Meet Impressions

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…

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…