Sweet Peach vs Meng Yue EL84

[ChrisR1983]

Guys

About to get one of these from HLLYaudio.com. These two seem to be the one that people go for. I've got about £200 to spend including shipping. Its meant to be a bit of a toy to learn a bit more about valve amps and to modifying them a bit to get some decent sound out of it. They'll be driving a pair of Fonken Floorstanders with FE127E in. I like folk music and my room is pretty small - about 2m x 4m

Anyone who has used/modded/heard these can you answer some or all of the questions below?:

Which has the best sound out of the box?
Which is best built?
Which is easiest to make sound 'better'?

Any other detail will help my choice. Being honest I'm swayed towards the Meng as its cheaper and I prefer the way it looks (kind of)

Cheers

Chris

[Globulator]

Originally Posted by ChrisR1983

Which has the best sound out of the box?
Which is best built?
Which is easiest to make sound 'better'?

Any other detail will help my choice. Being honest I'm swayed towards the Meng as its cheaper and I prefer the way it looks (kind of)

I chose the Peach because it is better value, I have not seen the Meng in real life. Each amp is around 10W in power.

Firstly it is an SE and has fewer parts -> easier to mod. It comes with nice SE output transformers, a big choke for the PSU and lots of space. It has PCBs for each FU50, the driver section, the PSU section and MM phono+soft-start. My next mod will replace the driver PCB and plate - just unbolt and go with the new plate and tag strip - simple!

The peach also has solid alloy knobs with a 6mm thick solid alloy panel - it's nicely made in my opinion, safe out of the box too with ground + fuse.

Out of the box sound is poor, instant good sound requires a) new coupling capacitors (0.1uF 400V x 2) and shorting the input cap, b) replace the 6N1 driver for a 6N6p (plug in swap).
So for 4 capacitors and a cheap tube it sounds good.
My 'Hot Sugar' mod sweetens up the sound further, but my next mod will I think make this unbeatable - into the big money (i.e. massively overpriced) amp category at the cost of a few more resistors and a couple of tubes.

My view is the Peach will sound better after final mods. Pure class A single ended is hard to beat and easy to wire. Why mess with 4 tubes when 2 do it perfectly?

I like the EL84 tubes but I'm a real sucker for the 100g ex military 50W RF tube - the GU50. The same factory that makes the sweet peach also makes an awesome point to point wired push-pull FU50 BTW - they bolt stuff together well in my opinion.

[ChrisR1983]

I bought the sweet peach from hllyaudio.com last night. Seems to be the cheapest place and I got it for $308 including shipping. I guess its going to be a long 8 weeks waiting for this :-(