Saturday, February 9, 2008

DIYTUBE Dynaco ST-70 - Refurbished

Vintage Dynaco ST-70 Modified with DIYTUBE ST-70 Driver Board

35 wpc in stereo and 70 w in mono
Completed in June 2007


The ST-70 is an amp that no tube aubiohobbyists should live without. This was an eBay find that was in pretty good working + cosmetic condition. However, I wan't terribly impressed with its sonic characteristics, particularly it's tubby bass and lingering muddiness in mids+highs. So, it was was time for a makeover.


...and after!!!!


The chassis was completely gutted and cleaned first with Fast Orange to get rid of years of organic deposits. The chassis was then polished several times with Turtle Wax's chrome polish, followed by Blue Magic metal polish, all of which are cheaply avaiable at local discount autopart stores. All tube sockets were replaced with ceramic octals.


and after...

Shannon Park's DIYTUBE ST-70 driver boards are a standard upgrade of the 7199 boards. The tube complement is 1x 12ax7 and 2x 12au7. The design is pretty much a time tested modified Mullard design dating back 50 years. The board allows individual biasing of output tubes for push pull perfection.



Under the hood...everthying was rewired and neated tucked away.

The only thing that's left to be done on the amp is to retube. 3 Svetlana and 1 Mullard EL34s (Russian productions) are on the power duty for now, and I would like to experiment with 6L6GCs or KT77s. All in all, the restoration was a great success wiht much improved sonics. It pumps out some serious wattages of pure listening enjoyment - deep and accurate bass and very forward mids. Great sounding amp!

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