JWN Amps still in business?

Never heard of that company.

Hi Italian

You may be in trouble with your JWN gear. If you head on over to AudioKharma there are posts/threads talking about Jim Nicolls and people who have lost money. The guy is a nice guy but I think in bad shape.

I hope things work out.

From what I surmised from that thread awhile back was that Jim either had some health issues / medical bills and or rehab of some nature that I could only speculate about causing him financial hardship.
It's rather unfortunate as Jim made some great sounding amp for a Very affordable price and my dealings with him were always positive
Hopefully he'll bounce back from whatever happened and reestablish his business but I'm not so sure

I received my amp from him several weeks ago. He started work on it in January. There were a number of delays so I had him go ahead and ship the amp with the trim work unfinished. Apparently he is going through issues. He told me these last few amps he was finishing up were going to be his last for awhile. I think some folks were really pressuring him, which I always tried to avoid. He was always very kind in his emails and very quick in his replies. However, he asked to borrow money to hold him over a few days. I had a bad feeling about it, and sure enough ever since I sent that payment, he stopped replying to my emails. It wasn't enough money to besmirch the guy's reputation IMO, but nevertheless it happened. Very happy with the amp though it seemed very susceptible to microphonic tubes - not sure if that's a side effect of the design or I had just had some bad tube luck. In any event, it is dead silent now and sounds terrific.

I hope he's okay and gets things in order. I told him he should build up an inventory of amps and sell them on ebay ala Dennis Had. Waiting 6 months for an amp after prepaying for it is just asking for upset customers IMO.

The website no longer exists. That's always sad.

Thank you all for the info, I had assumed something was amiss through comments on other forums. I too wish him well. He had beautiful equipment on his site and I've had a purchase of some type on my wishlist. Again thanks. Dave

Speavler- your post has given me some encouragement. I ordered and paid for an amp from Jim in February but have had no contact from him since May. Maybe all is not lost.--

Mdchrc - did you ever get your amp from Jim?

I gave him money in advance to build my amplifier.

Never heard from him again....

Mdchrc - I never got my Amp from Jim after a year. Still searching him out....

Just wanted to give this thread an update...

I recently met Jim without having ever heard of JWN amplifiers.  He was working as a service tech at a local shop and ended up completely re-working my old Scott 340b back to spec.  I learned quickly that this guy is smarter than the average bear and super into the hobby.  I understand there were some low times before(much as we've all had), but he seems well past them to me.

We're now into our second project restoring a pair of Maggie Mono Blocks that will undoubtedly sound sublime.  Search out the other reviews of Jims work and you'll see he's a standup guy with some excellent designs.