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To be plain, Nelson's F5 screwed things up for me. Tubes that is. Headphone listening is excepted. On my re-cabled beyerdynamic T1s and Sennheiser HD800s, Woo Audio's Model 5 fitted presently with TJ's very expensive Special Edition 300Bs and their latest fat-bottle 6SN7s still trounces all sand-amp comers. Otherwise it's been a wipe-out. Yamamoto's A-09S with top direct-heated designer triodes—EML, EAT, Shuguang Black Treasure, Synergy, C3m drivers and EML 5U4G rectifier—plus Octave's incredibly beefy KT88 push/pull MRE-130s with SBBs got sidelined*. The reason is resolution. That's true across the ambient retrieval, harmonic and dynamic domains. The valve amps sound comparatively fuzzy, indistinct, thick/bloated and energetically distanced. The F5 is simply the more crystalline and holographically present. You hear more. Bass and articulation/definition operate in an altogether higher league across the board and magnification of detail is obviously higher.

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* My custom-commissioned Trafomatic Audio Kaivalya monos (class A p/p EL84 with IT coupling) are a last effort to reintroduce valve power amps into my regular—rather than very occasional— diet. Their pending review will report on how successful they are. My 130wpc Octaves are clearly far too powerful for the kind of speakers I own. They hardly get out of first gear but sounded terrific with big Dynaudio and Triangle speakers at various shows.

Meanwhile the F5's fully elucidated upper mid/treble ranges offer real harmonics rather than high harmonic distortion. This quality is so non solid-statish that a visiting valve amp designer of true chops pointedly declared that the F5 wasn't transistors. Precisely. Another recent visitor imports Leben, Living Voice, Zanden and Cessaro to Italy. At home, he runs modified Klimo tube amps on a tri-amped Avantgarde horn system [above]. After hearing my F5, he contacted Pass Labs for permission to import FirstWatt. Whether it'll come to pass is immaterial. That another valve lover favored the F5 over the quality tube amps at my disposal is the point. It's not about sounding like tubes. It's about superiority.


The only other sand amp I've heard informally to perhaps fancy equally would be the smallest model from the Danish Vitus company. At $13.000 it's simply so disproportionately expensive that motivation to investigate it has been nil.

Why segue into an M2 review by way of the F5? Having tested the entire range except for the Aleph J, I view the F5 as the crown jewel or pace setter. It became the new benchmark. The subsequent J2 and revised F1 and F2 with now power JFets had to be as good, simply different good. FirstWatt isn't the usual commercial venture. Its designer is under no obligation to release new models just because. New and measurably higher performance silicon-carbide transistors from SemiSouth—the M2 outputs are from Fairchild again—have upped the ante. Anything sonically inferior no longer passes. FirstWatt also isn't about scaled-up power and load invariance into humdingers. These ubiquitous demands expand amplifier lines elsewhere to more and more powerful models, routinely to the detriment of finesse. Here this doesn't apply. The upshot? I firmly expected the M2 to match the F5 and J2 in sophistication and maturity. The M2 should simply occupy a different quadrant within a rather tight inner circle of the FirstWatt sonic bull's eye. Would it?

M2 vs. J2 & F5: The context was my usual AIFF/WAV-loaded iMac via Firewire into the Weiss DAC2, from there balanced into the Esoteric C-03. Alternately I ran USB into the Wyred4Sound DAC2 also balanced into the preamp on a different input. Cabling was my customary ASI LiveLine. Because the amps operate in class A with output transistors hand-trimmed by Mr. Pass for optimal load-line bias, they need about 30 minutes to stabilize thermally. They play right away (the M2 in a matter of minutes) but sound better when toasty. So I left them and subsequent comparators powered up side by side and simply switched cables live (speaker cables off, ICs off, ICs on, speaker cables on).

The first cut to spin was from my new Božilak|Rainbow City Records CD (and no longer iTunes store download as I first had). It's by Toše Proeski or Тоше Проески and a becoming collection of 14 traditional Macedonian folk tunes set to symphonic orchestra with ethnic soloists and chorus. Once known as the Elvis Presley of the Balkans, this lyrical tenor, songwriter and actor died far too young in a Croatian car crash October 16, 2007. It makes Rainbow an aptly titled and timeless classic.


