Lt. Bob
Spread the Daf!
Well ..... I think a lot of it has to do with the transformers. Good transformers cost a lot and if you were to buy the three trannies in this amp from Mercury Magnetics they'd surely cost 150 bucks just for the trannies. And how the trannies saturate ..... the core material ..... is it sealed and damped to reduce vibrations etc ..... that stuff all makes a large difference in the sound. But these things use cheap Chinese trannies that are just whatever wire half assed wrapped around whatever inferior metal core they have ...... just cheap.
I bet I could replace all the trannies with M.M. trannies and totally transform the thing.
Supposedly you can replace the trannies in an Epi Valve Jr and turn it into a kicking little amp.
And I think they take the most basic designs and use them without much tweaking.
According to what I've read about this amp there's a 1Meg resistor that needs to run from a pin on the power tube to ground and when they translated the Univalve design to a cheap Chinese version it inadvertently got left out. There's more to it than that, but supposedly when you add the resistor it cleans up and tightens up.
I suppose when an amp's cheap .... everything about it's cheap right down to the design phase of it.
"Yeah .... that'll work .... no need to test it and tweak it for the best sound".
Better amps will look at every factor right down to how the wires and circuit physical travel. They might sound better in one arrangement or location than they do in another. Cheap ones are good enough if they work halfway well.
Annnnd it doesn't seem impossible to me that the guy who designed the Univalve (a well regarded amp) might not want to make a cheap one sound as good as the more expensive one.
