Amp maker Mark Sampson is a bit of a legend in the US boutique tube amp world. He along with Rick Perrotta formed high-end favorites Matchless Amplifier Co. in the late 1980s. He later went on to build amps for Bad Cat and even later, around 2004, started producing new lower-watt tube amps under the Star Amplifier moniker. Star currently produces five different hand-wired point-to-point amps ranging from the biggest – the 30-watt family of the Blues Star, Sirius and Celestial to the smallest… the 5-watt Star Nova. Its small stature and low wattage is aimed squarely at the home recording market. With that in mind, we decided to rev up the Nova and see what we could find.