FEZZ AUDIO TITANIA

What they say ...

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StereoLife

Tomasz Karazinski | May 2016

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Attention to Detail ... and a "Duty of Care"    

In addition to the overall robustness of its execution, the greatest impression imprinted upon me was the manufacturer's care for details, details about which such a young company could could still be in the dark and not have a clue. Maybe some people think that a company engaged in the regular production of transformers had a head-start at positioning such a tube amplifier on the market, but in such cases I always tend to remain cautious and vigilant.

 

I already know of the existence of some constructs in which the tubes burned out after some two hours worth of usage, due to the fact that the designer did not take care of their proper ventilation. I also tested amplifier constructs in which the entire base of the chassis, with accompanying feet simply bulged in, arching under the sheer weight of the device.

 

You may believe it or not, but such 'attractions' are endowed upon customers by companies operating on the market since multiple years, and with dozens of device models in their product portfolio. And since their designers forget that a tube amplifier is a heavy device and hence can not be supported by a piece of sheet metal, how on Earth did such a young company embrace all such complex topics? It turns out that there is no problem with that, two traits suffice - the constructors care for detail and a design that is founded on the best, well proven standards.

 

"By the Book"    

Titania gives the impression of a product that has left the doors of a factory that has specialized in the production of tube amplifiers for many, many years. It is a device whose construction, apart the use of toroidal transformers, is utterly classical. You could say that the amplifier is faithfully  designed and executed by the book.

 

On the front panel we have two essential knobs, which are used for source selection and volume control. At the rear - three inputs, speaker terminals and power inlet with a mains switch. The tubes are located in the front part of the top chassis plane, whereas the transformers - a few centimeters behind them. The only decoration of the front panel is a metal plate with a beautifully engraved logo of the manufacturer. You also see a full aesthetic symmetry, emphasized by the triangular covers of the speaker transformers.

 

The amplifier rests upon four metal legs. Nothing wobbles or swings. The paint looks very resistant - you can see that the designers took into account both the high operating temperatures of the amplifier, as well as considering the habits of the more pedantic variety of users ... who will often wipe the chassis clean of dust.

 

It may sound corny, but it seems to me that the recipe for the Fezz Audio success lies in the lack of sophisticated exaltations and decorations, which  serve no purpose, other than differentiating the component from the competitive crowd out there. As such, the Titania boasts no exotic wood panels, nor does it catch the eye with tubes mounted in a horizontal position. There are no additional switches or subsystems targeted at prepping up the sound. Both from the outside, as well as from the inside, it is a purist construct of an amplifier. The protagonists of the setup are the vacuum tubes themselves, and possibly the transformers. All the rest is designed according to the principles of art. This can really be celebrated.

 

"... to tube, or not to tube ..."  

Perhaps you may ask, how do I recognize a truly "tasty" tube amplifier ? My answer is simple. When you first listen to it, you must be able to recognize that it is a tube amplifier playing ... but for a short while ... you should not be utterly convinced that this in fact the case.

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Why is it so? Because many of the manufacturers of such amplifiers on a tight budget sharply "exaggerate" certain characteristics when tuning them ... prepping them up in a specific way, one that instantly reveals the romantic, musical character of the glass tube. If within two or three minutes of listening we feel a strong warmth to the sound, then almost certainly after fifteen minutes we will start to get bored with it.

 

The ideal situation would be one where one experiences a presentation that reveals certain characteristics typical of a tube based design : A certain amount of sweetness, the organic liveliness of the midrange tones, as well as a delicate sweetening-up of the high frequency band. Generally, the temperature of the overall presentation would be raised, but only slightly ... accompanied by an unwavering tonal balance that remains intact ... 

 Whilst at the same time, the presence of other solid state attributes, such as good dynamics or superior transparency, would sow a perplexing doubt that one is in fact dealing with tubes after all.

 

 

"... a blissful paradox ..."

So here we now came to the crux of the matter, because this is the kind of presentation that is delivered by the Titania.

