last facility they built was 100,000 square feet. That's how well things were going then. From 1960 to 1970 I got a kit for my birthday and one for Christmas and bought several myself. I must have built 20 kits including Knight (Allied Radio) and Eico. Now there is not one single major kit company.
I believe members like Ericus Rex can build from a schematic and although that was not my original intent I will make the parts available. My intent is to offer a wired and tested kit for users to finish to their taste. In either case you are getting a circuit design and parts that exceed what others are offering. As I pointed out in the video, some designers are using LEDs to bias a tube and I have explained why this is not a good idea. In later videos I will go into parafeed output stages, the theory behind ElectraPrint's "Ultrapath" that was developed by Western Electric, the reasons why SE output transformers have a gap, where the other half of the sine wave comes from as the tube cuts off.
Although Heath and Eico had great instructions, many of their circuit designs left a lot to be desired. When I was 16 I built an Eico Cortina amplifier which was a nice amp, however when switched to mono playing records there was a great deal of distortion. I fixed this by putting a 4.7 K isolating resistor on the output of each phono preamp so that one would not try to drive the other. I wondered how at 16 I was fixing a design made by skilled engineers at a major kit company.
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