"The enclosure itself is likely to be a flat black lightly textured powder coat and of course with exposed tubes. Overall, I'm thinking black, black chrome with silver accents and detail cover for the tube cover. It should look very nice. I am taking it to SoCal Can Jam on March 19th so it won't be long now. This and perhaps other headphone amps will be direct-sale models. I would like to offer these as 'bespoke' designs where the customer picks the finish etc. And, it sounds fantastic! All tube of course, push/pull and pure Class A. 2 x 6922 and 4 x 12B4 is the tube complement. External solid-state rectified power supply. I was listening last night with Dan Clark's open Ethers to the Tryst and also via the discrete transistor headphone out in our new SWL 9.0 Anniversary Edition tube preamp. Different sound. The 9.0 preamp's headfi amp is hybrid of course. The Tryst is better and bigger sounding. I am planning to do more in the realm of headphone designs, including hybrid designs.


"The headphone amp in the new 9.0 Ann Ed is much better than the built-in headphone amp in the LS-100 was. I'm confident that this preamp at $2'900 will be a great seller as both preamp and headphone amp. I'm also working on a hybrid power amp trying different approaches right now. Ultimately I envision a KWA 150SE output stage with a pure tube gain stage and solid-state unity-gain output current buffer. I think that this will be the ultimate amp. This comes after I made a foray into SE tube designs. I love the sound we achieved with the all-tube designs. Soundstage depth, presence and musicality are astounding with pure tube designs. And, pure solid-state designs still have greater speed, dynamics and detail. There is a trade-off. Both do specific things very well. I am hoping to achieve the ultimate amp by combining our best tube gain stages with our best transistor current amplifier."

Back to the Tryst, it's a collaboration between Damon Coffman and Dan Wright. "Damon and I talked about working together for some time now. I'd been very impressed with his Coffman Labs Prautes [right; this $3'900 deck is a team effort between Damon and Cypher Labs - Ed.] I had thought about a headphone amp but didn't have the time to design one myself. Damon had ideas for something he thought would be even better than his previous work. Meanwhile he didn't want to deal with the production end of things. The result is an excellent collaboration between his circuit design and our implementation and production. I did go after our own MWI caps and also handled the aesthetics. Listening and final voicing were done between Damon and myself. And I must say, the Tryst is spectacular. It embodies all of the strengths of a well-designed pure tube amp with Class A bias, zero negative feedback and excellent bandwidth. Whilst conventional speakers require real power, headphones are quite happy with just 3 watts. In fact, for them that's quite a lot. The result is all the beauty of tubes without any limitations of frequency response or bandwidth and plenty of power to drive all current modern headphones with. This design follows my foray into single-ended tube amp designs with the Ambrose 10-watt SE EL34 stereo amp and our 845 DS Reference 32-watt monoblocks."


Again, for best pricing and to enable bespoke trim tailoring, the Tryst is marketed factory-direct, making each piece a potential custom commission.