The verdict was plain. The J2 was more crystallized than the M2. Separation power of front-to-back layering and extracting the singer from his surroundings was higher. The M2 acted more as I previously described my valve amps relative to the F5. Its outlines were softer, front-to-back transitions more water color. I'd also swear that the noise floor was higher. Not that ear on drivers gave anything away. The lower contrast ratio simply suggested as much. Tiny noises of fizz and such which surround ethnic flutes to markedly convey how they're blown and animated by breath were more acute with the J2. Ditto for reflections to show microphone placements and recorded space.

Calling the M2 more tube-like is quite accurate, albeit not exactly how most quickly scanning readers tend to absorb such news. They automatically associate bloom and harmonic distortion effects on tone textures to then be disappointed when it isn't that. This overlooks the broad-scale action of 2nd-order THD on more complex fare. Beyond vocals plus guitar, it becomes a fine eraser on separating lines and edges. It also damps the articulation of very fine overtones which withdraw into fluffiness. This rounding over action or slight gelatinizing—a leading lady's soft focus if you will—has many admirers. The M2 does it to a controlled extent which more pronounced I also hear from non-feedback SETs. One could view it as antidote to transistor chalkiness. That's relevant. It simply does not relate to the F5 or J2. Those amps don't know chalky.
However, the F5 in particular is astonishingly clean and fresh. It's got real zing and pizzazz. Just look at the plosives in that second word. If ancillaries are up to snuff, that's as energizing as a simple Mediterranean salad. Tomatoes are raw not cooked. Dressing is olive oil with vinegar, not heavy sauce. Cheese is light mozzarella, not a smelly fat affair. To come off takes top quality ingredients - sun-ripened tomatoes, fresh basil. Still, lovers of typical French cuisine could find such a plate too clean. The M2 shifts that. It puts some sauce on. As you reduce the volume, it simply reveals itself as a reduction of transparency and resolution. The cleaner and more crystallized the amp, the more visibility it retains into whisper levels.


Some audiophiles relate to all of this as a function of warmth and density. Accordingly the M2 would be considered warmer than the J2 which itself is warmer than the F5. Naturally here it's a matter of only a few degrees.


On the Proeski album, there's a wicked Balkan bag pipe. If you've ever heard live bag pipes, you know why the Scots used them in battle. They can be bloodcurdlingly mean, shrill and cutting. The F5 delivered them most uncut, the M2 most beautified. I'm frankly not certain how much of this was due to the input transformers, how much to the Mosfet outputs. The German Aaron XX integrated amplifier was quite close to the F5 in performance and used Semi-On bipolars.

A Greek reader felt I needed more opera in my diet and duly dispatched mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova's Nuit Resplendissante of French operatic arias under the baton of Frédéric Chaslin conducting the Münchner Rundfunkorchester. Charles Gounod's "Ou suis-je; O ma lyre immortelle" from Sapho came in handy. Like bag pipes, mezzos can be peaky and challenging. The F5 had more teeth and—in a good way—veered closest to showing textural glassiness on occasion. The M2 was more civilized and gentler, the J2 a tad sweeter for perhaps the most sophisticated treble. The F5 had the most tintinnabulation.

To say all of this differently, consider Zu speakers for a moment. Their Druid MkIV was famously dynamic, meaty and dark and really polarized opinion. Druid fanciers felt that the newer Essence with its ribbon tweeter veered too far from the house sound. They'd use the M2 on the Essence. Those for whom the Druid was too dark would run the F5 for maximum illumination of that speaker's deliberately subdued top end. This now gives us a generalized scale on which to place the M2. The F5 is jumpiest and cleanest. The J2 is sweeter. The M2 takes a backward step from ultimate resolution to go mellower, softer and just slightly voluptuous.


To investigate whether this tendency entails more than a relative infusion of warmth within the established FirstWatt sound, let's draft the ModWright KWA-100, Wyred4Sound ST-500 and Burson Audio PP 160 into service.