We wanted to love this little amp. We were forced to return it for the following reasons:
-We know tube amps and even though this seems to be a transistor hybrid, after a mere 4 hours of break-in the front face plate, volume and adjustment knobs, USB flash drive VU meter, etc got so burning hot you could hardly touch them. It's normal for any amp, especially a tube amp, to get hot, but NOT where it gets too hot to touch the control knobs. This unit as-is would not last 2 months before the controls, meter, etc would burn up at this rate. Unacceptable.
-The treble and bass pots/knobs are not treble and bass boost or declinations. They are merely light filter types that either muffle or filter some high or low output sounds. Both sound terrible.
- We tried two different types of good speakers- one 4 and on 8 ohms. Sound from any input source sounds defective, muffled, and weak. This is after the 16 hour break in point.
-Left channel was louder than right channel. Turning the amp off and letting it cool down, then removing the tubes from the cheap plastic protection protection towers, no easy task, and reseating them back in did not fix the problem. The 6P plates in the tubes were 'illuminating' differently; probably defective un matched tubes. Also seemed like the dc offsets were not set or calibrated corrected from the factory (amount of balanced power going to the outputs). There is no balance pot/knob.
-There is no way this is a 25w per channel amp. At best after full break in and warm up, maybe 7w inefficient rms per channel at best. The one we got sounded weak and eniemic.
With the amount of frying heat on the front face plate and all front control knobs, meter, etc we do not recommend this to anyone for any reason. We either got a defective one, or this is exactly how it was engineered and made.