This vacuum tube amplifier manages to be both ominous (it comes off like a mating pair of 2001 slabs) and diabolical (if there were an axis of evil, its joint venture might look like this). But unlike a lot of tube amps that work hard to turn their science-fair project appearance up to 11, there's nothing gimmicky about its looks, and it's got an unbeatable pedigree. The Fi X is made by Don Garber, one of the audio world revolutionaries who started the vacuum tube boom in America. His store, Fi, on Watts Street in early nineties, pre-mall SoHo, became a clubhouse for a gang of future legends. "They got a lot of their ideas from Japan," says Blackie Pagano, a younger L.A.-based amplifier designer, "where fathers and sons had never stopped building electronics together, not just from kits but from scratch."
Their work put single-ended tubes—a wiring system that simplifies what's done to the signal carrying your music—back on the map, and Garber's affinity for this kind of purity—and his desire to produce more affordable stereos—led him to invent the X, sketched on a scrap of paper on the subway. "The first watt is the only watt that matters," Garber says. "I didn't say that, someone else did." But it goes a long way to explaining why this baby gets by on only about two and a half watts per channel. (100 watts per channel seems to be the magic number marketers like to sell, but that Navigator out front rattling your windows might have more than 1,600). Its 2A3 tubes have a kind of cult following among the obsessed, and reviews from the audio fringe have said the X delivers stunning midrange performance—especially good with music made by small ensembles. (Though with the right high efficiency speakers, Garber points out, the X can even handle Mahler's Ninth.) There is nothing superfluous here and Garber's mission is to deliver those few precious watts as cleanly and directly as possible. The slab design separates the noisy transformer from the tubes, but it also allows for the shortest silver-wired signal path possible, as well as built-in cross-ventilation. "Don puts his thought into the circuit and not into the fufu stuff," says Pagano. "And he spends his money on parts, not on marketing, so you get a lot more for your money." The X goes for $995.
Garber, now 65, runs Fi alone out of a carriage house in Brooklyn where he also pursues his painting, which sometimes ventures into Mondrian-like territory. ("I'm out of fashion," he states). He's listening to different equipment all the time, but his living room upstairs (rustic, with Eames and Breuer chairs keeping company with a pair of bucket seats mounted on the wide plank floor) is clearly set up for focused listening: A towering pair of Cain and Cain speakers in beautifully turned cabinets dominates the room. He likes to remind you that "few people just sit down and listen to music, doing nothing else," meaning all this fuss is a waste for most. But he also knows to restrain talk of ohms and topologies with civilians: "It sounds better," is his simple explanation of his tubes. And why does he fly under the radar, selling his line (which can go up to $5,000) by word of mouth? "The stereo business is full of acrimony, excommunications, and Spanish Inquisitions," he says. Plus, "I've been told I have the marketing charisma of a rumpled paper bag."
Don Garber can be reached at dgfi@earthlink.net.
