_{Photos courtesy of Heaven 11 unless otherwise indicated.}

I remember the first time I set eyes on Heaven 11’s Billie amplifier. It was at a Montreal Audiofest shortly before the pandemic. The door to Heaven 11’s room was plastered with a poster of Charleton Heston as Moses from his 1956 Ten Commandments movie, but in place of the commandment tablets, Moses held two giant preamp tubes in his arms. It was a striking image, and sort of edgy.

The inside of the room itself was semi-bathed in a smoke-like psychedelic red tint, while further right, at the end of a table under a glow lamp, sat a component adorned with only two big knobs and a couple of triode-looking tubes sticking out of its top. Its look, with its clean, uncluttered lines, and graceful aesthetic, immediately appealed to my purist audiophile sensibilities—no superfluous bells and whistles here to detract from what felt like the product’s main purpose—to play beautiful music.

It looked 7Wpc SET. It looked artisanal. It looked timeless. When I heard it, I was sure I was right; its sound was pure, colourful, detailed, and highly musical. I imagined I could hear the point-to-point wiring, the amplifier tube stage, the simplicity and low-parts count of a vintage design.

Those assumptions were dashed after I left the room with Heaven 11 proprietor Itai to ask him questions for my report. When I asked him to describe the Billie amp, it was like he was speaking to me in a foreign tongue. “The Billie is a class-D amp with a tube input stage. It delivers 120Wpc. It’s equipped with a DAC, headphone jack, turntable input, and Bluetooth.” I blurted out several times “Wait, what?” as I tried to wrap my head around it all.

In those days, you just didn’t see class-D amps at an audio show, and certainly not a class-D / tube hybrid. Thinking back now on that moment when I first saw the Billie, so-named in honour of Billie Holiday, and seeing how ubiquitous class-D has become since then, it’s hard not to feel awed by how ahead of its time the Billie was, as was Itai.

“Not only were standalone class-D amplifiers new,” said Itai in our interview at his sunny, high-ceilinged Montreal office, where we sat next to Billies on podiums and Magnepan and ESL speakers (Itai’s favourite speaker designs are boxless.) “Class-A/B and class-A had pretty much hit their zenith. I don’t see class-A getting better. What’s better than (in reference to the transistors in the output stage) on all the time? Unless you integrate a coffee warmer into it, that’s about the only thing you could do that’s better, you know? Every year, class-D is getting better. It’s exciting. The last thing this exciting to happen to the audio world was the CD player.”

An industrial designer and musician who keeps a custom-built Gibson Explorer-type guitar at arm’s length in the room we were in, Itai financed the first batch of Billies through a Kickstarter campaign. It took longer than anticipated to get the product into the hands of backers—instead of 4 months, delivery took two years, during which Itai admits to having slept poorly amid a growing number of emails he was receiving from concerned backers.

Did he ever think that his project might not work?

“No,” he said. “As a designer, I follow the design process, or iterative process, which stipulates that as you’ve tried more things and there’s less other things to try, you’re eventually bound to fall on the right answer. People refer to the process as a circle, but to me it’s more like a spiral, because as you’re going through it, you’re getting closer and closer to the centre. So, I wasn’t discouraged, because I knew that was part of the process and that we would get there some day.”

The Billie’s design stems from a serendipitous chain of events that brought Itai’s pre-production 3D rendering of the integrated amplifier he envisioned into the hands of two successful local amp designers willing to help bring his concept to fruition—Sylvain Savard for the class-D section and Tenor Audio’s Denis Rozon for the tube one.

Now in Mk2 version, with MK3 slated to be released at the end of the year, the Billie employs the ICEpower 200AS2 class-D module. Apart from the module and some internal wiring, both sourced from Asia, the Billie is built and assembled entirely in a factory on the outskirts of Montreal.

When did Itai get the idea for the Billie?

“It started when I bought a country place and needed a sound system for it,” he said. “I had spoken about it to a design student of mine, who said I should check out class-D amps. I said, ‘Aren’t those shit?’, and he said, ‘No, no, there’s some pretty good stuff now’.

