HI John,
Thanx for the post. What i meant was, older amps that use high quality trannies & chokes will outperform CHEAP new tube amps...with cheaped out output trannies & poor power supplies.
BTW, taking an older amp like the scott, and doing mods like: eliminating the preamp section, recapping with high quality caps, changing some key resistors....can lead to a pretty darn good amp. I think there are people on the web who do just this. If you want your final amp (yeah right...you KNOW you have the bug and NOTHING is final), i would suggest an amp that is built new, with high quality parts. Should cost you between $500-$2000 in parts, depending on what kind of speakers you have, what circuit topology you need, etc.
I agree with Dave's post below that output trannies sound slighlty better after being broken in. THis is typically a 1000 hours or so, depending on the iron. After that, in my OPINION, the differences will be almost too subtle to bother about.
hope this helps.
-akhilesh