I note one customer review on Bottle Head forum of someone who "upgraded" from ACA monoblock to MonAmour 2A3 monoblock but not too much of a Leap to Audio Note Kit power amp. What's people's build experience of Bottle Head or ANK product?
I've got Bottlehead and ANK kits. I doubt you will be able to find a negative experience with Bottlehead on the net. You will easily find bad experiences with ANK.
As for me, I built a DAC 2.1. Brian is responsive on the front end and marginally so through the building process. Strangely, there are two different schematics for portions of the 2.1 which made it difficult to know whether or not I had received the correct parts. In some cases, I definitely did not. Eventually, as I found more and more parts which were not to spec and was experiencing oscillation, demanded that all parts be sent exactly as spec. That's when he stopped responding to me.
Personally, I would suggest Bottlehead. Support is extremely good. There's a large online community as well. I think it speaks volumes that Brian long ago deactivated the online forums for ANK offerings. There's also a lot of hand-wavey glim-glam marketing associated with ANK even though, by and large, their entry-level offerings aren't anything soecial. The Bottlehead guys couldn't be more allergic to that.
Build-wise, ANK was marginally easier though a bit less satisfying since a lot of the construction involved PCBs.
Just my two cents.
Thanks for that - I've looked at photos of construction for both - your comments confirm what I can see in photos that the Bottlehead kit looks a bit more messy to construct. I'm a draughtsman and was a welder (not an electrical engineer) and deal in schematics and following plans exactly. If I have all the correct bits the soldering will be good with everything in the right place. I can deal with the mess but if the parts are different I'd struggle. Had minor grief with B1 Korg kit transposing 323 resistors for 232 or whatever no they had written on the side - i'd have done better with colour coded resistors. 🙂
Totally agree with Thekak's comments about Brian Smith of ANK. In the end you get a quality product but it takes time after getting refunds to buy your own correct parts. Sadly Brian is not receptive to feedback.
Hi,
I built the SEx amp from Bottlehead many years ago. Shipped to the UK, it arrived with everything well packed. I'd never built an amp of any kind before and managed without any problems. The instructions came as pdf files ok a disc. They were easy to follow and well thought out. Also, if you have any problems at all, like I asked them about sound in one of the channels , they sent me out a new tube (or pair, I can't remember) and were really helpful. Turned out that the hum was my fault in the end.
Definitely recommend
I built the SEx amp from Bottlehead many years ago. Shipped to the UK, it arrived with everything well packed. I'd never built an amp of any kind before and managed without any problems. The instructions came as pdf files ok a disc. They were easy to follow and well thought out. Also, if you have any problems at all, like I asked them about sound in one of the channels , they sent me out a new tube (or pair, I can't remember) and were really helpful. Turned out that the hum was my fault in the end.
Definitely recommend
There is help on HiFi Haven as well if you need it. A lot of Bottle Head stuff built and a guy who works building their stuff hangs out there as well.
I built a bottlehead moreplay preamp as my second diy project, ACA was the first. The instructions were great, all the parts were correct and it sounds nice. For me the most difficult part was making some of the mechanical connections to things before soldering.