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Hey all!

A little backstory, years ago I purchased one of the 18watt kits from the BBQ place, it was my first kit and I was low on income and it was the cheapest kit I could find so I went with it. Also, at the time I wasn't up the speed on all the drama and such ill will that's gone on, yadayadayada... But I built the amp and it sounded pretty good. Since then I've built a few other amps from scratch, tweed bandmaster, princeton, lightning from various schematics and layouts I've found on all the different forums.

Getting to now then, I was never totally happy with the 18w and became more and more so after finding 18watt.com and hearing how much better other kits sounded than mine and how much better the layouts were, so I stumbled on trinity a few months ago and decided to gut the 18w and redo it trinity sIII style.

Well I just finished it using just the chasis and transformers from the old kit and It already sounds and looks much better. My, longwinded I know , question is: the transformer I used has 270v HT taps instead of the 290v of the trinity PT so as a result all my voltages are lower by a good bit. Is this a major problem then? The amp is running good, very quiet, sounds good, no redplating and the bias looks good. Just hoping someone could shed some light on this for me. I also wondered about replacing the glass rec with diodes as that would up my B+ but i'm not sure how much or how to design that.

So hopefully this isn't out of place and if it is my apologies. Thanks.

Hey, It's not really a problem, the amp will work fine. It probalby wont have the headroom, etc, and the 12AX7s will be running pretty low. You could use a SS rectifier. It's easy to wire one in across the pins of your EZ81 and see how the voltages / sound is. If it was too high B+, you could drop some volts with a Zener like we do on the Triwatt for the 6V6.

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Stephen
Web: www.trinityamps.com. Facebook: facebook.com/trinityamps. Twitter: @trinityamps

Cool cool cool. Thanks so much. Yeah I've been tinkering with it and it sounds pretty great. I did go with the SS rectifier and got the voltages a little closer, still fiddling with them though. And I'm not really sold on the OT I have either and all the reading I've done on the web says to get a trinity OT so I think that'll be ordered as soon as I get a little more money in my pocket. Consequently, I wish I'd have just gotten a trinity kit 3 years ago instead of the one I chose but hey, live and learn right?

Live 'n Learn. One thing I learned, is quality is always worth it.

_________________
Stephen
Web: www.trinityamps.com. Facebook: facebook.com/trinityamps. Twitter: @trinityamps