Elekit of Japan, winner of the 2018 Mono & Stereo Best Buy Award for their TU-8500 Preamp, continues to buck the trend by coming up with very high quality equipment at super low prices. How cheap is cheap? At the 2019 Montreal Audiofest, we discovered the Fezz Audio Titania KT88 Integrated tube amp for only CAD$ 3,000 (or USD$ 2,250), and that is real cheap already. But the Elekit TU-8340VK is cheaper by another $ 1,000 dollars!
How is this possible? We don’t really know, and do not really care to find out, lest the company owner suddenly wakes up one morning and realize how cheap his products are and decides to raise the price.
The TU-8340VK is a push pull amplifier kit with a starting price of less than $ 1,250. You do have to read the fine print, because the $ 1,250 price does not come with tubes and you do have to assemble the amp yourself. You have a choice of using EL34, 6L6, 6550, KT88, KT120, or even KT150. Even if you are to add about $ 400 dollars in tube cost, the amp would still come out to less than $ 1,700! If you are technically challenged, you can pay Victor Kung of VKMusic.ca (US/Canada Distributor) to assemble the whole thing for you for a small fee.
The TU-8340VK puts out about 42 Watts in Ultra-Linear mode when using KT88 output tubes. It has a Semi-Automatic bias adjustment by a push of a button, so it even takes care of the biasing for you.
For approx. $ 2,000 dollars, the Elekit TU-8340VK is likely one of the cheapest, yet high quality KT88/EL34 based tube amp on earth.
by Richard H. Mak, Analog Editor
For more information, please contact Victor Kung at www.VKMusic.ca