Budget SET or SEP recommendations?

The fire amp is not going to be biased high enough to run kt150's or even kt120's unless you have the model made for kt150.You could probably change some resistor values and bias the 150's with the proper voltage.

Being a member of a local audio club I have heard almost all of Dennis's amps and I liked the el84 version the best if you have the right speakers,the kt88 is good too.

Kenny.

I'd recommend looking at Don Sachs' custom-built KT88 amp.

Don will custom build to your specs so the price ranges between $2,495 and $3,199.

I have his 6NS7 based preamp and can attest to Don's attention to detail and craftsmanship.

Kdude66: When I bought the Fire Bottle amp, Dennis Had did respond to my question (via Ebay of course) regarding KT150s saying that my December 2016 amp would work fine using 150s. However, the GL KT88s sound so good with the Sonist speakers (and now that a new Morrow cable has spent the seemingly requisite 400 plus hours breaking in) I don’t really care about tube swapping at the moment. Actually I care (deeply), but I just don’t wanna. It’s my understanding that EL84s result in the amp producing around half the power available with other tubes…that might be wrong, but my brain is deluged with the hundreds of pages of discussion I’ve read about this amp so things are getting fuzzy…except in the amp. I just checked out the Don Sachs amps and they’re beautiful, but not Single Ended as per the gist of this conversation, unless I missed something (extremely likely).

I have the 2A3C Dared which is a SET integrated amp.  3 inputs no phono stage..., ran it on klispchorns, then on some avantegarde 3 ways and some zu audio .  Its super clean It is really nice and easy to roll tubes.  Its my basement system.   I on my main system Have a SEP Inspire pre amp by Dennis Had, he was with cary audio before, love his preamp....   Love it, its cleaner than the dared, but cost more and is only a preamp the dared is an integrated.  Its feeding into some mono extreme Klauss amplifiers, odyssey.   I would go with the fire bottle amp if i didn't like the dunlavys with a little more power on them.   I kinda wanna buy one of those amps just to have down the road, but then will have to by a matching pre amp... anybody want a steal of a deal on a dared 2a3c?

If you want inexpensive and fun to get into it, I would recommend two amps.  I have both of these and that is what got me started on tubes.

Tube Cube 7 if you have very efficient speakers.  It has a better model of tubes than the current miniwatts, so better rolling options if you like.

Aiqin/Oldchen EL34 amp - discussion here - twice the power, nicely built, quite affordable.