Leaderboard

Thank you gents and Brent. Julie got a full ride for another year and finished the semester with straight A's. Both her daughters got straight A's as well and got into a special medical program for middle school. Yacht formal tonight to celebrate where I shall have an opportunity to wear my nautical themed pashmina afghan while singing I'm on a boat. Another print on 500px got sold. It is a good day indeed.

Just finished the last final for the first year of medical school. Hooray.

Well, your ghost is a little less loquacious, so we can hope.

Some good news as we can all expect some more measurements of electrostatic headphones. Kevin and I weren't happy with the lack of a good amp for Tyll to measure on so being a bit loopy we decided to build one for him and donate to the cause. It fell to me to build it and it had to be something special, with some unique features but also a known standard. A souped up KGSS felt like the best choice as it's a well known design and probably the most popular high end Stax amp out there. Justin built a pile of them, it's been a popular DIY project, I'vv and the Stax SRM-717 is pretty much a KGSS so an easy reference point. I've also built a dozen or so of them so plenty of parts in stock. Here it is sitting on top of it's younger sibling. It is clear that this isn't a bog standard KGSS since Tyll as a reviewer needs flexibility. All the outputs are driven off the same amp section but the three major bias voltages are taken care off via their dedicated sockets. The bias supplies are all either generated by fully regulated power supplies or derived via a voltage divider off a fully regulated line. Now the fourth output is a bit special as it is a small variable DC supply driving an EMCO DC-DC converter and goes up to 1kV. There are jacks on the side to plug in multimeter probes and the pot to adjust it. The ballast resistor can also easily be swapped out for any value required by what ever unit is up for testing. I'll ship it with a 4M7 unit rated to 2000V which works just fine for most sets. The LED's for power indication are mounted underneath the chassis to make the front a bit cleaner. I looked into transparent feet but found nothing that I liked. So here are the guts. The PSU is a design derived from the KGSSHV but simplified and limited to single 500V caps. I run it at +/-415V which is about as high as that Edcor transformer will give me. On the KGSS amp board the 2SA1156's are replaced with 2SA1486's and it uses 2SC4686A's as output/gain devices. I had to back the current off a bit as the sinks were reaching 95°C at the stock KGSS setup but even at 8.5mA it is a very powerful amplifier. Vanishingly low output capacitance and no protection resistors means a very linear output. I left the 5k1 output resistors off as they might interfere with a non Stax based design. Other than that it is a pretty standard fair for my builds, XLR inputs and loopouts, quad Alpha pot which is easy enough to bypass by simply maxing it out. The AC input also features a voltage selector which made hooking up three transformers a bit easier. Needless to say this amp sounds awesome and has no problem driving even the tricky SR-007A (SZ2) to perfection. Tyll is happy and and so are we. The "God amp". Who comes up with this shit as it is a pretty lackluster piece of engineering. Same with the Electra which nobody cares about any more. How come nobody can build an all tube electrostatic amp properly?

I like it! I can't see a picture of Iovine without thinking he's a massive douche-nozzle. News feed are saying this is about Beats streaming service, but I think Apple could really benefit from the active headphone platform. They'll prolly stick a bunch of sensors in the cans, but at least there won't be friggen thugs running the show. Edit: I take that back, Al. At least there won't be neanderthal thugs running the show...they'll be sophisticated thugs.

Happy birthday, Shelly. I shat soon forget that first elevator ride when you met us idiots. I think I'm remembering that right. God, I'm getting old. Imma remember it that way anyway. Hope the glow of your birthday won't soon wear off.

http://m.tickld.com/x/30-problems-only-british-people-will-understand

Sounds amazing. Really amazing. Cooked some prime fillets from Sams. Pan seared in olive oil and butter then broiled. Yummy.

Well we had a nice 2 weeks of spring, it is now too fucking hot Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Just my opinion, but I think we've devoted more than enough time and space to Patrick. I'd be quite happy to never have to see his crap again.