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Typo in footnote 2, should be Garber, not Farber.
But yeah, the only way that address could have possibly been any cooler is if it were 3 Watts Street.
se
The 6SL7 and 421A dual-triodes get their plate voltage from a 5Y3 full-wave rectifier, a tube that Don Garber also uses with the SET amps he builds around the RCA 45 output triode. That tube's output is smoothed by a frame-type inductor and a trio of modestly sized capacitors. The B+ voltage for the 421A output tube is specified as just under 290V.
All of this is put together with the care and characteristic artistry of every Fi amp and preamp I've seen. It bears repeating that Garber is an accomplished painter as well as an electronics manufacturer, and his background as an artist has obviously determined the styling of Fi's commercial gear. But a closer look reveals how the physical and electronic aspects of his designs relate to one another. While some builders experiment endlessly with different brands of capacitors and resistors, Garber applies his time to auditioning every parts layout imaginable: Multiple chassis layers increase his options, and offer the advantage of keeping signal paths as short as possible.
That said, the quality of parts used in the Fi 421A is in keeping with Garber's own perfectionist agenda. Connectors are Kimber and Cardas (they get along fine), and Garber's coupling capacitor of choice for this model is a Rel-Cap polypropylene film capacitor. "It's a very good cap," he said, "and it's not too expensive. I could try something else, but it would drive the price up, and I'm happy with the amp as it is." Garber has a reputation for keeping prices almost crazy-low, given the materials and workmanship on tap, and that carries through to the Fi 421A. If priced in accordance with the industry's usual five-to-one ratio of retail price to manufacturing cost, the Magnequest output transformers alone for this model would set the consumer back over $2000and that's not counting the mains transformer, choke, new-old-stock tubes, and casework.
And then there's the sound
I'm as shallow, unthinking, and self-consciously perverse as the next guy. Whenever I'm confronted with a very low-power amplifier, my first itch is to try it with a big recording of big music, just to see what happens. So it was with the Fi 421A and its 4Wpc maximum outputwhich I used to drive my high-sensitivity Audio Note AN-E SPe loudspeakers. (Call me unadventurous, but I'm still in no big hurry to try the Fi with my Quad ESLs.)
Within minutes I'd ditched the power-music idea, having realized that my newly made Fi needed some running-in time: Straight out of the box it sounded slightly thin, and strangely (for a stereo amp with a single output device) bereft of center-fill. That would all change for the betterdrastically so, almost comically sobut for now it was obvious that playing orchestral music during the Fi's first week in my home wouldn't tell me anything about anything. I sneaked up on the bigger stuff during the Fi's early days by limiting my fare to early Dylan, early Peter, Paul & Mary, early records by the late, great Bert Jansch, and Nathan Milstein's recording of J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo (LP, Deutsche Grammophon 2721087). During those soft days I noted that the Fi 421A was dead quiet when there was no signal present: I had to strain to hear even the faintest ghost of hum during idle. And all of those records sounded open, clear, compelling, and lovelyespecially the Dylan and the Peter, Paul & Mary. Much has been made of SET amplifiers' knack for reproducing solo lines with greater-than-average presence, and with the Fi 421A that was especially true of human voices.
When the time was right, I graduated to large-scale music, including my enduring favorite recording of Mahler's Symphony 3, by Jascha Horenstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, on an LP made in 1970, a time when even classical-record artwork got the same pseudo-cerebral treatment as the pop jackets of the day (Nonesuch HB-73023). Sure enough, the many drum crashes and orchestra tuttis throughout the first movement were thoroughly satisfying, as long as I didn't turn the volume knob too far to the right. In fact, double basses, cellos, timpani, and orchestral bass drums had exceptional weight and timbral richness through the Fi 421A: In my system, the single-tube Fi sounded warmer than the 2A3 Stereo, with slightly more bass weight. More important, the Fi 421A proved almost mesmerizingly musical in the most basic sense: It was freer from timing and pitch distortion than any other tube amp of my experience. Each of the simple, beguiling melodies in the third movement of the Mahler 3, What the animals in the woods tell me, was played with startling musical clarity. The posthorn solo in particular was riveting and impossible to ignore, as were the trumpet lines toward the end of the movement, and contralto Norma Procter's solo in the following Misterioso.
Popular music benefited from the same qualities. The percussive sounds and electronic pulses throughout Andrew Bird's weirdly beautiful "Not a Robot, But a Ghost," from a rip of Noble Beast (AIFF file from CD, Fat Possum FP1124), were as tangible as the woodwinds in its opening bars were colorful and lovely. Every song on Roxy Music's Avalon (SACD/CD, Virgin 5 83871 2) sounded fine through the Fi, with spacious, colorful keyboard washes, appropriately tight, deep bass, and the sort of low-level clarity that made even the subtlest detailssuch as the extra words in the chorus of "True to Life"easier to enjoy.
