WIth the three footers then perforated bottom cover removed, the guts of Romy 20SE were easily got to.

I rarely saw tube amp coupling caps of these stout dimensions before.

And still there were smaller bypass capacitors piggy-backing the bigger issue.

In keeping with Georg's mantra of resonance control, one spots plenty of applied damping putty.

Even the flying leads to the boards shroud in their own stiff extra ends.

Where some expensive low-power SET monos reviewed recently practiced serious inner shunyata—the Buddhist word for emptiness—Rike clearly believe in parts density. Checking out their innards, you won't wonder where your money went.

"The problem with our capacitors is that burn-in time is very long. This amps needs about 300 hours to sound really good. Until then, it can sound closed-up and constricted but that will change daily during the break-in process."

At eight working hours a day, I'd listen to possibly bad sound for 37 days straight. Damn. And there you thought reviewing was all roses.

"The power supply for our high voltage feed sits beneath the transformer cover which must be removed to see it. Is it important to show that?"

Figuring that prospective buyers would say 'yes', so did I. Georg then emailed this photo, showing a toroidal line transformer next to the high-voltage power supply whilst on the other side of the metal barrier we recognize two toroidal output transformers. The last toroidal rather than EI or double C-core output transformers I'd seen came in Yamamoto's 300B SET. Toroidy of Poland too specialize in them. Now Rike followed suit by reminding us that their choice of output tube and class A2 operation was specifically predicated upon being able to use far less complex output magnetics than high-impedance direct-heated triodes require. And a practical upshot thereof is lower output impedance at the speaker terminals than is typical for this amplifier breed.