Bumfluff101
Member
This is my second Hotkits build and it's an absolute beast!
This was a genuinely challenging build with very tight tolerances both on the board itself but also trying to get it into the enclosure (I had to add a gasket for a couple of extra mm of height so I could get the backplate on).
I hit a bit of a problem during initial testing when one of the tubes turned out to be dead and whilst testing all of them I ended up blowing the tube LEDs by accidentally connecting the tube high voltage line to them. Desoldering and replacing them when the tube boards were already in place was not fun at all!
Soundwise it hits like a sledgehammer. Heavy and articulate hard rock and metal tones are all present and correct and the clean channel is nice to. I run it into a Nux Studio MkII with just a power amp / IRs active and it sounds great. The clean channel can take overdrive / distortion pedals as well giving you even more options and it has an fx loop with a level trim on the send to.
Lots of flexibility in the tone with loads of mini-toggles (Cut, Boost, C45, Fat, Bright) that allow for deep tone sculpting across the different channels and most importantly you can actually hear what they do.
All in all well worth the build and although the Hotkits guy is a bit old school and only sells through facebook he does have sound samples of all this products which I think is a neat idea. I would say that I use a 12v 3amp power supply - the build guide says you can get away with two but I wanted to be sure.
This was a genuinely challenging build with very tight tolerances both on the board itself but also trying to get it into the enclosure (I had to add a gasket for a couple of extra mm of height so I could get the backplate on).
I hit a bit of a problem during initial testing when one of the tubes turned out to be dead and whilst testing all of them I ended up blowing the tube LEDs by accidentally connecting the tube high voltage line to them. Desoldering and replacing them when the tube boards were already in place was not fun at all!
Soundwise it hits like a sledgehammer. Heavy and articulate hard rock and metal tones are all present and correct and the clean channel is nice to. I run it into a Nux Studio MkII with just a power amp / IRs active and it sounds great. The clean channel can take overdrive / distortion pedals as well giving you even more options and it has an fx loop with a level trim on the send to.
Lots of flexibility in the tone with loads of mini-toggles (Cut, Boost, C45, Fat, Bright) that allow for deep tone sculpting across the different channels and most importantly you can actually hear what they do.
All in all well worth the build and although the Hotkits guy is a bit old school and only sells through facebook he does have sound samples of all this products which I think is a neat idea. I would say that I use a 12v 3amp power supply - the build guide says you can get away with two but I wanted to be sure.
