Good point. In this discussion we have addressed only those issues dealing with commercially produced amps that sound good for a reasonable price that happen to be built in China. You absolutely can build a great amp for 1000% that will sound better than most of the 5000% amps made commercially not to mention you can custom tailor the parameters for your speakers. But my point stands, if the amp sounds very good and I am sure Colinhester knows his stuff; then bad transformers must not matter to the quality of sound. If you can make a good sounding amp with poor quality parts then why spend that extra money. I pose this question rhetorically since I have spent planty of dough on amps. He claims the amp is excellent and I believe him and even using your analogy of the el-84 SET his amp is an integrated with I think a phono stage included. You would need another 400 for that and the labor and at the end it is worth diddly to anyone else. So is this a bargain or what? (Please understand I am now working on my second homebuilt so these questions are a form of self-justification et al.) J.R.