Building a tube amp kit.

[solipsistnation]

The board, stuffed., originally uploaded by solipsistnation.

For my birthday I acquired a K-12G stereo tube amp kit from s5electronics.com. It's a pretty basic little kit, and from the research I did beforehand is about the best tube amp you can find for under $200 (kit or otherwise. A read a couple of reviews that said they thought it stood up to $1000ish amps but I guess we'll see). Since this is a second amp and I'm not quite sure where it'll live (either in the bedroom for lounging and listening or on my desk at work as part of the most ridiculous computer speaker setup ever) I don't really need anything too fancy, just something that'll make noise come out of my iPod or whatever.

So, here's the board. It's a cute little kit. The case is about the size of 2 kleenex boxes together. Some of the hardware is a little cheesy-- in particular, I'm replacing the wires they give you to run between the board and the banana jacks for the speakers with something a little heavier and I'm replacing the banana jacks themselves with something a little less likely to short out on the case.

Of course, when I finish I will no longer be able to use this image.