I agree to extent with the notion that... " we have to double the price because those audiophiliac fools won't buy our product if it is too cheap and more mysterious they are the better"... type of businesses are what is killing the audio nowadays. But, I'd give a little credit to well recognized winding houses to have little decency and integrity and trust their expertize a little , especially if they are in the market for many years and had many happy customers. I try to understand the importance of specs but I did commission a custom OPT from self proclaimed guru. I didn't want to spend the money for Tango transformer which was specified in the project . The custom Opt has very good specs and measures excellent, too bad the sound doesn't match the measurements superiority.
It only takes a little searching for high quality, reasonably priced components that will perform as good as wished for. No need to go with the first pretty "expensive" girl that comes down the pike.
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Agreed . I think $300-600 is pretty respectable budget for both engagement ring and a pair of SET output transformers ( many would probably disagree with respect to engagement ring ..😀) Lower than $300 and I'd buy used Chinese amp instead.
I think the OP only wanted 10W. I built a SE with parallel 6BQ5 and UL with 10W trannies for under $100 for the pair, shipped.
But he seems to be long gone, anyway. 1 post and ...poof.
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Damn so many answers lol. The amp was actually only intended to drive a pair of tweeters that would be crossed at 5-7khz or so to assist a full range. I wanted something fun to build and wanted to use output transformers that could handle the whole audio spectrum if I ended up repurposing the amp but that's the reason I would only need a few watts. I definitely wouldn't try running magnepans off of a SET amp unless it was a beefy SET lol. Anyways if I do go forward with this project I'll probably end up going with an Edcor transformer or something similar. While it seems that I can see a bump in performance from spending more, it isn't worth 10x more money on a first project that I really have no idea what I'm doing anyways to begin with. And I'd rather do 10 cheaper projects that all sound good and have 10 cool unique amps than 1 perfect piece. But that might just be the broke college student in me speaking 😀
It's funny what some mfg's. or sellers consider "full range." About the only thing that comes close is a large, tri-axial car speaker, if you want something compact and full range.
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It actually really is a good full range, it's the Dayton rs100-4. It just has some cone breakup above 10k but it still sounds really good full range. I just plan to add a tweeter with my own amp in the future as a fun project and to see how adding a tweeter would change the clarity in the upper end. And it would be an easy low power needed amp that would be great with tubes for treble and it would actually be usable lol.
I always use a correctly selected $1.25 slow-blow "T" fuse in my HT+ This small device is a very wise investment. I challenge anyone to hear its impact on the music.
Proper measuring equipment AND years of experience.
Otherwise you will probably be fooled by the wider bandwidth OPT 😉
you can find excellent OPTs with let's say 10Hz-50KHz bandwidth
but also lesser grade OPTs with 10Hz-500KHz bandwidth
it really takes more than average DIYer skills and equipment to read the differences
As I said above is very hard to evaluate audio transformers by looking at specs and measures.
Even for the very same people that have designed those OPTs.
Experience and open minded listening are fundamentals to make great audio transformers.
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