Point to point wiring.

Albert, don't you need to settle down a little? No-one even knows what a Pinto is anymore!

Its easy to assume that you are a millionaire since you have such a wacked stereo *and* you live in Dallas, *and* you get a tax write-off on your SUV. Its an innocent enough mistake. Now if you lived in Wisconsin, you would be safe from such assumptions and you could rest at night, knowing you were finally getting enough cheese :)

I suppose I should put in my two bits about handwiring. Its Good. You can control stray capacitance, you can build circuits with custom wiring if need be, servicability, updatability and upgradability are improved. If laid out properly, bandwidth is improved and the stray capcitance caused by layout is of a better quality (a circuit board must be regarded as a form of capacitor- no-one wants to listen to capacitors with a fiberglass dielectric). If done efficiently, it is more reliable, especially if you have hot tubes and tube sockets, and in such cases often not any more expensive. I have more reasons, but I degress. The real reason we are here is to give Albert a hard time.

Huh. Is that anything like that time we were in San Francisco?

Hard time? Get it? Oh, never mind :)

On a more serious note (somehow back on topic), I don't think anyone pointed out here that point to point wiring is a much bigger deal for tube amps then transistor amps. Tubes being high impedance devices, they are affected to a much greater degree by stray capacitance then transistors. To control the variables thus introduced, point to point wiring can be an elegant solution. OTOH for transistors, for the most part, its a red herring.

There is certainly some truth to that. I have seen arc-over, due to circuit board contamination, that has heavily damaged PCBs in some tube amps I have serviced over the years. This is something that does not happen with point to point wiring.

Vacuum tube audio equipment that is point to point wired survives much longer (and is therefore preferred) in tropical climates.