Meet Impressions

Chris and I conspired with Al to put on a "to the death" battle royale of electrostat headphones. Electrostatic headphones in attendance were Stax O2mk1, 4070, Lambda Signature, Lambda Pro, SRX3/mk2, Sennheiser HE90s, Koss ESP950, and Beyer ET1000s, plus Sennheiser HD800s to act as a baseline. For amps, we had Headamp Blue Hawaii and KGSS, plus Stax SRM1/mk2 and Vlad's Beta 22 powering a modified Stax SRD7ta. The control amp was the Headamp GS-X. The source for the blue hawaii was the Denon 2900ta (balanced). Sourcing everything else was Dreadhead's dac comparator setup. Vlad, Hirsch, cetoole, dreadhead, Dusty Chalk, rugby and I were in attendance, with a brief ap…

I guess I'll start this here with what I posted over at head-fi: Well, first things first, thanks to cryhavoc for a great job organizing this meet and GO SPURS. Second thanks to skylab and his wonderful family for allowing all us crazy headfiers to share their beautiful domicile. I must say Rob, I only hope my son grows up to be as well-behaved and charming as your children. O.K. now on to the real business. The highlight of the day for me was unfortunately not headphone related. It was Skylab's vinyl rig, the sound was glorious (as is Rob,s taste in music, eclectic is good!). The Denon turntable was not only glorious to behold but produced some great sounds, especi…

http://new.photos.yahoo.com/hirsch_d Here's a few (OK, 189) pics taken at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. Basically, lots of very good sound, but little that reached greatness (and a good deal that was absolutely awful). I'm still recovering.

As I'm doing a mega-whirlwind tour of Florida this weekend (Jacksonville yesterday & today for Axpona, then scampering down to Tampa tomorrow morning for the Beerfest and then back up Sunday morning), I'll have essentially no time to post either impressions or pics anytime until Monday night. Axpona was pretty cool today. It was fun listening to a wide variety of speakers. The hotel venue was smaller than expected, but inside the hotel was fairly well decked out with the audio stuff in lots of rooms. Compared to RMAF, I'd say the event is maybe around 20-25% the scale - and even then I still didn't get to see everything today, let alone listen to everything. If I …

The meet's still in progress, so no real impressions to speak of. I just figured I'd check in. I'm hosting, and there's a lot to be said for not having to break down and set up my rig somewhere else! The group here is myself, Vince (n_maher), Dave (drp) and Haj (Salt Peanuts). I'm sure we'll get to the equipment present, impressions and pics later. For now? Back to listening!

Let me start this off by sort-of crossposting from HF. Not being able to just C&P from HF to here and have the pictures show up is REALLY annoying. Before I start with re-inserting 25 or so pictures, let me start off with a HC exclusive. I hope there are no small children around. **Colin Note: I decided to skip the bathroom pics this time, in loo (get it, literally toilet humour) of the shot below** He's baaaa aaaaack! Event organizer: Trav Listening to what we can all agree was the best rig there... mine. Trav in his normal/more natural pose The triumphant return of Ingwe Can you seriously believe someone brought a kid to a meet!?!?!…

Because y'all are too lazy to make a thread, I made one for you. The guy in the first pic is my uncle (I was slightly taken aback when I saw the pic but found out he was a Head-Fi'er this past summer): http://www.head-fi.org/forums/6092529-post9.html

I got a call this morning about a meet which I'd discussed in passing a few weeks ago and then promptly forgotten about. We listened to a stock RS-1, my K340, and a modded RS-1 along with a Grado 225. The rest of the gear list is as follows: modded Audio Aero Capitole Naim CD5x modded Denon 650F EML 20B & 2A3 tube amp SinglePower MPX3 w/6BL7's my experimental tube amp The short summary. The MPX3 was not as good as I expected, I thought it would at least hold its own against my tube amp but it got beaten in all respects once I swapped 6BL7 tubes into my amp. The Naim and my Denon are quite similar in terms of sound signature, but the Naim has more resolution …

Just got back from meeting up with everyone, had a great time and thanks to Andrew for supporting the event. His new maximo i590 were the best of the affordable iem's , a humble servant in the shadow of the JH13 but can stand its own anytime. Tons of top end gear to enjoy and good to share time with old acquaintances. A scrambled slide show to tease, more later ..dB

Had a good time yesterday at my house. Grover Huffman (maker of Grover Cables) came over peddling his wares.... well not really peddling.... I had upgraded three pairs of my Sc. Grover ICs to his newest creation the Sx IC I also replaced my 10 foot long Monster Speaker Cables (yuck!!) with 3 foot long Grover Sx speaker cables. But really its about the comraderie, so Grover came over cables in hand, so we could have some fun swapping cables and doing some listening. Oh... he also brought another pair of surprises A pair of 60 watt tube monoblocks which he built himself So we started off by listening to my system in its baseline state with …

