Meet Impressions

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…

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

There was quite a bit of uncertainty as HF is down and the attendees had no way to communicate with the organizers. I am sure bhjazz, who organized the meet, was nervousrs about whether people would actually show up. I arrived 30 minutes late, and there were only 4 people, including myself. But soon thereafter, most of the attendees arrived and another great meet was had. Based on my conversations with several people at the meet, I may have been the only Head-Caser in attendance. In other words, this thread may turn out to be a one-man impression thread. I did tell a few people about HC, so we'll see. Sorry, Brian. I couldn't wait until HF came back online to do th…

I'm currently taking a break from a mini-meet, it got pretty intense and my friend & I are taking a break to go grab some food and catch up on things a bit before returning to the listening. A little teaser, we have a modded Audio Aero Capitole, a custom built 2A3 amp, and a balanced RS-1 recabled with copper litz wire. For shits & giggles, we decided to compare a regular store bought CD (Tori Amos - Boys for Pele) with a CDR copy burned on a Fujifilm CDR. I've heard people saying CDRs sound better but never heard a difference on my system, so since we had a top-notch system at our disposal we decided to test it out. Shockingly, the CDR sounds better, and I was li…

Here are my impressions from our meet. I had a great time at the meet, as well. I was able to see some old friends like robm, rhythmdevils and asr (who did a great job of organizing). I also got to meet some new people, and put faces to some names that I?ve seen around on the boards. RSA Apache: I heard this amp using the Ayre CX7e and it was a completely underwhelming experience. This was the first thing I listened to and I spent over 30 minutes on it. It simply did not engage me in any way shape or form when I was using my 580s and listening to some CDs I had brought with me. The sound was extremely dull and devoid of dynamics, especially with Eric Clapton Un…

Yesterdays meet at Earl's was a good time as usual. Here's the obligatory gear pics:

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 …

Hi Guys It was a great meet. I always enjoy everyone's impressions. First off, it was too bad trose49 couldn't make it. I was looking forward to meeting him. n_maher, on the other, hand did make it and he brought some great sounding stuff Nate was nice enough to open the Herstens DAC so we could have a peak inside it was hard to compare the balanced mini M^3 to the one I brought because Nate was feeding it from an Arcam into his "Hertsens" DAC and I was going optical out of a Shuttle computer to a Constantine DAC..... but I'll leave it to those who are not as affected by placebo effect as I am to report on the sound.... I thought …

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…

This was my first meet, and my camera shat the proverbial bed a few weeks ago, so no pix for me. I spent most of mine time hanging out and bumming around/talking to people, but did get to listen to a few things along the way. I went down there with the the intent to listen to a Millett Max (something which I'm thinking of purchasing). Let's see... there was Fitz' AKG collection, which was just massive (maybe 35-40 pairs?), and I believe they were all out of production (or at least most of them were). I just listened to the K1000's, as I knew it was something I wouldn't consider purchasing due to price, so there were no worries of me trying to sell my soul to obtain…

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 …

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 …

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…

Below is the post from Headfi here is the link Norcal Mini-ish Meet impressions 8-9-08 - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio Wow what a fun meet, thanks to Dan for opening his home to us all We had a great group of folks there that all shared a deep love of music and gear. It showed with lively discussion. I eneded up staying at Dans place when the group went to lunch so I could get some quite time listening done. There was a ton of of top flight gear considering this was a mini meet. Once again even though I was there for 12 hours I still did not listen everything. Eddie Current, a tale of three amps. The Nautilus, this is one heck of …

Biggie hosted an Oakville meet today. I'm still working on my impressions file but here's the quick summary. Lavry Black is good, but not as good as tubes. HF-1 is better than last time, probably amps & break-in. My tube amp needs more work or better tubes. The Senn 650 at this meet has way more bass than the other 2 650's I've heard in the past. The K701 doesn't have enough bass. The 2 pairs of K340's are getting closer in sound, but still rather different. The PS-1 still remains my favourite headphone. The SR-60 is the best headphone for the price ever. People who say "Grados have no soundstage" need new batteries for their hearing aids, or they need hearing aids in…

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…

and that is all there are so dont ask for more

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/

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…

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.

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.

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

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.