An intriguing combination…

The Western Electric 300B tubes are pretty much the gold standard for the version, and at $1,495 a pair somewhat spendy. The good news is they last forever compared to the Chinese knockoffs, so they are an excellent long-term purchase. Considering you can have an entire integrated, built from the folks at WE for $7,999 (the new price) this has to be one of the best deals going. It even has a built in MM/MC phono section, headphone amplifier, and a bluetooth DAC. Not to mention a pair of ECC83 tubes with WE branding. Fingers crossed here.

We’ve got an extended review, waiting for fact check from the WE people, and as soon as we get the all clear, it will go live.

But in the meantime, we’ve been enjoying the heck out of this one. If you have a pair of efficient speakers, it’s all you need. WE claims this amplifier puts out nearly twice as much power as most standard 300B amps that usually deliver 6-9wpc, due to their unique circuitry.

It’s smooth, smooth, smooth, as you’d expect a great 300B amplifier would be. Remember, Western Electric wrote the book and designed the tube.

No doubt to keep costs realistic, they are using a solid-state power supply, but everything is well implemented and the casework is an industro-cool design that you’ll probably love or hate. We’re in the love column, and in addition to the black you see here, Nickel and Champagne is also available.

The 91E comes stoutly packaged in a bespoke crate, with everything incredibly well organized. This is an amp you can be proud of owning to be sure.

https://www.westernelectric.com/91e

Amazingly good for the money!

$159 won’t even buy a tank of gas for a giant SUV these days, but it will buy you a pretty bitchin’ CD player. The PL100PRO used to be $99 before tariffs, but hey – this is still less than a month’s worth of latte’s at your favorite coffee shop.

With RCA and XLR outputs, you can run it into any system with ease. Just because they were here, we did try a 20 foot pair of balanced interconnects, and the PL100PRO drives them with ease. The slot-loading mechanism feels pretty robust, and if you like the sound, buy a 2nd one and put it on the shelf for the day something bad happens.

It may not be as awesome as the yelling, screamy guys on YouTube say it is, but compared to what that $1,000 Sony CDP-100 sounded like in 1983, this is an incredible deal and a major technological advance. What it lacks is the refinement of a much more expensive player, but in the context of a nice budget or vintage system, I think you’ll be pretty excited. It also features optical and coax SPDIF outputs, in case you’d like to use it as a transport. It’s even better as a transport.

Running the PL100PRO out in the garage system with the FiiO K17 DAC via the optical input, everything sonically is well balanced. And thanks to a 5v USB-C power input, it’s easy to connect. As we bought our review sample pre-tariff, it did not come with a power supply. That may be different now.

However, using it with a basic Apple Power Book charger than happened to be around yielded great results. Stepping it up to a better linear power supply (also on hand) from Wyred 4 Sound provided benefits in terms of better bass control and a more refined top end – though that starts to defeat the “budget” aspect of this player.

Totally an Exceptional Value Award winner…

https://smsl.shop/products/pl100-pro