Quote Originally Posted by Pigmy Pony View Post
I think you'd struggle to get one for 50 quid, more like £200 is about the norm.

Maybe they got a bit better built later on - I bought one of the very first Cyrus 1s, within a couple of years the paint started falling off the knobs. I had it for about 10 years, and in that time it packed up once - "dry joint" the dealer told me, cost £40 to fix. That might qualify it as "unreliable", everything else I've ever bought lasted way longer than that without issues.
It's not worth more than fifty quid IMO regardless of how much people are paying for them.

Amps crammed into small cases are just never a good idea. Capacitors get stuck next to transistors and heat sinks because there's not enough space to lay it all out optimally, and the heat means they die early.

Never mind the 'space saving'. You're 'saving' a cube of air about 4'' by 4'' by 2''. If that amount of space really matters then you've got much bigger issues to solve.