Some marketing claims are true

None of the amps I build are better than the others,” Justin Weber of Ampsandsound told me not long after we met. “They are just different.” I may have smirked inwardly. According to his company’s website, Weber makes no fewer than 23 amplifier models, many capable of driving both headphones and speakers, ranging from the $2700 Kenzie OG to the $38,000 Arch Monos. Are they really all equally good?, I wondered. Surely this was just a clever Buddhist ploy to distract us from some of his amps’ high prices. Doesn't the extra $35k spent on the Arch Monos buy you something more desirable than the performance offered by the little Kenzie? Writing for an audio magazine means I hear a lot of marketing claims, some more risible than others, and I have learned to take them with an entire seabed worth of salt.

- BY ALEX HALBERSTADT

But then Weber is kind of weird. Besides operating a hi-fi company, he's a psychotherapist in private practice, a supervisor with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a husband, a dad, a boat owner, an amateur photographer, and the host of a YouTube channel. He's upbeat and polite and goes through enough 16oz cans of Monster Energy Zero Ultra to worry a convention of endocrinologists. Given all that, you might imagine that he stuffs circuit boards in his basement on weekends to get away from his patients and lower his blood pressure.

But as it turns out, Weber's company is an entirely more serious enterprise. It is an outgrowth of years he spent as a home builder and appreciator of classic postwar tube circuits, and the products reflect these interests. The amplifiers are wired point to point in California—by a person with nontrivial soldering skills—and equipped with transformers designed and wound to Weber's specifications elsewhere in the Golden State by a mostly deaf magnet-wire virtuoso named Gery Gaetani. The amps’ wiring is neat and really pretty and reminds me of the internal layouts of my now-gone Shindo gear. All of this is true even of the relatively affordable Kenzie OG, which ships with WWII-era new old stock 1626 output tubes that can be thought of as shrunk-down 45s. Not bad for a social worker.

Last year, when I wrote about the $19,000 Ampsandsound Red October XL, I was struck by that amp’s astounding way of unraveling complex arrangements, precise recreation of musical textures, prismatic color palette, and unambiguous control of both my headphones and the Klipsch La Scalas. But given its price, I was as likely to own one as I was to take out a mortgage on a midsize castle in Upper Saxony.