Although it times it felt like I had just opened a box and tipped a bunch of electrolytic caps into it.
The pedal isn't finished yet as I will be putting a 4-knob OD into it as well, the Broadcast being used as a boost for the OD. But the Broadcast is working. And it sounds great - much like a regular Broadcast but maybe a tad louder? Hard to say. Leaving out the transformer doesn't seem to have hurt it at all - it sounds much the same as my other two which were built stock on Pedal PCB boards. One was a Duocast, the other a Broadcast. In all of them I have used a Russian MP20 PNP Ge transistor which works very well.
I guess that if the transformer was a 1:1 maybe they used it to avoid interference with other effects? I don't know, but I do know it sounds bloody great without the transformer too. The Vero board is larger than I like - it will fit into a 125 but not a 1590B. Some of those caps are huge.