If you’re thinking about purchasing your first tube amp and understandably tempted by the huge selection of Chinese built amps showing up on ebay I should tell you that they are heavy well built amplifiers. The one pictured was purchased for around $600 plus shipping of from China. It’s claim to fame is the super heavy transformers.

This one ended up in my shop for repair when one of the resistors on the circuit board blew up and cooked the board. This incident was believed to be tied to a bad tube. The owner had a new replacement tube ready to go for when it got fixed. Assuming the repair would be no problem the owner was interested in tweaking the amp because he was never that thrilled with sound. I replaced the bad resistor that I assumed failed from a shorted tube and fired it up only to watch different resistors located all over the board heat up and start smoking just before the fuse blew again.

It’s a shame too, because the although the appearance and weight of a $4000 amp is here - the actual circuit design and sound is not.

Many of our customers have purchased amplifiers from us AFTER experiencing similar disappointments. I don’t know what this gentleman is going to do because I’m not going to fix it. With no schematic I’d have to reverse engineer it and even then a repair would only leave us right back at square one with an amplifier that is what it is… ready to break.

So save yourself the cost of a too good to be true amplifier from China and the aggravation and apply it towards something that IS good. It always saves you money in the end.

Steve