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Manliness. Sexism in audio—apologies to Anne—is as primitive as anywhere else. But for this test I still moved in the white Lithuanians which at €7.600/pr are closer to our Job description than the €20.000 Cypriots. I cued up an ambient album from Al Gromer Khan for plenty of infrasonic synth trickery and sat down first not in the sweet spot but in my regular work chair. That's because my writing table sits semi-diagonal in the room's closer left corner. This places me head-on with the left speaker though that's nearly always toed in to aim more or less at the middle. Still, any port boom generated in the left front corner gets insufferably exposed here even when it turns out somewhat less objectionable in the regular seat (though as Harry said to Sally, it's already out there to still compromise clarity). Now envision my eyebrows going Jack Nicholson. The small Job 225 mined the twin 10-inchers' reach for all their considerable worth but betrayed no port flatulence which usually accompanies that unplugged exercise. None! Except for the €9.000 class D Atsah monos, no amp had previously managed. I was dumbfounded. And I had four extra pairs of socks to wear.


To underline relevance, consider DC at 3.45Ω, minimum impedance of 2.8Ω @ 9.000Hz and max of 20Ω @ 17Hz. This speaker's tuning hits max impedance in the lowest bass to have normal amplifiers deliver less than a quarter of their power to its woofers than they do to the tiny tweeter which doesn't need it. Just as its clearly conservative specifications promised whilst my inner cynic doubted, the small Job really did imply control with its claimed unconditional stability. Though bass orgies are nearly as primitive as sexism, I took some fun time out to indulge in Bob Holroyd, Jamshied Sharifi remixes, Mercan Dede, Cheb i Sabbah, Al Gromer Khan and other ambient maestros, all at stout levels. Nothing stymies listening pleasure like lumpy uncontrolled boomy bass. Yet little creates the kind of scale, depth and realism very low bass does when it's right. This was right as rain (which would be true for Scotland not Switzerland but so it goes with clichés).


To get these speakers closer to my central square in Rome—their review had called them a mixture of vintage Sonus faber with American bass balance and rocking dynamics—meant returning to the Hex. This went lighter on mass, heavier on speed. Here I even ran my Esoteric C-03 transistor preamp in 0dB gain mode without meeting Twiggy. The practical upshot? To properly hear the Rhapsody 200 in my room had finally become possible with a true budget amp. Zu's giant Submission subwoofer sat idly by for the duration.


Sacred or unholy cows? I'm first in line to believe that low-power amps tend to be quicker, more transparent and refined than muscle-bound equivalents. At close to ten times the Bakoon's power, the Job 225 breaks with that rule. Class A/B amps tend to get less respect than their class A elders, often for good reason. Here too the Job 225 fails to conform. Tubes sound more romantic and musical. Put in such terms, the first part vis-à-vis the Job is true. But the second? Isn't music by its very definition musical? If so, do we need enhancements or alterations before music is made musical? This line of inquiry quickly gets philosophical. Again I'll be first to admit that I enjoy the temporal relaxation tubes can give which shed a certain metronomic quality for freer looser breath. But this quality can be injected with line-level valves if one fancies it. What's most essential for speaker drive is - well, drive. Control. Broad bandwidth. Low noise. Low distortion. Here the Job 225 categorically eclipses all tube amps, certainly those which are anywhere near it on price.


When valve designer Sasa Cokic visited me in late April during a delivery of a custom phono stage to a Swiss client, I played him Bakoon's HPA-21 on his favored Sennheiser HD-800 'phones. Sampling both voltage and current outputs (I clearly favor the latter which is said to measure 1/10th the distortion) Sasa preferred the conventional output for its warmer fuzzier feel. It's arguably closer to tubes. He called it more musical. If we leave that contentious term and focus on harder terminology, the Job 225's equivalent of the real estate mantra is transparency, transparency, transparency. This is easiest demonstrated at whisper levels. Lesser transparency (intelligibility says it better) congeals sooner. It locks out visibility of the small stuff. Yet the Job doesn't sound antiseptic or skeletal. That's another unholy hifi cow. We've been conditioned to believe that lucidity—being lit up all over like coming out of the shadows—strips away magic. This coming out is routinely faked up with top-end sizzle and pixilated edges from hyped transients. The Job 225 comes out for real. In full. Not partially. Lightningy-fast guitar arpeggios à la Gerardo Nuñez, Vicente Amigo or Tomatito don't take on a higher Platinum content. Percussive tremolo work high up in a piano's register doesn't get hollow or 'synthie'. Close-mic'd female vocals don't get spitty. Recorded sibilants sound normal rather than exaggerated or offensive. Et cetera.


