They were able to do so because their marketing and customer support were second to none. None of them worked the first time I plugged them in, and I got to experience the joys of debugging electrical circuits that were so crammed together they required a magnifying glass and tweezers to manipulate the parts.įollowing an extended bout of debugging intermingled with highly colorful cursing, I realized that Bottlehead was the IBM of tube amp kits.įor those of you too young to remember the heyday of mainframe computers, IBM dominated the market with products that were universally acknowledged to be inferior to their competitors. In addition, of the three kits I purchased, not one included all the parts (and given that a “kit” is just a box of parts, that’s a bit of an oversight). Barring that, they are one long, continuous exercise in frustration.īottlehead designers appear to be engaged in a contest to see who can cram the most components into the smallest possible space, and hide solder joints behind other components so it’s impossible to get a soldering iron on them. I suppose they are easy if you have the patience of Job, the manual dexterity of a neurosurgeon, and the electronic debugging skills of a post-doctoral electrical engineer. Early in my explorations with tubes I bought several Bottlehead kits because they were the most popular tube amps, and they were advertised as “easy to build”. I guess that’s what led me to believe they were “easy to build”.
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