Price Paid:  $1275.00 from UHF magazines audiop

Summary:
I ordered this amp from UHF magazine's website, www.audiophileboutique.com on a Monday, and had it powered up and ready to burn in on Tuesday afternoon.

It came with 4x JJ Tesla KT88's and 5x EI 12au7's.
It appeares that UHF took the time to bench test the unit, because each of the boxes that the tubes came in were labelled with the socket name they were
in. Nice to know that they took the time to do that.

The equipment I currently own is a Vecteur I-4 integrated amp, Cambridge Audio D500SE CD player sitting on vibration isolation feet, JPS speaker / interconnect cables, and Nuance Model 50 speakers (Not many people know this, but these are great speakers, circa 1990)

Right off the bat, the amp sounded awful compared to the I-4, but I expected that. Tubes take time to burn in, so over the course of a week, I let it play at a low level to allow it time to settle in to its full potential.

Every now and then I'd check on it an notice some improvement. After about 50-75 hours of burn in, this thing really openned up!

The soundstage has incredible depth, and is wider than I'm used to hearing on the I-4. The midrange is slightly more pronounced than I'd like from a tube amp, but not overly so. I suspect that the EI 12au7's are responsible for that, and I'd like to try replacing the EI's with some NOS tubes eventually.

With nicely recorded material, the bass comes through beautifully, with a good measure of tightness and punch and the midrange and highs are sweet.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this amp, and highly recommend it.

Strengths:
Good build quality, Excellent sound quality even with the supplied tubes. Nice soundstage.

Weaknesses:
None.