If this begins to sound like an endless circle jerk around neutrality, perhaps so. But neutrality eludes description. Only recording engineers have a chance of actually knowing it by direct comparison to the live feed. To describe the Job 225, I'd focus on aspects like unwavering image lock, realistic sizing, articulated depth layering, clear soundstage sorting, absence of hardness and etch despite very high exactitude. With speakers all of these qualities improve when phase shift and group delay are low. Should we expect the same for amps? One could also invoke the difference of superior passive over many active preamps as a sense of temporal quickening, greater clarity, leaner but better defined bass, more open treble, greater immediacy, higher jump factor aka suddenness if perhaps ultimately lower dynamics. All that's true here except for how passives really abdicate responsibility for drive to the source. The Job 225 exerts iron-fisted control for no dynamic bleaching. There the passive tie-in falls well short.


The Job 225 won't be a suitable antidote to hard-hitting robotic modern speakers which are all about the leading edge, sizzly highs, maximal punch and overblown bass. It would certainly get the latter under control as much as the built-in alignment allows. It's simply no softening agent. For a warmish speaker like the AudioSolutions Rhapsody 200 it proved to be the perfect counterpoint. Whilst the Bakoon sounded just as good—the 200 is efficient enough to go plenty loud on little power—it couldn't come close to the Swiss amp's woofer control. With any 25Hz-extended speaker, that's part and parcel of sounding good. So I'll have to correct myself. The Job 225 did sound better! On the sealed Gladius with its costly Fostex drivers and exotic Raal ribbons, it wasn't. Better than the Bakoon. But it was as good if not identically so. Costing 75% less whilst making 10 times the power simply made it better again. Definitely no pyrite but real gold.


In this light, could it actually be the world's best small amp ever made as Job/Goldmund assert so calmly in their owner's manual? Only the audiophile in the sky has that answer. Here on earth I don't know of another $1.495 amp with this type of true power, grip, lucidity and refinement. Not even close. That this one has got nine generations of R&D teams spanning a colossal three decades behind it adds that much more assurance and resonance. The design IQ in this circuit is immense. I think that renders it irrelevant whether some other 'small' amp somewhere is two or three percent better. What I can't get my head around? That it sells on Amazon. What's the chance of someone seeing it there even recognizing what they truly had were they to get one? That's where reviews come in. Do I feel used now? Not. Reviewing is what I do. I'll simply admit that this nearly sounds too good to be true. I just can't find a catch. The 225 thus must stay. It'll keep future review amps coming through honest. They'll need to significantly best the Job 225 to justify the usual high-brow audiophile tariff. What an upsetter. Time to ask for the invoice. And there's one more job our Job needs to wrap. Lift the global embargo outside the US. I couldn't possibly remain the only listener not on US soil to enjoy this game changer! That'd be just wrong. Time for the 225 to go 230. Volts. Here's to the missing five. Cheers!


Quality of packing: Very good.
Reusability of packing: A few times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: A cinch.
Condition of component received: Flawless.
Completeness of delivery: Perfect.
Human interactions: Good.
Pricing: Extreme value.
Final comments & suggestions
: At publication time this amp sold exclusively via Amazon, only as a 117V unit and only to US customers (even Canadian readers were refused). Job Systems also didn't publish their email to answer inquiries (the owner's manual does have it) to make pre-sales support zero. With 35dB gain and 0.75V input sensitivity, overeager volume controls and/or preamps with high gain will get loud very quickly even on standard 89dB speakers. And without a DC servo, this direct-coupled circuit won't amplify but pass on DC to the speakers. Even a superior valve preamp like my Nagra Jazz occasionally created small crinkly noises to suggest mini incidents of DC leakage when all other solid-state sources were dead quiet. One suspects a DC servo was omitted for sonic reasons but if the firm were interested to broaden the 225's appeal, one might suggest they rethink this particular feature.

Job Electronics website