“I started researching it and I stumbled upon the Tripath class-D chip, which people were calling a giant killer,” he said. “It was being referred to as class-T to differentiate it from the rest of class-D. So, I got a little Trends Audio 6Wpc amp from Hong Kong for $250 that used the Tripath chip. And it was quite amazing, The sound was very good. When my brother came to the country place, I made him listen to it. And he said, ‘Yeah, it sounds good, but I would never put that in my living room’. That was the light bulb moment for me. The amp was basically this cigar box with a volume knob, with zero features—it didn’t look friendly.”

Itai saw an opportunity to fill a hole in the market.

“At the time, electronic components started appearing that had these LED screens with features and more features, and more LCD screens, and subfolders of folders,” Itai said. “It just killed the whole aesthetic of it. And because features are easier to implement than good sound, it also killed the sound. I progressively went down that slope of worse sound where it got to a point when I forgot what it was to sit down and listen to music. It was the same for my friends, who started getting rid of their bulky stereos and getting Bluetooth speakers. You would listen to them and, within 15 minutes, it was like, ‘let’s turn this off and continue our conversation’. And I wondered how I could make something desirable to those people.

“So when I had that revelation because of my brother,” he continued. “I called the Trends people and said, ‘I got this great idea, how about we pimp your thing’, and they weren’t really interested. They were doing their thing.”

It’s then that he felt a calling to do it himself.

“I just felt there needed to be something better, or else we won’t be talking about music,” he said. “And we are on this road now where things are becoming more dicey.”

In what sense?

“In the sense that I think that with Bluetooth speakers and the home theatre systems, what was being created was a disengagement with the music, where the music becomes the background, which is fine sometimes. But when you want to go beyond the background, it’s nearly impossible to do it with a Bluetooth speaker. You sit down, and next thing you know you want to do the dishes.”

One of the things Itai was most grateful for—he called it a masterstroke—was something he could have never predicted: how much Sylvain and Denis would get along. “To have two engineers get along, and like each other, and see each other outside of work, and have their wives like each other, that’s like, phew…”—he feigns wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm—”I don’t know how I managed to get that one.”

Was he as lucky when it came to getting the class-D and tube sections to work well together?

“Oh, my God,” he said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. It was very hard. The first prototypes were very disappointing. The thing with the tubes was that any noise made by the electronic part of the amp was amplified 800 times by the tubes. It was very hard to get those two sections to behave well together.”

What part of the Billie’s design made the biggest difference to its sound quality?

“Putting the tube section into the class-D,” he said. “That still is the one thing that makes all the difference.” Beyond the sound, Itai believes tubes have something that class-D will never have. “Tubes are made by hand. Each one is unique. They’re not unwavering. They’re life.”

Was he completely happy with the Billie’s design?

“As a designer, I don’t think I’ll ever be happy. I’m eternally unsatisfied. I’m not a perfectionist—I don’t believe in perfection—but I do try to aim for perfection.

“Aesthetically, I think the choices I made for the Billie are appropriate for an audiophile, in that it evokes a certain gear lust,” he said. “But even the audiophile’s significant other who’s not interested in gear can appreciate it and say, ‘Okay, honey, you can have this on the credenza instead of in the credenza’, and this is when they listen to more music because—and this is important to me—the more you see something, the more you’ll use it. Design creates the interface between the human and the machine.”

“I can’t hammer this in enough,” he said. “We need to make gear and products that are not crazy expensive and that are appealing to people who aren’t necessarily already sold on the audiophile experience. My kids’ friends would come into my house and point at my system and say, “What is that?”. And I would play their favourite song on it and they’d be like, “Oh my God!”—Itai widens his eyes in a look of amazement— “They’d never had that experience.

“You and I grew up with that experience,” he continued. “These kids don’t grow up with these experiences because they listen to Bluetooth speakers or in-ear monitors. I want them to fall in love with good sound, but I also want to give people the features that allow them to listen to their music the way they want.”

Any new products on the horizon? “Not the very near horizon, but yes—a Quincy preamp and a Lemmy amp.”

Now there’s a match that promises to jazz up your life and rock your world.

Click here to discover more about the Billie.