Carina EL34 tube amp... very fine sounding amp hand crafted by Eddie Vaughn, but sadly no longer made. Eddie, know that all your hard work and artistry as imbued in your amps are loved and appreciated to this day...

It took awhile for Eddie to build it -- about a year -- but I was never in any hurry. I've always been appreciative of the artists among us... I always saw Eddie as an artist and I know what a difficult time artists can go thru to remain true to their art. I have enjoyed this amp many years now, so way longer than its 'gestation' period...

I've always looked at audio that way... it's a blend of technical, and of course there are cost and business aspects, but I've always felt audio is closer to 'art' than engineering... All you have to do is hear something just so beautifully moving ... well it's spellbinding. And I say this even though I was trained as an engineer...

Know that a lot of these tube amps like Eddie's and all the Decware amps are hand crafted, hand soldered with point to point wiring...hand built component by component -- each and every one of them...

I'll stop editorializing, but I just wanted to convey that these hand crafted amps can sometimes take awhile to receive versus going to a general electronics store and picking something off the shelf that day... So you have to weigh what you are willing to wait for... 

For speakers : The Hornshoppe Horns (a 2nd pair I have, this pair has the newer Fostex 126en drivers). I couple the Horns with a smaller open baffle subwoofer, consisting of a Hawthorne Audio 10" Augie driver driven by a Rythmik Audio plate amp. Sadly Hawthorne Audio is no longer in business.

I also use in this setup a small desktop FiiO E09K/ E17 DAC and headphone amp combo which I can also feed from a laptop via USB running Foobar2000.

Or sometimes I just feed the Fiio setup, connected to the Carina tube amp, with my Colorfly C3 portable music player, playing uncompressed WAV audio files.

The turntable is an Audio-Technica AT-LP-120 - about $300 on Amazon. I replaced the phono cartridge with a Shure M97xE. That turntable/ Shure cartridge combo sounds good and is fairly low cost at about $100.