heh, I have no idea why they failed aside from me maybe tweaking the trimpots wrongly and cooking something so rinse/repeat is all I can think of right now.
On another matter of the Beta, If I wanted to route the speaker signal to a couple of different devices internally (stax, sony transfo boxes and XLR for K1000) can I use 4 pin XLRs to swap speaker outputs?
So.. Binding post bananas to XLR male > Fem XLR 1,2,3 on the back > Stax, Sony and Front panel XLR phones or are XLRs not rated for the 18wpc these dish out.