Meet Impressions

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 …

What an epic meet. We listened for like 4 hours straight, went out for some Chinese, then went straight back to listening for another couple hours (wasn't keeping track of time that well, correct me if I'm wrong). I'd first like to thank Marc for shipping the LCD1 and Fostex T50v1 up here so we could do a great three-way match up between the TOTL Head-Direct, Fostex, and Audeze (the LCD2 isn't technically out yet) orthos. And so, without further ado, here is my view on the three: HE5: A good amount of soundstage and there is a slight angling of the pads, which is a nice touch. The pads themselves are quite stiff and aren't the most comfy, and the cable isn't al…

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…

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…

Me & philodox met up at a local store yesterday where he was introduced to vinyl and had Massive Attack ruined for him. I'll let him fill in the rest of the details, but suffice to say, we had a fun time listening to cool music & gear.

the winners: meridian G08 headamp gs-x ps audio GCHA ps audio power plant shure e500 headphile HF-1 sony r-10 cardas sennheiser cable the losers imho: monster power conditioning strip (sounds dry and lifeless compared to the power plant) stealth (muddy, no air) hornet (no air) beyerdynamics dt880 (emotionless, dry) equinox sennheiser cable (too fat sounding on senn 650s) qualia 010 (urgh, just urgh) http://www.tc.umn.edu/~laux0078/chicago%20meet/

There was only three people, two beers, and one system, but I'd say the 5th Annual International Postjack Plus Friend Ohio Mini Meet (codename: Raging With Reks) was a complete success. Jacob's speaker rig is truly awesome. Pretty much does everything I'd want a system to do. Tonally my absolute favorite part was the highs. I love it when the highs are perfect, and they were. The soundstage had really awesome depth, and the imaging was great. We went from small scale classical to large scale classical to a bunch of jazz to Rush to that weird guy from Soft Machine doing weird spoken word free form jazz. Although I spent a bit of time telling Jacob to buy a turnt…

Decent meet. Got to try my 007s with the BHSE and listen to the GSX so I was happy. Todd listening to his new HP system.

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

Thanks again to Philippe (papomaster) for hosting this excellent meet. I had a great time listening to all of the headphone setups and sharing knowledge and opinions with the other guys. The atmosphere was even friendlier than our last meet and I think we have a good future as a headphone community here in Montreal. I'm not too good at "speaking audio", but I'll do my best writing some short impressions from the setups with which I had the chance to spend quality time. These were based on short-term listening in a crowded room with people talking so take it with a grain of salt. Laptop -> Nuforce Icon -> Stax SRD-6 -> Stax SR-Gamma I thought this was a …

link So, who are these people? I know pic #2 is Jude; #8 is Mikhail; #11 is Tyll; #13 is Ray. #6, is that Pete Millet? #12 (the other one, not Tyll)? #16, I haven't a clue -- Steve Nugent? The EFF guy and the Ultimate Ears guy are pretty obvious.

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 …

All you need to know is that Yikes came, cleaned up on the door prizes, implied I was deceptively short, and left.

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

Had a portable mini-meet a few weeks ago with mrarroyo and Vorlon1, and got together again today with mostly the same gear. Though maybe not much to interest folks here, I thought I'd do a quick take on a few things I've now listened to a couple times. Both meets were pretty budget-fi meet, which is kind of nice. Anyway, here goes with mini-impressions: Sources were three imods (4g) and a nano. Portable amps: Graham Slee Voyager - bass and bass and full mids and bass. Not good bass, but BASS. I didn't like it. I do like separation between notes and that was missing. ibasso P2 - yuck. Very congested. ibasso D2 - didn't try out the dac since everyone assumed some…

I posted these over on HF and wanted to share them with you all as well. We spent 2 days at this insane event, what a great time I am beat but here are the first set of pics and thoughts. Sonist Speakers these were in many of the rooms and they make 2 types of speaker both use a ribbon tweeter and a standard bass speaker. They are fairly efficient which is why many used them but IMHO they are mediocre at best. They image poorly and seem slightly off tonally I really wanted to hear the electra print amps and get a good impression of them but it was impossible as they used the floorstanders of these and it left me feeling flat. Cold War Amp this amp was a beauty and t…

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

Thanks to Icarium for hosting a great meet on Saturday, with a small but select batch of audiophiles and gear. And thanks to Craig for bringing some of his product line. I was able to spend some time comparing an HD800 with my K702 on his pre-release Eddie Current Balancing Act. I doubt that recorded Bach organ works can sound better than this. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3823[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]3822[/ATTACH] Craig and his new baby. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3825[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]3824[/ATTACH] Our host and the Eddie Current Zana Deux. Woo Audio amp and other gear I wish I could afford. I also compared a K701 with my K702, and noticed that the notorious headband bumps are…

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 …

not really a meet. went to carls awesome house for a few hours and listened to some tunes via speakers. in the line up were super small fonkens (forget if they were micro or mini fonkens) but the damn things were tiny and metronomes. some uber apogee speakers i hadnt known about were added to the mix towards the end for a song. amp of choice was some unknown 10 watt tube concoction which sounded quite nice feeding the metronomes. the fostex fe 127e drivers were enabled and the midrange was everything that it was hyped up to be if not better. the top end was lot a little but it was just the right amount of loss for a really nice listening session. even at louder volumes th…

I think we had a meet. I'm a bit too tired to remember for sure. the past few hours have been a blur. at least I made it home up north of Muir.

Myself and two other head-case'ers had a listening session this sunday just past. I had a great time forcing all my music down their throats, and they seemed to enjoy themselves. I gave Micah [Redleader] my headroom hat as it doesn't fit my massive head. The picture of Nick [datamorph] didn't turn out all that well due to my poor camera skills... man I need a tripod. Here is another one of Nick that was taken with his ghetto camera. He had to beat the crap out of it to get it to turn on and it was making weird noises. NOTE: I'm not sure if datamorph is registered here, but redleader is I believe.

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.

1) Stax Omega 2: I really liked these headphones; they have IMO the bigggest soundstage in a headphone other than the K1000s. I didn't find it to be too bassy out of the ES-1, although the impact was not up to the level that I would consider satisfactory for hard rock. But these have very good timbre, and the tonality is a little bit dark, but nothing to really complain about. I would not hesistate to build an O2 system if not for the fact that I just can't get them to fit right. I tried rotating the cups and the cushions every way, but just never found a good fit. 2) Orpheus: Between the Orpheus and the O2, I'd say it's a toss up when both are amped out of an ES-1. I co…