Integrated Amp Reviews

The 91E's 49lb machined-aluminum chassis, 18.9" wide, 15" deep, and 11.1" high, boasts an appealing industrial design that befits its heritage. It is big, bold, and beautiful, and its 6" tall, 1" thick faceplate commands your attention.

On the left side of the faceplate, in a recessed panel, a column of pushbuttons allow source selection: phono, CD, tuner, aux 1, aux 2, and Bluetooth. In the center, a raised 4" × 2.5" glass display, which is easily legible from across the room, shows the selected input, the volume level, and twin VU meters. Near the bottom of the screen, the Western Electric logo glows proudly. A 2.5" volume dial dominates the right side of the faceplate, above a power button, an LED status indicator, and a ¼" headphone jack.

Behind the faceplate and atop the chassis, the 8 ohm transformer block is set between a pair of ECC81 driver tubes. Behind, on either side, stand the two 300B power tubes in their protective glass cylinders. A ½"-thick aluminum plate with ventilation grids caps the cylinders.

The back panel is all business. The left section accommodates eight gold-plated RCA pairs—labeled Phono Load, Phono In, CD, Tuner, Aux1, Aux2, Line Out, and Pre Out—as well as a ground screw and an MC/MM toggle switch. A pair of speaker binding posts is set in a small, separate section, and a third section contains Ethernet and USB inputs (both for firmware updates only), two 3.5mm control jacks, and an IEC jack. The 91E stands on four rubber-and-metal feet.

The minimalist, black aluminum remote is cleanly laid out with the essential functionality. The display dimmer is a nice touch.

Aesthetically and functionally, the 91E is a well-thought-out, well-built product. Its controls feel smooth and solid, and they performed without a glitch. Western Electric's attention to every detail was obvious, starting with the hinged, cherrywood shipping box for the 300B tubes and packing materials: dense, formfitting foam-rubber sections for the amplifier, a screwdriver, a pin straightener, and a wrench for removing the protective grids. Heirloom-quality stuff. Accessories included a thick, hospital-grade power cord unlike any other I've seen.

I've reviewed amplifiers with loose internal parts, confusing manuals, and poorly labeled options. The 91E harks back to the golden era of US manufacturing when superb craftsmanship was standard practice for a successful American business.

SET coherence
I well remember my first encounter with an SET amplifier. Before I bought my Shindo Allegro preamplifiers and Shindo Haut Brion push-pull power amplifier (20Wpc), the Art Audio Diavolo, which used a pair of KR VV32B power tubes to produce 13Wpc, was my amplifier of choice. The sound was what I associate with the classic SET personality. Pancakes with butter and ladles of syrup, the Diavolo sounded heavenly, with all the richness and profundity of mass in a large NYC church. Was the Diavolo transparent? Hardly. But it sounded refined, pure, and hypnotic on jazz and classical records, and it bloomed like nobody's business.

The 91E is the opposite, in every imaginable way. It is one of the most neutral, down-the-center, frequency-pure amplifiers I've reviewed. While it delivered that sweet 'n pure triode-treble audiophiles relish, and a room-filling soundstage, it exhibited a trait not commonly associated with tube amplifiers, let alone SET amps: as Whitener claimed, the 91E's low end was tight and accurate. Whether spinning Weather Report or Wagner, Brubeck or Brahms, if deep bass was impressed into the vinyl, the 91E delivered, time after time.

The uber-coherent 91E never favored one part of the frequency spectrum over another, never exploded in treble peaks, never mired me in blobby bass. The 91E's transparent midrange worked its magic in concert with its (largely) grain-free treble and fast, dense bass. This is unusual in my tube-amp experience: My old BAT VK-75 and its KT88s hit hard with tight bass, but I never enjoyed its sound as a whole. My beloved Shindo Haut Brion delivers lovely lows: soft, a little loose, somewhat rich, but texturally and timbrally perfect. The 91E, by comparison, lacks the enveloping bass and weight of the Shindo, but it is convincing in its grip and clarity, whether on acoustic bass, electric bass, joyously thumped bass drums, timpani, or the bottom end of a cello.

Listening
Standard jazz history tells us that when fusion became popular, in the late '60s, the market for crusty swingers like Dexter Gordon and Hank Mobley dried up—that jazz was dead until Wynton Marsalis and the Young Lions rescued it in the 1980s. But (mostly) smaller indie labels including Black Jazz, Ovation, Strata-East, Catalyst, Artists House, Cobblestone, Inner City, Muse, Mainstream, Xanadu, and Groove Merchant continued to record talented jazz heads throughout the '70s. Horace Tapscott, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Black Artists Group, Arista Freedom, Enja, ECM Records, and others explored esoteric jazz territory: keyboardists Mickey Tucker, Neal Creque, and Charles Earland; guitarists Roland Prince, Calvin Keys, O'Donel Levy, and Pat Martino; and saxophonists Charles McPherson, Eric Kloss, and Hadley Caliman expanded the traditional boundaries of jazz. Guitarist Mel Brown created some of the nastiest blues skank this side of Lightnin' Hopkins.

In my listening, the 91E made the most of these artists' records, framing each in its own flatly recorded '70s jazz milieu. Mel Brown's Blues for We (Impulse! A-9180) was presented cleanly with a broad instrumental soundstage of startling immediacy. Every area of the stage was illuminated, and the smallest ambient details were convincingly realized. "Clarity," "detail," and "depth" fill my listening notes. The 91E excelled at creating the extravagant space and stinging textures of Neal Creque's funky jazz-and-soul on Creque (Cobblestone 9005); created scale and force on Hadley Caliman's Hadley Caliman (Mainstream Records MRL 318); and reproduced the intimate, small-studio coziness of Mickey Tucker's 1977 release Sojourn (Xanadu Records 143).

Comparing my Tavish Audio Design Adagio phono preamplifier with Sculpture A Mini Nano SUT to the 91E's onboard phono stage, the Tavish had more weight, bloom, and tonal color. The 91E's phono stage was cleaner though and provided more definition. It played with force, extracting more detail and revealing more instrumental complexity.

The 91E delivered treble clearly, without scorch or grit, preserved dynamics effortlessly, and presented recordings with drive and dimensionality that made listening a fun, energetic experience.

My DeVore Fidelity O/96 loudspeakers benefited from the 91E's tight bass, their 10" paper-cone woofers as well-controlled as by any solid state amplifier. Oddly, the 91E sounded less like a traditional tube amplifier with the O/96s—less so, for example, than the class-D LKV Research PWR-3 I recently reviewed. My Shindos, too, sounded more tube-like, overall, than the 91E, displaying rounder, richer tone and more enveloping soundstage bloom.

The 91E reached more of its potential with the Fleetwood DeVille loudspeakers. The SET treble truly shone in its clarity and detail. The amplifier's coherence and neutral demeanor were more evident, too. Despite the O/96s' higher specified frequency response, the 91E drove more detail through the DeVille's compression-driver tweeter than through the O/96's 1" silk-dome tweeter. But both speakers sounded fantastic with the 91E: clean, clear, and palpable.

Conclusion
Charles Whitener's claims about his Western Electric 91E integrated amplifier were spot on: The 91E does deliver a "solid low end and extended highs," and it does have the "clarity of the original WE 91A's midrange" and the ability to create an "incredible soundstage."

The 91E is not your traditional treble-and-midrange-champ SET amplifier. In delivering more strength and power without compromising the low end, it's a classy machine that can frame music neutrally in a large soundstage. The 91E elicited consistent musical pleasure. Western Electric is back.