Headphone geeks gathering. Canman's friend came to see the lowlifes he hangs with... K-701 coming out of RKV/Impedanzer Stevieo cleaned up nicely for the meet Canman's Lavry DAC with Pass Labs Aleph 3 amp. This could be one of the finest K-1000 rigs I've heard. Eastsound CD player, Raptor, and another player whose name I may never have known. I didn't do a lot of listening at the meet. My style now is to pick three or four things I want to hear. The Raptor was one of them. Now, I've gotten tired of a lot of the fighting. Some friends of mine like the Raptor, and I'd love to be able to say nice things about it. However, that just …

Not sure if anyone here is actually interested in these, but since it had a lot of Gilmore representation I figured I would post here. KSA-5 Clone Balanced Dynalo Whatever this new amp is called. About the only headphones I recognized at this meet. Along with the 50 pairs of LCD-2s Some amp the audio store guy was peddling. A pimped out Crack and a normal Crack

DISCLAIMER: The below is a joke. A bit of parody, if you will. We would never put such insane requirements on something as simple as a Head-case post. Please, when posting impressions follow a few simple rules. If you attended this meet, please place all feedback for it in this thread. Make sure to include your answers to all the following questions in your feedback. If you are the attendee, you only need to answer questions for the first form on the page, "Form 1". When you make a new post for yourself from within this thread, use the "quote" button and then highlight only the top form, Form 1". You can type your answers where it says "PLACE ANSWER HERE". After …

The short version. The various Chinese tube amps need a way to set the channel balance, every single one had horrible channel imbalances which fucked over the soundstaging & imaging. I don't know if it's crappy QC or bad tubes, but it wasn't pretty. It drove me nuts and I couldn't listen to them much, so no real impressions on them. Philodox's new amp is great with high impedance ?phones, but I suspect it was current starving the Grados. Normally I need to turn the volume way down when going from Senns to Grados, but with his amp I had to keep the volume knob at nearly the same setting. The amp was brand new so I hesitate to make any definitive comments on it, it s…

and that is all there are so dont ask for more

Never call a friend about going to Vegas if your not totally serious. After several phone calls Al and I booked a one day blitz of CES madness to see if the HD 800 hype was for real. I'm on an iPhone so more details to come but the HD 800 is the real deal and to me worth every penny of the $1400 asking price. We got into Vegas at 10am and went straight to the Senn display area for a 20 minute session each with the HD800. All I can say it they sound Great and are competitive with any top tier headphone (current or discontinued). Thanks to Jude, Drew and Tyl for the hookup and it was great to hang with Ed, Naaman and his Dave. Dinner and drinks was a blast! To be c…

We had a meet yesterday at his new apartment. We had all the expensive Grados. Except the GS1000. Because it sucks. Someone also brought a crappy CD player that no one wanted to listen to, as you can clearly see from the "no disc" status. We also discussed the greatness of Grado quality control, or how every Grado had the same kink right at the cable Y where the wires split. We were astounded at how every Grado from the 225 all the way up to the PS1000 had that same kink at the Y. Oh yeah, and someone said that the pads on my Senn 580 looked like they were made of panties, or pantyhose. I'd like to state for the record that this isn't true, it wa…

The meet has begun. Here are some early pics at Gate 19 Houston Airport:

'Twas a smashing good meet. Kudos to [AK]Zip for organizing it and taking care of the gear I sent out. One way to know a meet has been a success is when you go in knowing absolutely no one and by the end of the day you have a new set of friends. It was great to meet everyone, all really nice people. [AK]Zip himself was both something of what I expected and what I didn't expect, in a good way of course. Will post more later including pics. Thanks to all for making it an enjoyable time.

This was a bit different kind of shindig than your usual Head-X.org meet. These were "old farts" (their term, not mine), while "we" were the "young farts" (again, their term). Ingwe was particularly thrilled with that, as he's old. They had Tyll come out to Atlanta for a meet/greet + presentation on computer audio. I arrived around 60% of the way through the 2 hour "set-up" time, which was really about the only time one had to listen to music in a reasonable environment (more on this later). I pulled in and got out of the car and saw TomB pulling in. I went over and caught up a minute before heading into the hotel where we were greeted by two friendly ladies with …

Welcome I hosted a mini-meet at my place on Saturday, including HeadphoneAddict, Blutarsky, Sherwood, wiatrob and myself. And HeadphoneAddict's son (he has a Stax rig!) The idea of a small meet was to keep things more accomodating to getting some critical listening done - near impossible to do at full meets. And we did just that It's much more affordable, too All in all, it was a good success. A lot was learned, definitely by me and hopefully by all. Thank yous go out to: HeadRoom, without whom we would not have had the D7Ks to review And Drew at Moon-Audio, without whom we would not have had the Senn cables, the Creek, the Shanling nor the iQu…

It was fun. Too tired to comment on gear right now.

We're here, we're moderately sober, and there's gear being set up. Seems like time for an impressions thread. Duggeh's pictures will tell the story far more accurately than I can, so I'll get out of the way.

Yeah this is a meet thread and shit. Have fun.