DYNA KITS I GAVE 5 STARS most would now give 4
Has anyone ever built these? How do they sound? I am thinking of building one for fun. I don't think they can compete with my Pass Labs but it should be fun.
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I built a couple of Dyna Kits back in the mid 60's -- a 10 year old could build one -- all transistors if I recall -- separate pre-amp, amp, and tuner. Was a 0-100K that exceeded that on the bench. Some people did not like it because the sound was 'too clean' or as they said 'sounded hollow'. That was through a very large set of AR speakers before they got tiny and small.
Back then there were two top level amps -- Scott (Kit), Marentz and MacIntosh (not kit) and a second tier of Scott (kit, maybe better than Dyna by a tad) -- and being a radio amateur and member of high school club, I can tell you that with access to their equiptment the Dyna met and exceeded every published benchmark -- in fact it exceeded my neighbors (who'd died and i 'inherited' his) Macks in most tests. if I rember marentz's were totally out of our league. Took me a weekend to build the amp and tuner from scratch, the next weekend was taken up with the amp alone (call it Saturday mess around and finish up on Sunday late morning to mid afternoon, though nothing LOOKED complicated, this was back when transistors were reasonably new on the 'hi-fi stereo' market and the circuits were amazing works of engineering. and they were built better than a tank -- the difference being the massive voltage spikes that would fry transistors, but rarely did -- the fuses on the transistors reacted too slow to stop damage, but the Marentz and Mac were nearly impervious and I can't remember that we ever caused a volt/amp spike (that was within reason) that damaged the units -- of course you had the tubes as did Scott to take up a lot of what passed through before the fuse knew what hit it -- that is MY memory. I vagely remember a bet I took that was the cost of the kit, no labor, but the cost of the amp kit if I'd do something stupid like double the amps in a spike, and it came out quicker than snot on wet soap, and still with a .01% distortion at 0-100k. There was SOME damage, and I can't recall it -- but I always rand a very large ground wire -- still do on all my vehicles -- and this was one reason, now I can look at the warranty of a battery, and double it and get about it's real life and real amp-hours plus a push in the voltage department --
For the time, the equiptment, and the engineering, I'd give Dyna the same today as I would have then: 5 stars full on and a '+' if they had one. Others at the time would have given it a 4 or 4+ because of the sound - MAYBE because of the damage that COULD happen with a near lightning hit.
While the Dykakit tuner was not as fancy as others (just a tuner, on-off switch and maybe a near-far knob, or a fine tuning knob -- it was about as simple as you could get, on-off switch, tuner, maybe volume (?) and a sensitivity switch with a tube to give you signal strength rather than a meter like the Scott ( I might have wired that in myself) -- but it was clean, and not the face of something that you would want to see in some Mercury space craft - most would say that the Scott had a better tuner and I'd have to agree, but for design, Dyna, and for price - Dyna, and ease of build, Dyna. And for no wiring of th tuner, a direct nob on the rheostat and a no heat sink (if I remember correctly) the Dyna was at $99 for the tunder and $120 each for the amp and pre-amp - you had a darned near perfect set -- And the 0-100K +/- something like .01% distortion, it beat a lot of our lab equiptment. I approached out lab O-scopes -- I think the one we used was a scope that was just a dumbed down model of a military scope built up by Linton Labs that did a lot of early LASER and glass and glass-lathe work for the military. And the Dyna picked up 0+ cycles, and the scope didn't move until it hit 5???? CPS ---
So, from what I know they were easy to build, had true lab-bench performance, so good that folks from Sierra College came up to look and said demeaing things about it since it was a 'hobby' amp for 'music' and only cost $120 and they'd spent $500+ for their 'real' amps that put out higher distortion at lower watts than the dyna.
So those would give it 3 stars, high-fiers would give it 4 and people who were not afraid to throw the 'bass' switch and HEAR the difference or run it up to it's full 100watts (????????) would give it the 5 stars. I know when I went to a college in Illinois, NIU, used it to boost the signals on their radio telescopes.
Not sure where they are today -- since most of what I do is far different than what I did then -- but I'd say go for it -- they always had exceptional engineering, build solid, quiet units, that were easy and fast to put together -- like in a weekend. I WOULD add a fan were I to do it today, and might even drive it from a second circuit if sound were critical -- esp if you were using an o-scope of today's models, you are more likely to see it than hear it, even at full volume and good speakers.