This is certainly a mess.... and it doesn't work! After turning it on and seeing no smoke or sparks, I found that it did not make any noise at all. Turning the volume up I could hear a small amount of noise and very little music. I turned it off and started to trace all solder joints and measured all resistor values to be sure I did not solder the wrong parts in the wrong place. It was then I discovered that I had received the wrong value power resistor for the 2a3 cathode section. Instead of 880 ohm I got 50k ohm. I could not find any 880 ohm resistors in stock at Mouser so I opted to parallel two 1.8k for a total of 900 ohms. I am awaiting these parts this week (October 15, 2003).
The input jacks are Cardas, the binding posts are pure copper from Cardas (these are overkill), the power supply caps are ASC polypropylene in oil, the drivers are Philips 5691, the 2a3 are Chinese Valve Art, the rectifier is a Philips 5U4GB, and the output trannies are One Electron UBT-3. The gold paint looks OK from afar... In the picture above, I did not attach the volume knob yet.