Zenith 5L29 Single Ended Tube Amp

 

Winter is coming and I finally got around to doing a bit of work on this Zenith 5L29 single ended pentode tube amp. I won this on Ebay about a year ago and it sat in storage. I finally have the time and space to work on tube amps again. 

This little guy is probably maxed out around 5-6 watts per channel. This unit comes with bass, treble, bass boost and volume. It runs two EL84, 12AX7 and a 6FQ7 with 5Y3 rectifier.

So far I just added the speaker terminals along with new RCA input jacks and CL90 inrush current limiter to bring the voltage down a bit from the wall socket. No cap work has been done on it yet.

This is a great little single ended unit and sounds great in my office with a not very efficient pair of Monitor Audio MA-9 speakers.

These are worthy little amp if you can pick one up, super easy to get up and running as a stand alone amp.

November 3, A little update, this little amp sounds fantastic and has really grown on me. I do not use the Bass Boost switch as it takes away the detail of this amp, I may just rewire this circuit out of the amp period.

Loving this amp, what more can I say.....

Pioneer SX-3700 Receiver

 

Fun, this Pioneer SX-3700 receiver showed up for me this week, the last of the silver faced Pioneer before the full digital champagne series that followed.

This SX-3700 was rated at 45WPC and had a mix of digital and analog tuning, best of all it had the Fluroscan meters so you could watch your music as you listened to it, as was all the rage in the late 70's and early 80's receivers.

 This unit is in pretty good shape over all and is missing the original on/off power switch knob. I had an older spare Harman/Kardon one kicking about and stuck it on. 

Nice sounding unit for a solid state receiver and if you search the audio threads some think it was better sounding than the generation proceeding this one. I have been noticing these silver faced units are fetching a premium these days.

I will probably keep it in rotation for a bit and let it go to a new owner. Let me know if anyone is interested.