Hi Everyone,
New to the forum, greetings!
Got my hands on a Trifly kit last week and finished on Sunday, just wanted to share my experience!
Overall impression: What a great little amp! Came well packaged, well documented, is very peddle-friendly and surprisingly loud (I thought) considering the low wattage. I have a 12AU7 on order to see how that affects the overall volume, will be experimenting with some lower
mu preamp tubes as well (my future goal is to get as high-gain and low-volume as possible).
The build was straightforward with great instructions. There are effects pedals more complicated to assemble (but likely not as dangerous
). Included is lots of extra info on how tubes work and how the different parts of the circuit affect the sound (will be trying out the switchable pre-amp gain mod for sure!)
Made a few errors along the way, namely the jumper layout on the reverse of the circuit board ('correct' layout in the pictures further down), as well as having some long component leads sticking out the bottom that were arcing with the tube sockets (sacrifices were made to the fuse-lord).
All-in-all sounds really nice for such a small package; very little hiss even at full volume despite my imperfect soldering and inattention to cable routing. Tubes start to break up with the volume around 11 o'clock and sound really good to me at about 2.
Looking forward to trying her out in a live situation and through some different cabinets, so far I've only used the following signal chain:
Les Paul Special (P-90) -> Trifly -> THD Hotplate (sigh urban environments) -> 4x12 (Celestion g12t-75).