Y'know winding an output trafo may be in my near future. Shockingly expensive part of a tube amp.
You can get yourself an input trafo on the cheap by gutting a big HT amp with a nice 500 or so VA 30-35v AC supply rail and yanking that trafo and running it in reverse. I have 2-3 sitting round very eligible for that task. Couple are even toroids.
You can get dynaco st 70 upgrade boards ... or bloody hell, use the old st 70 board - also cheap on ebay and audio sites. 20-30 bucks.

That leaves the chassis and iron and tubes ... tubes gonna cost ya the same ... 2-300. Chassis - almost any price ... your taste and industriousness is the limit here ...

That leaves the Iron ... wind them and you got yourself in for $3-400 tubes included, 30-40 watt tube amp. Buy it and you're out nearly 2 X.

Cool.
Srinath.

[quote author=44455E5956435F370 link=1366500563/30#30 date=1367374167]Y'know winding an output trafo may be in my near future. Shockingly expensive part of a tube amp.
A guy named Paul Reed Smith started building guitars in the 80's One day he ran into Carlos Santana at Manny's in New York and the rest is history. Paul has a factory that turns out superior quality guitars at the rate of 200 to 300 a week that cost anywhere from $2000 to over $10,000 apiece. About 5 years ago he decided he wanted to get into the amp business so he hired a guy named Doug Sewell out of Texas to get him started. Doug is famous for getting any sound you want out of his custom built amps. I don't know if Paul bought or leased Dwayne Allmans amp that he recorded Live At The Fillmore on but anyway he got it in his possession. He also got Jimi Hendrix's most famous stage amp. Both amps are Marshalls. He got Doug to tear them apart and map everything. Paul had in mind to build a dual amp in one box that contained Dwayne's and Jimi's amps. Everything was going fine until they got to the transformers. The transformers were totally different even though both amps are Marshalls. It was gonna be too costly and time consuming to try to build them theirselves. Paul being the relentless man he is searched for 2 years before he found the right guy to build the transformers. That's how touchy the transformers are. That's one of the reasons Paul is so successful, he is a total perfectionist. Now the finished product is Dwaynes amp on the left side of the cabinet and Jimi's amp on the right side. They're 2 different amps with 2 different transformers sharing only the reverb circuit. Being the guitar very *friendly* person I am I had to have one. All of my buddies love it. I'm good friends with the guitarist who plays for the two living original members of the Lynard Skynard Band, Ed King and Artemus Pyle. He told me its the best amp he's ever played through period. Ed is real sick now (has heart trouble)but if he gets better they want me to go on a small tour with them and play bass. They did Florida back in Jan and I was too sick to go. Its been 35 years since the plane crashed. I think Derrick (their guitar player) just wants to use my amp LOL. It would be a dream come true if Ed and I can get healthy. Artemus has the body and mind of a 40 year old. If you didn't know him you would think he's on speed LOL. Anyway Sri, good luck with your transformer, you've got your work cut out for you.

The Harmon Kardon is an AVR230. 50 watts per channel.Its nothing special though it sounds pretty decent. Its 12 or 13 years old. I bought it new off the internet for $199 while audio stores around here were selling them for 299. The Klipschs are the small ones (Wish they were the big ones) The 5 speaker package. I did splurge and get a 10" woofer. The whole package came in at a little less than a thousand while audio stores were selling the same thing for $1300 to $1500. I would go to an audio store and listen and pretty much pick out what I wanted and go home and buy it off the internet. I'm cheap. I bought a Sony surround sound system for $500 new when they first came out with them in the 80's and my parents still use it today.

Sri- I agree that the older HK stuff was great, but I've not been too impressed with their new digital topology. From the sound of it, you're not either, as far as working on them.

Midnight - I, too, suffer from the effects of too many nights playing in a rock band in dirty little shite hole bars and clubs. My ears are only good for root frequencies up to about 16khz. But I think you'd be suprised how well even damaged ears can pick up on upper register harmonics. Don't let "bad" ears keep you from enjoying quality gear. Especially if you're looking at tube amps. They don't do a great job of playing full range, it's the midrange warmth that sets a tube amp apart.
               
You're absolutly right that an output trafo, on either a guiter or stereo amp must have near perfect values. Sri's idea of winding his own is sometimes the only way to get what you need. Many, many factors must be considered and adjusted for when choosing an impedance ratio for ouput iron. And as for tubes....be careful. If you don't know how to read a tube power curve chart, make sure to only replace tubes with those of the same model number. Otherwise, one of two thing will happen. It will sound horrible, or you'll burn up your expensive new tubes in a matter of hours. Oh, and if your amp has more than one tube per channel, get a matched set.

If either of you are looking for decent prices on tubes, I would suggest "The Tube Store" out of Canada. Great selection of new and NOS. Even some pretty cool boutique tubes.

I should say the HK amps I have tried have all been uniformly good. However I dont buy anything that tips the scale under 50lb. Or a pound a watt ...
Open the suckers up and its an un classified un mitigated disaster ... fuses - all fuses - 8 of em in mt HK avr 7000 in the bottom of the board that is buried under 4 boards ... and can not be pulled out, they need to be desoldered, so you have to get under that board too.
I have cut a hole in the thing and made a removable panel and put the fuses on the bottom of the board ...

Now the flip side is denon ... sounds fine, and open it up ... its well laid out, but its unreliable as hell ... denon will slap a power transistor onto a heat sink with no mica and no thermal compound ...

I should say these all had their high points and their lows ... yamaha my favorite HT amp - RX-v1 - great, dsp3090 - even better, but they had a few dummies ... onkyo TX sr 805 great - tx sr 806 - awful ... so on. pioneer had a disaster in the vsx1020, but I had a vsx 1015, and a 1017 that was simply phenomenal.
HDMI - the first 2-3 generations of it were bad for these. The Onkyo 805 died from HDMI issues a lot. Pioneer 1020 and 1021 too

Cool.
Srinath.