Audio Accessories

Introduction Ok so everyone here knows me as a cable freak who is also obsessed with connector quality. Yes i am , so bear with me, i promise i am not going to go patrick82 here . anyway, as many of you guys know i am one of those who do not use a dedicated headphone amp, instead i use the ghetto trick of directly driving my senns directly from the two xlr outs of my apogee/lavry dac (pioneered by none other than the brilliant fotm starter iron dreamer ). because of that, the headphone cable has become the critical link between the dac and the headphones in my rig. To maximize the sound quality i need to get the best sennheiser headphone cable i can find. Over the …

I don't know about you guys, but the VI cable keeps breaking for me (every few months of daily usage). If this is the case for others, what have you done to prevent this? Has anyone tried an aftermarket cable? I really don't want to deal with this problem again (3 times so far). Any help would be appreciated!

Going to meets and packing up all my gear is a pain. And now with CanJam, it may limit what I bring. I was thinking of getting a Pelican case or two. Does anyone use them. Any other case suggestions? I don't want to use suitcases and cardboard boxes anymore.

As the title says, I'm needing a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter so I can get rid of the cheap/awful buds that came with my cell phone and use some decent IEM's. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding these. Radio Shack(mine anyway) and the cell phone companies in my area don't have any. I ordered an expensive one ($20) from Pocket PC Techs only to find that it was defective upon arrival so back it went. I see lots of adapters in mono but I'm not finding a lot of options for stereo. Anyone have one that they're happy with? Where did you find it? Any help would be appreciated.

I've got a family member getting ready to spend a year or two in Seoul. He's been advised to pick up a couple of converters in the US before he leaves. Seems a couple of his colleagues picked up a unit or two that were of suspect quality which led to some equipment damage. Anyone here have some top flight units they'd recommend? I'll confess to knowing nothing about the converters, what's out there or what's good. Thanks in advance. Hope things are well with the Head Case gang!

I ordered two of these a while ago to plug my Duet into my HP FEEL 200se amp. I didn't realize it at the time, as I was in a hurry, but I ordered two mono cables, thus they are both white. There is no red or black. Does that matter for sending left + right stereo signals from the Duet to the headphone amp's RCA inputs (white and red)? Are red ones somehow grounded any differently? I'm going to be plugging in normal red + white RCA cables to these adapters. Maybe I should stop buying stuff at 3am?

Would somebody measure the diameter of the hole in a pair of Grado flat pads? I think I'm going to but the pads for the SR60 and just cut my own hole. Thank.

Phono preamp. Any thoughts on whether this is good unit? Anyone have experience with it? Pete

In my new source/transport thread Yikes made an interesting point, that optical is an inferior solution to coaxial (or something to that extent I suppose). Why is that?

I was recently at BestBuy looking to purchase some new audio equipment and came across "Headphone amplifiers." I had to do some research about what exactly they are and came across this post- link removed I'm just curious about what constitutes a good headphone amp and should I purchase one. Thanks ya'll.

Hello I'd like to try out some good silver interconnects. Please tell me what i should be looking at.. right now i have my eyes on the moon audio silver dragon.

I want to get one so I can use my Big Joe for my floorstanding speakers and K1000. Do they degrade the sound quality? Is there any ones (Hopefully under $50) that you guys would recommend?

I'm looking to buy a tube tester and would like to make it a bit future proof to my buying habits. Before researching the testers, I never knew that 12 pin tubes existed. I'm talking about 6KD6 compactron type tubes. Does anybody here use them, design with them, etc.? Has anybody even seen a piece of audio equipment that does use them? I'm guessing that I won't ever need to test them, but would like to know more about them before I dismiss them.

My Google ability has failed me -- I am looking for a TRRS to TRS adapter that has a built in mic (perhaps that can clip onto the cord of headphones) so I can use my regular phones to talk via Google Voice. If that is not clear, I imagine it would look like a TRRS male to TRS female jack, with a cord coming out the side with a mic on the end. Does such a thing exist?

