FAQ #4

Why don't you offer do-it-yourself power amplifier kits?

We do offer a highly regarded do-it-yourself rebuild kit for the original Dyna St-70: the AVA Ultimate 70 vacuum tube amplifier. The St-70 is reasonably forgiving of a messy layout and minor wiring blunders. You will likely be able to troubleshoot and fix assembly errors before you do much damage, and all you need for final adjustment is a DC voltmeter.

An ultra wide band solid state amplifier is much less tolerant of assembly mistakes and layout errors and takes more sophisticated test equipment for final setup than we can expect an amateur kit builder to have access to.

Those companies that have provided kit built solid state amplifiers in the past have essentially prebuilt and tested the circuit boards and allowed the kit builder to just wire in the power supply and input/output connections. Because the designers did not have control over the layout on kit built units, they had to design slow, overcompensated circuits that were likely to remain stable even with rats-nest wiring techniques and no opportunity for careful final set-up adjustments. This gave more hope of having the completed amplifier work, but insured that it really never worked very well (kind of like putting a 40 mph governor on your Porsche to make sure you don't crash it too badly).

We design and build ultra wide band amplifiers using all the bandwidth available of our MOSFET output devices to insure that no signal in, short of output clipping, can ever cause slew limiting or transient distortion. We must control the layout and use good RF engineering practices to insure absolute stability. We build these circuits into our own new chassis designs and into selected older Dyna and Hafler chassis too using carefully controlled wiring layouts. We test and set final operating parameters using a AC variac, dual trace oscilloscope, distortion analyzer, and square wave generator. Because the exacting layout work and final testing is something we could not control with kit built units, we simply cannot offer our solid state amplifiers as kits and maintain the musical performance and reliability we demand.

You save significantly with an Audio by Van Alstine amplifier as compared to other "high-end" units. We would do you no favors by "dumbing down" our ultra definition amplifiers to the point that they were OK for kit assembly. Enjoy the savings over other brands and our enhanced musicality, but let us build our solid state and hybrid amplifiers for you.