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Upstairs when the bell rang, my wife had questions. "What did you get today? Whoa, that's beautiful. What's it do - oh, just headphones? Do they make anything else? That's really great looking kit!" It was. Is. Built like the proverbial brick outhouse too and put together most cleverly. Four long bolts right through the rubber footers clamp top and bottom together whilst shorter hex bolts reinforce the wavy front. As the photos show, the casing is really thick bent plate with laser-cut logo and type on top plus more laser trim on the bottom. These slots spill out red backlighting down and up. Classy and effective. The external PSU is a small wall-wart switcher with 100-240V appetites to be plug'n'play around the globe.

From the included assembly guide: "... this simple amplifier topology was designed with several criteria in mind. First it's designed to have low sensitivity to parts value variation. Second it's designed with the kit builder in mind. Many decisions were made to simplify the circuit and provide parts that don't depend on a fully stocked workshop to build. Third, in view of SemiSouth's unfortunate demise and our choice of transistor once manufactured by them, the concept of Sicphones now envisions post-production alteration with respect to both the kit and assembled versions...

"... your Sicphones amplifier is what you might call a zero-feedback capacitively-coupled single-ended class A constant-current-sourced design. Because of the inherent bias of the single-ended class A topology, both input and output are capacitively coupled and there is no blatant negative feedback (though, like most amps of this sort, this has some degree of degenerative feedback coupled here to the source of the gain transistor vis-à-vis the impedance of the Zener diode). As the name suggests, it uses a constant current source as opposed to a fixed drain resistor to engage the drive transistor. You may note that for the sake of simplicity and choice of gain transistor, this amp isn't cascoded. Whilst generally cascoding is a great idea not only to ameliorate some of the effects of reverse transfer capacitance but also to improve linearity, here the gain transistor has fairly low gate capacitance. It's fairly stable over the operating zone of the amp to make the notion of reducing complexity favorable over adding the cascode arrangement."

Here the project's narrative from start to finish ends. Not only had Colin set the initial funding limit low enough to attract sufficient support—I've since tracked other audio-related Kickstarter projects which didn't come close—but he'd resolutely and resourcefully tackled unexpected challenges, maintained proper communications with his Kickstarter clan throughout and managed to deliver 'by December 2012' as promised at least for the priority builds. Color me impressed!


You'll not expect a formal review on something I purchased upfront for purely personal enjoyment. But you'd obviously appreciate a little sumthin on sound. With enough juice to power HifiMan's HE-6 to levels I consider fully satisfying and beyond, the Sicphones amp is highly resolved and predominantly fleet rather than flatfooted, lithe not fulsome and completely illuminated or lit up. My own upshot is that AKG's budget K-702 sounded truly big-time brilliant—meaty, robust, colorful—but Sennheiser's HD800 less so because those cans got somewhat stark, whitish and tonally bleached. Too much zip and zing, not enough oomph. My fave Audez'e LCD-2 shed some of their chocolaty density and buxom bassiness to sound more neutral and linear than they often do. My clearly most copasetic matches came from the AKG K-702—at the price I paid for Colin's amp, this would be realsization award turf— and my Beyerdynamics T1 and T5p.

The amp sounds dialed for speed and separation. In FirstWatt's related canon squarely think F5, not J2 and definitely not M2. The tonal center of gravity feels shifted up. This coupled with very high micro detail and dynamic attack emphasizes light, visibility, imaging, incisiveness and ambient recovery whilst it downplays mass, weightiness, warmth and harmonic succulence. A perfectly complimentary front end would attempt to clone Burson's Conductor DAC for less coin whilst savvy DIYers could well dream up a linear power supply which might also buff out overall body a bit. Should Colin go pro, he might well decide to offer his own such external PSU as option.


Fellow enthusiasts dreaming of going public with a mature audio circuit or loudspeaker should really feel inspired by Colin Shaw's happy story of this Sicphones project. In our age of FaceBook, Twitter and other social media, the Kickstarter route could just be what your dream needs to manifest in this new baktun. The Internet has allowed self-styled reviewers like yours truly to become their own publishers. It seems just as effective at generating manufacturers to shortchange some of the traditional process. And that can be a very good thing...
Sicphones Kickstarter page