As observant Head-Casers will note, I am a fan of I often end up taking 45 minutes or so during the process, and I like to listen to podcasts while doing so. My laptop sits on a shelf that's about 4' away from the sink where I shave. I have some really (really) crappy speakers right now that are USB powered and have a 1/8" audio cable. They have two modes "too quiet to hear" and "so distorted you can't make out speech." I'd like a USB powered speaker (singular or pair, it's irrelevant), ideally one that has a built in DAC so it's only connection to my laptop is via the USB cable. I've never particularly liked the analogue output on any Macintop that I've owned…

So I recenty got a new iPhone 3g and now need to carry around my earbuds with the USB cord with me at all times. So right now my solution has been to use my old batty and dugout softcase:) So I have two questions. 1. What is the best soft headphones case that has enough space for earbuds, usb cable and maybe a future third cord? I would prefer a softcase but am bycurious over soft/hardcase. (The third cord option would be for an iPhone A/v cable but is totally optional I would like it as a future cord.) 2. What is the best earbuds with microphone, volume adjustment and play,pause,fast forward etc.?

I'm trying to find spring loaded binding posts, the sort where you push on the end to reveal the hole and let go to clamp the wire. I need them as a quick release thingy (not for wire) These sort of things used to be quite common in the old days but I've only found one so far and it comes with stupid speakers attached Personally I find that going a bit far just to bump up the price of binding posts but these sharks will try anything. So if any of you have/do come across something simlar, let me know. Thankee kindly mon amis

roll up, roll up, buy an expensive empty box.. https://shop.mcintoshlabs.com/products/lb200-light-box

For primarily budget reasons, I am using a PreSonus Central Station as a pre amp in my living room speaker system. The PCS has a pretty decent built in dac which I am feeding with a modded Onix cdp via spdif. Due to the fact that my Flying Mole custom amp that had been providing amp duties over this past year has suddenly decided to take the vow of silence, I am in the market for a new sub $1.8K amp and perhaps going balanced if that is doable at that price point. The PCS has TRS outputs so I was thinking that if I had a pair of TRS to XLR connectors to a "balanced" amp(s) I would have a true balanced speaker system. Am I right or am I blowing smoke? (Leaves self open f…

I bought a Squeezebox today and plan to run the coax out the my Opus 21 and the optical out to my Marantz receiver. I found a few glass optical cables at Parts Express but the longest the have is 12 ft and I really need something thats 15 ft. Any recommendations?

These cables are fucking great! Other than the Head-Case style intro, this is the same review I posted on Head-Fi to make known Alex's fine work. Enjoy, or don't. At all three of the meets I have attended, I have used various cables made by Alex, aka ayt999, and I have been impressed with his work. At the recent Saratoga meet, I sampled three different mini-mini cables that he was working on, and talked to him about his idea of opening a "shop" on Mall-Fi. I said I would be happy to be one of his first customers and asked him to make me a mini-RCA cable for use with an iPod dock. When I received the mini-RCA last week, Alex also had included three new mini-mini …

I'm looking around for a very clear/transparent balanced volume control with attenuation in ≤2dB steps, across the range -40dB to -85dB (though if it went to -100dB that would be a bonus). This is for feeding my balanced beta22, my source has a low output impedance. putting a fixed attenuator before my present goldpoint attenuator would mean it could start at -40 but couldn't cover the whole range in ≤2dB steps. transformers/autoformers appear not to go this low options I can see are maybe: MiniVol MiniVol PGA2320 Volume Control - error404's Audio DIY Endeavours though I'm no good at coding lcduino1 The LCDuino-1 display I/O processor once it ge…

Hi all, I posted this on Head Fie, but thought some folks here might be interested also: It seems like the response to the review of Hug & Dance, Paranormal Division's Transformation Tweak has died down a little so I thought I would add my response to aGuise's strange treatment of my system. I won the treatment on Audiogon, and here is the letter I sent to aGui this evening: Hi aGui, You cetainly have an unusual job. Tweaking people's minds as well as their systems. I promised to write and relay my experience of the Transformation Tweak. I spent a half hour masturbating before I called you today, and focused on the first few minutes of a Michael Jackson…

I was informed that they were stopping production. Anyone know what's going to replace it if anything?

I have a friend who works at Circuit City. Earlier this year we were talking about making him a line stabilizer and he started egging me on to get a power conditioner. Well I am going on a cruise next summer, so all of my cash is tied up there so I mentioned I couldn't buy for at least a year. So he calls me yesterday. "I have a Monster Power Center, you want it?" "How Much?" "$40" "...!" I had to jump all over this. http://www.vanns.com/shop/servlet/item/details/752246098 That is the center I got. For $40 I figured I couldn't go wrong.