spritzer

Release date for the SR-X1 is set at May 9th: https://stax.co.jp/product/srs-x1000/ I've already placed a preorder.

Ehhhhhh fuck that guy... Anybody who sells part of a bank to his own father, needs to be taken out back and shot. Icelandic politics are such a cluster fuck right now, we have a major problem of attracting only idiots to power and it is really biting us in the ass now. Then we have the upcoming presidential elections with just one round of voting and 30 people running. It's also held in the middle of summer, 50% turnout would be high so our next president could have 4% of actual support behind him. Yeah no provision to have the two top people duke it out in a second round. Very democratic... On top of that, alleged child molesters and other trash in the running but they are from the artsy elite so nobody does anything. It's a shitshow...

This is funny, I just bought some SRD-7's to use as donors for my own boxes. A SR-Lambda was included with one of those energizers and just look at that serial number... Aside from the foam in the earcups being crusty and the earpads having been replaced at some point, they play perfectly for a 45 year old set.

A lot of money was spent on this and the amp is very nicely made in terms of the chassis design. All of the panels are 8mm thick with very nice machining on them but to take all this effort and waste it on a fundamentally flawed driver design... is just beyond me. The analog inputs go through those four dual opamps per side before it goes to the AKM A/D converter. The Xmos unit handles the USB a sample rate converter after it. The SPDIF input has its own sample rate unit too and all of this feeds into the ESS dacs. I always thought these would have a DSP but it appears to be all analog, unless there is a grunty chip hiding on the back of the board that I can't see. That does me we could make our own amps for these if we just clone the filtering circuit and add some adjustments to it. Not sure if there is any demand for that though.

Time for a bump as I found a cheap Sonoma set. My amazing cable tidiness aside, the headphones that came with the set had an imbalance but my other two sets play just fine. One was supposed to have an imbalance as well but nope, just the earpads that were utterly fucked. That seems to be a common thing with these as the materials they used seem to be very cheap indeed so the earpads just fall apart. Now Kevin is already yelling at me to take apart the amp so I'll do that tomorrow. A lot of thought and money has gone into this stuff and quite possibly the worst packaging ever designed... the wank factor is off the scale. The box for the amp is more than 10 times the size of the amp... 2" foam on all sides is a bit too much for such a small unit. I did sit down and listen to them and it is quite an odd experience. Everything sounds a bit fake and the single ended nature means they are as if you have yet to pop your ears... like the sound is further away than it should be. It's quite an odd sensation compared to the normally open sounding electrostatics. It's also easy to hear the DSP trickery going on here and the limited volume on tap is a dead giveaway... I'm almost at max volume with the RCA input and can easily listen at full tilt for an extended period. They also really don't like it when played off the head, you move your head or any transients... the drivers are not happy. Running the drivers in free air creates a lot of audible distortion and they squeal with any movement. Such a shame so much effort has gone into what is at its core, a terrible driver design that has no real purpose.

This might be too crazy for me but why not go further. I happen to have a couple of 30kWh, 400V battery packs so a DC-DC converter and make it "portable"?

I can't wait to try them.

While I was waiting for a flight, I checked out some Chinese sites and found these pics: This is the HV supply for the opamps and the bias supply. This is clearly pretty dire but look at the bias supply... it's simply a voltage doubler off the input AC with no trimmer, no voltage divider, no filter at all but there is more fuckery afoot... look at those bias ballast resistors. Can anybody decode those values? Hint... they are not 4.7M as they should be. 🙄

Sure, if you aren't having fun then why on earth would anybody call this a hobby. I know far too many people take this way to seriously but I'd also say his post very much goes in that direction and comes off as nonsensical at best. Perhaps I'm biased by my own extremely low effort reviews but when you are drawing up multiple images... yeah... it all becomes a bit serious. I also very much agree that the review doesn't touch on how the headphones actually sound. To me they have a deliberately compromised imaging (as in designed throw a specific image but it doesn't really work or make any sense) so I feel it is a lot of BS thrown up to try and account for that. Electrostatics are (well should be) infinite baffle designs so if the room is having an impact... then the other side of the bipolar output is surely doing so as well. That will cause cancellations, time smear and totally fuck up the sound. I find it a bit funny how both designs that pay homage to the SR-Omega, leave out or fuck with, what is arguably its main design element. The ES-1a doesn't have the outer screen in place at all and on the X9000 they use a very different material and then angle the screen... and do it in the wrong bloody direction. The screen should have been denser and flat to the back of the drivers.

Yeah, seems like that to me as well. Going by the SR-X Mk3 Pro and even the Gamma Pro's... you can get very good performance from such a small driver though. Well it they voice it correctly.... 🙄

Absolutely but that might be a good thing. The SR-X was so overly damped it wouldn't really work today.

I read through it all and I have to disagree with his findings and it rang alarm bells for me when the room had an effect... yeah no!!

I've been away but this one was short lived but really bad. Some 30-40 thousand people lost all heating to the houses (in -10°C weather) and the electrical grid couldn't keep up so they lost that and cold water too in some places. Now another eruption is forecast in 3-4 weeks and that might just be the new norm for us.

There SR-X1 drivers are clearly a play on the older SR-XMk3/SR-5N basic structure as seen from the stators but who knows what the structure is actually like. I'll buy a set when they first become available and rip it all apart...