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Tube amplifier El Cheapo
Page 3: Better build your own
Last updated: Monday March 8, 2010
I've been listening to the Suppo EL84 amp for a while now, and I've been making some modifications to it that indeed made the little amp sing. So what is my evaluation? For 145 Euros this little amp is a surprise: The sound is very much OK, but the build quality and safety sucks. Most important, as shipped, the amp is very unsafe and a lot of work needs to be done in order to make the amp suitable for the European region.
Would it be worth while to build your own from scratch then? I think so: Like most things in life you get what you paid for. And even if we do think that safety is standard, in China people will save on quality and safety it seems in order to ship a product fast and make money.
If you are an experienced DIY-er and want this amp as a starting point for your own project, then maybe the SuppoAudio amplifier is your choice. But, I'm sure that you like to make modifications easy or make your own design choices and than you're probably limited by the part choices already made for this amp.
Any tube amp is as good as it's output transformers, and these are relatively expensive and consume sometimes 30% of the budget. This means that making enhancements other than some initial mods will mean that at some moment in time the output transformers need to be upgraded. This is certainly the case with the Suppo amp as the output transformers are probably limiting what you can reach with the current parts (in his latest emails, Joe from Suppo told us that the output transformers are probably not safe enough to be used for that purpose). It is questionable whether this will at that moment in time be a good investment of your money. It's like upgrading your Fiat 500 in order to turn it into a Ferrari and expect it to be a safe ride...
I've decided to continue my project to build a EL84 amp on a separate page. So please continue reading here. For the moment this is just ideas on paper, so check back to see whether I made some progress with the El Dorado amp.
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