Ever build an amp that worked but sounded bad?

Must've been about 15 years ago, I built a tweed Champ/Princeton following a Angela Instruments catalogue (they were paper back then). It was great fun and a proud moment. And it even brought me and my father closer together because he used to mess with hi-fi amps when he was young.

Anyway, it looks cool, and it's totally functional, but it just sounds bad. It sounds dark. If I put a dirt pedal in front of it, then I can make up for some of the darkness by cranking up the tone/treble, and the boost and distortion make the amp scream.

But by itself, it's a dog.

It just seems like everyone's building amps that sound great.

It happens all the time. Use it as a learning experience.

5F1's are dark by nature. Bright caps across the Volume pot can help at most volumes, but for overdriven stuff - you'll need a small value bypass cap on the 1st stage cathode (maybe a 1uF or 2.2uF).

It just seems like everyone's building amps that sound great.

I guess what isn't clearly conveyed with every "sucessful" build is the typical tweaking stage, which can go on forever. I personally spend a lot of time nitpicking a fresh build, and generally driving myself crazy in the process.

I've yet to fire up a project and be thrilled right away 90% of the time, even if it's biased perfectly, all my voltages look good, speaker is broken in, I've got nice tubes in it, etc.

I think that is why many of us are tweak freaks - we're trying to reverse engineer amp designs that are up to roughly a half of a century old! That last 5% or so of tweaking can drive you nuts. At least it drives me nuts!

Along with JC's advice, I'd just generically suggest to tweak it a bit at a time until you get it as close to what you were expecting to hear as possible. Or come back to it somewhere down the road - you may have fresh ideas on what to tweak.