But this great, simple amplifier shone most brightly with simpler recordingsof which there's no better example than the recent album Sleep with One Eye Open, by Chris Thile and Michael Daves (AIFF file from CD, Nonesuch 527603-2). This is a collection of mostly old bluegrass standardsthree of the songs were written by the late Lester Flattperformed by two young, musically adventurous, and very high-energy singers and players. The Fi 421A was well suited to this material, not only in its clear, organically textured, and altogether natural reproduction of instrumental and vocal sounds, but also in its spatial performance. Though the 421A didn't offer the largest sense of scale I've heard at home, it nevertheless allowed Thile's ancient Gibson mandolin to sound eerily present in the gentle instrumental "Ookpik Waltz" (a 20th-century fiddle tune by Canadian fiddler Frankie Rodgers). Listening carefully, I could hear and almost see the wooden surfaces of the instrument's body radiating in the studiojoined moments later by the larger presence of Daves's steel-string guitar. This wasn't the sort of plasticky, gimmicky, altogether dreary stereo-imaging sound of most high-performance gear, but a musically realistic enhancement of a listening experience that was already clean, open, warm, and realistically colorful. Nice.
Simpler Fi
Something distasteful has happened in perfectionist audio, and it's not my fault. As I mentioned in my column about the Voxativ Ampeggio loudspeaker (August 2011), original samples of the Western Electric 421A tube have long enjoyed a reputation for being fairly priced$100 to $200 a pop, on averageand reasonably easy to find, if not quite as common as stones. But in a recent conversation, Don Garber gave me the bad news: "Good 421A tubes are getting hard to find, and they're now $300 and up." This apparently began to happen even before the aforementioned column was published, so I'm pretty much off the hook.
Another new development: Fi is no longer the only company making an amp with a single 421A output tube. As Garber put it, "There's a guy somewhere making a knockoff of mine. The only thing that bugs me is, it's ugly." I pressed him for a more sensational quote, but he wouldn't take the bait. "If you're going to plagiarize my stuff, I don't carego ahead," he declared. "But make it good!"
Don Garber may no longer have the 421A market to himself, and I have yet to hear the copycatbut the aesthetic value of the original Fi endures. The vast majority of audio amplifiers would look silly if placed on a nice piece of furniture, next to a vase or a few books or a photo of a loved one. Garber's amps are among the very few exceptions. (My own list of exceptions would include the 47 Lab Gaincard, the first two Naim NAITs, the Pass Aleph 5, and both versions of the Shindo Haut-Brion. And I once saw a picture of a very nice Audio Note Ongaku installation, but that was a crazy-big shelf.) I'll leave it to others to judge whether a Fi amplifier qualifies as a work of audible art, but I have my own opinion on the matter. And my 421A amplifier, after being here for scarcely two months, has already earned its status as an heirloom.
Just as this issue was going to press, Don Garber alerted us to an impending price increase on the Fi 421A, owing to a change in parts suppliers. I'll follow up in a future "Listening" column.
Typo in footnote 2, should be Garber, not Farber.
Fixed. Thanks Steve. - John
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
...that would look good on "a nice piece of furniture next to a vase or a few books" are the 47 Labs Shigiraki and the Nelson Image SE-8. I am a little biased as they are the two amps that I own (thank you Mr. Dudley for alowing me to justify two amps to myself) but they are both compact and gorgeous, although in different ways. Oh yes, they are both low powered (20 and 10 wpc respectively) and they sound as good as they look.
Book collectors also get "the question" frequently, and I thought I'd pass along the perfect riposte, which unfortunately I cannot now recall the source for. When someone looks at your records and asks if you've really listened to all of them, you roll your eyes and say "And SO many more."
Helpfully,
Mike / The Online Photographer
Another beautifully minimalist design and build by Don Gerber. No wonder they sound so nice.
Real bad news though: "Good 421A tubes are getting hard to find, and they're now $300 and up." I looked all around... were the heck do you even find Western Electric or comparable sounding surrogate in 421A?
Happy Listening!
First of all let me say I have been a Stereophile subscriber for 20 years, and I was also a Listener subscriber, and LOVE Art Dudley's writing.
That said, I assume Art was simply reporting what Fi told him about the 421A tube. But the fact is, this tube wasn't made by Western Electric at all. It is a rebranded Tung Sol 5998. ONLY Tung-Sol made the 5998. There were later tubes badged "5998-A" from GE, but these were really just repurposed 6AS7GA tubes.
Until a few years ago, the 5998, which was used in computer systems and was made in large quantity, was easy to buy fairly cheaply. But it began to become popular in some audio applications, especially in some headphone amplifiers. Several Woo Audio amps use this tube as a premium upgrade over the stock 6AS7G. The 5998 is different from the 6AS7G and really isn't a drop in replacement for it, given the 5998 has twice the transconductance and mu, but they are the same type (dual triode) with the same pin out and draw the same heater current.
Even still, the 5998 is today easier to get and MUCH cheaper than the WE 421A, and the 421A is nothing more than a Tung-Sol 5998 with WE's name on it. Paying $200-300 for them is just plain silly.