 

From the very onset, and after the first few passages of music, I had already started to dwell on, and wonder about, how far this new Fezz Audio amplifier goes towards qualifying as a typical tube amplifier ... This, in contrast to an amplifier that exhibits a number or recognizable sound virtues which are typical of a good, natural transistor based amplifier. Or, was the Titania perhaps akin to yet something else - to an amplifier that joins both these disparate worlds ... a Hybrid ? 

 

The Titania's tubes certainly "made themselves known" in the midband which became nicely compact and warmed-up. But, fortunately, the tubes did this very delicately, and without any exaggeration. We definitely hear a pearl-esque, noble high frequency band with delicate sibilants .. very much typical of the tube nature of the hardware ... but other than that, I was dumbfounded. To state it clearly - for me the Titania has the exact amount of 'tube characteristic' as is needed, whilst in other tonal areas, it refrains from "exaggeration" and, instead, plays like a good, neutral amplifier that absolutely does not give up on sheer power or resolution.

 

"... Bass ..."

One of the biggest positives of this amplifier is the overall balance between the upper and the lower frequencies which are heavily augmented by the quality and quantity of available bass. The bass presented by this amplifier, is adequately powerful and deep, but at the same time, very elastic and controlled. The tubed nature of the Titania is pleasantly revealed here and fills the scene with a fast "beefy clout". I had my doubts, until I played a sequence of increasingly hard-hitting and beefy music material ... trying to catch the Titania staggering, dragging out some of the bass grunts ... but I failed. To be clear, this is not an amplifier that delivers a sharp, "kick in the stomach" type of bass, but one where I think that the designers have managed to achieve an almost ideal compromise between depth and speed.

 

"... dynamics and drive ..."

This crash test was also meant as a checkup of the Titania's dynamic capabilities. As it turns out, the healthy 45 watts of pure tube power can really shake up some speakers, and you do not need to use high efficiency loudspeakers, say in excess of 90 dB, to make your case. During the test, we used two models of floor standing Pylon Audio loudspeakers, the Sapphire and the Diamond SLE 31 25, as well as several other loudspeakers, of which the most difficult to control were most probably the Albedo HL 2.2.

 

The Titania coped with them all very well and, what's more, it extracted 100% of what all of these loudspeakers were capable of, whilst adding only a little bit of it's own pleasant smoothness, and its fresh vacuum-tube-like richness to the high frequency range. This amplifier does not require "careful speaker selection"... so, loudspeaker-choice will definitely not turn into a nightmare.

of With such a versatile powerhouse, one can enjoy the freedom of going in almost any possible direction, and the choice of speakers, sources or cables will not rely on heavy auditioning of some twenty or thirty setup configurations.

 

"... the bottom line ..."

After a few days worth of listening, my impressions can be summarized as follows: I was impressed with the dynamics and transparency, the decisive and strong and even bass, the saturated ambience, and the elegantly finished upper end of the frequency band, 

 

In sum, this is a very good, versatile amplifier, with a perfectly balanced

top-to-bottom presentation ... augmented by a beautiful tube-like ambience ... and "sprinkled" with a bit of the Titania's own unique character:

A "fezzo-toroidified" sense of wide-bandwidth speed and articulation.  

 

"... Chameleon ..."

However, the biggest advantage of Titania may be neither the bass ... nor the ambience ... nor the almost perfect balance between the different parts of the audio band. In my opinion, the advantage of this amplifier - as compared to similar designs with a similar price tag - is an almost complete absence of limitations imposed upon the interconnected equipment, as well as on the type of music being played back.

 

I had repeatedly tried to torture, almost brutalize, this amplifier by subjecting it to music material that I would normally not even subject some solid state amplifiers to. But this amplifier is one hell of a die-hard. It just simply refused to surrender. There was neither loose, flaky bass, nor overload, nor even signs of clipping or of compression of the sound. Nada !

 

"... Challenging a Myth ..."

Are you one of the many that believe that tube amplifiers are not really suitable for listening to Heavy Metal ?

If so, then I kindly ask you to reconsider and to think about why almost all guitarists love tubed guitar amplifiers. With a good amplifier, they can really rock up the neighborhood, and listen to the music the way it really sounds.

Not just loud and fast, but also with the right meatiness, saturation and richness of contrast.

