The Man Who Would Be King. In the Rudyard Kipling novella brought to the big screen by 1975's John Huston adaptation starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, things end badly. Connery's character develops a swollen head from delusions of grandeur. So he eventually does lose it - the head, still wearing his crown. Caine's character gets crucified but later cut down. He lives to tell the tale to Christopher Plummer's narrator of Kipling but by now has mostly lost his mind. The man who would be king because natives believed him to be a god's son was just a pretender. He bled like a mortal when his wife to be bit him in their wedding bed. That disqualified godhood, crown and claims on Alexander the Great's hidden treasures. The natives' wrath sorted the rest. Likewise, it'd be all too easy for the traditional tube natives to view today's device as just a pretender and get out the modern-day axe or nails of nasty chat-room comments. The Noritake Who Would Be Triode? After all, it looks nothing like any other tubes we're familiar with.

Fortuitous timing had the Feliks Audio Euforia OTL tube headphone amp with pre-outs on hand. This would pit Nutube against Oldtube and at that, not just any small-signal 12AU7/12AT7 types as our Nagra Jazz runs but bigger 'proper' 6N13S dual triodes driven by upscale Psvane CV-181TII (6SN7). My benchmark connection would come from a COS Engineering D2 DAC with discrete relay-switched resistor ladder volume.

In that fashion, inserting the B1 Nutube or Euforia would just add their flavour. Now I could report by contrast versus the direct connection on whatever action I'd hear the valves make.

Today's limited edition FirstWatt box with its small laptop-style external SMPS was obviously not groomed as definitive cost-no-object statement on this Japanese part. Instead it solders it into a pre-existing very affordable buffered passive preamp with trim pots.

A Nutube lights up green under AC voltage but my overexposed shots made the filament glow nearly white.