BorderPatrol P20 EXD+EXS. Roy Gregory, The Audio Beat

The BorderPatrol P20 is no ordinary amplifier. In fact, there’s nothing ordinary about the company or the man behind it, one Gary Dews, late of Yorkshire and Brighton in the UK and now Maryland, USA. That’s an eclectic, contrasting, even contradictory path, an odyssey that has left its own indelible imprint on the very nature of his designs. If the audio world is constantly being divided and subdivided into ever more clearly defined pigeonholes (each with its own matching set of deeply held and just as deeply divisive prejudices), here is a product that defies categorization and confounds stereotypes. The amp uses 300B output tubes, but it isn’t single-ended (although there are BorderPatrol models that are). It’s a power amp, although it’s also available with a variable-gain input to create a single-channel integrated. The open chassis might look ultra-traditional, but in fact both the materials and the modular construction are anything but.