Perhaps you also think that tubes are not suitable for dense electronic sound? OK ... well, just listen to the Titania, and you'll find that a tube amplifier does not have to only be a nice toy with which to quietly listen to jazz, using bizarre-looking loudspeakers, boasting high efficiency.

 

With this new Fezz Audio integrated amplifier, you can do anything that you would normally do with a similarly-priced transistor based amplifier ... the difference being that with the Titania you will receive a sound quality which will be, without exaggeration, downright magical !

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Our comment at Atelier 13 Audio

Constantin Gregg-Saad | February 2023

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"The Fezz Sound"

Considering all of the above, we recalled the observations made by the reviewer of the Fezz Torus 5060, their remarkable $2,250 solid state integrated amplifier. In that review the conclusion was that there was such a thing as a "Fezz Sound" -- regardless of wether tube or solid state -- a sound that is modern, refined, dynamic and extremely musical with all genres. If you take the Fezz Mira Ceti, Silver Luna and Alfa Lupi amps for a real spin, you will definitely hear what the reviewer was talking about.

 

 

"The Fezz Value Proposition"

What is crazy here, is that these things are beautifully built, but are priced to kill ... and they are made in the EU ... not in China ! ... ???

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Thinking the issue through as to why such a price is at all possible to achieve - at least to a certain extent - could be explained by who the people are that are behind the brand ... or rather, who the company is : 

 

It is in fact a well known company, both in Poland and in multiple countries around the world, called Toroidy, a company run by the Lachowski family, by the father Lech and two of his sons, Matthias (Maciej) and Thomas (Tomek).

 

As the name suggests, they are producers of toroidal transformers. It is their power transformers and, for quite some time now, their output speaker transformers (also toroidal!) which are most widely known and respected among both DIY enthusiasts as well as well renowned audio companies.

 

These may be found inside products of companies such as Baltlab, Lampizator, Ancient Audio, Amare Musica, or even Mytek ... so basically in both, very reasonably priced units, as well as in the high-end ones.

 

The company also manufactures enclosures for audio equipment, and in addition thereto, it has its own paint shop. So we think that the emergence of amplifiers that use their company's components ... transformers and enclosures ... components which proved their class when used in products of other brands ... was only a matter of time.

 

For those of us who have the slightest bit of experience with vacuum tube components, it is needless to explain how important a role the output transformer plays in obtaining a high quality of sound.

 

It is for very good reasons that many top global manufacturers wind all their transformers "in-house" ... or, at the least, have them made by dedicated professionals, whilst paying the significant price associated therewith, and suffering from really big subassembly costs.

 

But Fezz Audio does not need to outsource the production of their transformers to anyone, and the idea of building their own amplifiers arose at a time when the product portfolio was extended by a series of very rarely produced speaker output transformers, ones based on toroidal cores. The production of these special cores is extremely difficult, so in spite of the advantages that they offer over traditional transformers, such as a much broader bandwidth, they are generally very rarely used.

 

The Lachowskis decided to take up the challenge and prove that a Polish company can actually make these to very high standard. So, they fiercely jumped into the matter and invented a method of how to properly produce such output transformers, for each and every vacuum tube type.

 

From there, it was only but one small step to "practical application". The more so that they did not need to purchase chassis from other companies, and in addition, because they had their own state of the art paint-shop,  they could afford to offer very attractive, and numerous, color schemes.

... all this without incurring higher production costs.

 

Q.E.D. applies here ... from the latin term "quod erat demonstrandum" = "Which was to be demonstrated" ... or, the proof is in the Fezz Pudding :=))

 

 So, we now have the simple and clear answer to the question as to how is it possible for Fezz Audio to offer such attractive prices given that their production is located in the EU. Essentially, and in a nutshell :

On the essential subassemblies of the amplifier - or at least on some of them - external companies do not make a profit. Coupled with this cost efficiency, Fezz then resists the temptation to add high mark-ups to their cost base ... a temptation not resisted by too many in the High End.

 

There is another saying from a US movie starring Kevin Costner : 
 

" Build it..and they will come"
 

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Its early days ... more reviews to come for sure !

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In the meantime ... take a listen !