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About 20 years ago I bought a sealed Heathkit AA-23 for about $200 and stuck it in a closet. I felt an affinity to it because at that time I was working in a building Benton Harbor, MI that some of the Heathkit operations had used. The last copyright date on the materials I could find was 1969.
Huge respect for people back then that could assemble this as a beginner with limited experience. Society must have been better and more practical back in the day.
More pictures of the assembly in the link.
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The two shaft volume control for the kit was very badly balanced, at low volumes it hat the right speaker louder and as you turned it up the left speaker would get louder. Mouser has some of the nice blue 100k Alps Japan pots at $14. This means that I had to put in 0.22 716p Sprague orange drops to replace the 0.022 micas that came with the kit and I also needed new knobs. The final result is a very nice, tactile interface with aluminum replacing the plastic (which are saved along with the original parts).
My daughter loves the amp so it needed a new Cambridge CD player to complement the Technics turntable, Audioengine WiFi and Klipsch Quartet speakers. I would have killed for this setup as a kid!
I love mine. Great punchy midrange bass. It's really unique in that bandwidth. Motown, Jazz, Funk is so much fun on this little gem.
It's kind of industrial, kind of retro-futuristic. Pretty cool.
Thanks for sharing.
The styling is very (appropriately) retro. I am surprised that my kids like it a lot. It is set up running a pair of Klipsch Quartets in my daughters studio and doing an amazing job. Those speakers are not friendly to SE amps, I don't think the impedance is very flat.
Sorry, but that was a lot more valuable and historically significant before you assembled it. And the people who really deserve respect in all this are the engineers and writers who designed and produced these kits so they would be easy and fun for the lay person to build.
That's the way I feel about my Dynaco ST-70 and Scott LK-72 kits. I would prefer to sell them to someone who isn't going to assemble them. Who is that?
Your interest may vary but the results will be same. (Byrd 2020)
I can't compete with the dead. (Buck W. 2010)
Cowards can't be heroes. (Byrd 2017)
Why don't catfish have kittens? (Moe Howard 1937)
"I would prefer to sell them to someone who isn't going to assemble them."
Good for you! In their unassembled state, they're museum pieces with every aspect of the kit process and components available for all to see. Assembled, they're just more vintage stereos. I still remember the thrill of opening every kit I ever bought, and that goes back to my first Knight Kit in 1966. It was truly a unique experience to unpack those boxes.
Yeah...no
Have the fun of unpacking and then running through the build. It is a fine experience. If I had an NR750, or a Mark Donahue AMX, it would get put down the road.
Douglas
Friend, I would not hurt thee for the world...but thou art standing where I am about to shoot.
I have other things I could contribute.
I thought about that, but keeping it in a box didn't seem to help anyone.
The point was that it was not easy to assemble at all. There were also serious compromises in the design that needed to be fixed; way to much gain for line level inputs that needed to be padded down and a compromised power supply. I also added a grounded power cord, because, yikes.
It is sad that this could not be sold today.
Great that it finally got used for what it was meant to be.
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