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So I finished my my KGSSHV Carbon a few weeks ago. Been too busy listening to it, but I thought I would share my effort and measurements. I am lucky enough to have access to some test gear that allowed me to take thermal pictures of the amp and some further analysis such as frequency response. I also put together a bring up guide that I used. It is basically a summary of what others have already come up with here in posts. it can be viewed at: KGSSHV Carbon Bringup Guide Attached is the test report. And yes, the wiring still needs to be tidied up in that picture, especially the grounding. I was a little impatient, plus I still need to design a small latch and inrush limiter circuit for the momentary switch. For now the switch on the IEC connector makes do. KGSSHV Carbon - SR17001.pdf

If you insist, Colin

Happy with the sliver RPF1 Race numbers came yesterday, company rushed the order for free. Didn't have time to put them on. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G890A using Tapatalk

Well the new 100/100 fiber at home seems to be working..

Wow, that was a lot of work! Looks great (even if I don't know what half of it means)!

Swapped in 6CA7 from Electro harmonic and the sub-bass is better ..... Tubes rolling is fun and GG is amazing ! Thank you Kevin !!!! Can't thanks Kevin enough The LED switch is awesome from Joe and Ang, 2 tones, so white is my warmed up and warmed orange is operational

I like the red thing cuz it's red.

HS

Wheels look great! HS

This is great, now we have somebody in charge of documentation!!! Seriously though, excellent work and not nearly enough multimeters.

Top this.

VINTAGE DACKS FTW

Chic Corea - The Musician (2017) New album with a lot of guest artists. I'm not sure yet if this is some sort of live performances anthology or a brand new set. Liking it so far, freely available at Spotify, it's a 3 CD set.

Thanks guys! also to doug, the lady in that video I've met her as she is a local music teacher and I've seen her do and lead a uke conference at our Illinois music teachers conference. Unfortunately she is pretty terrible and represents a part of uke education I'm very much in opposition to, but thank you for the thought and sentiment

Wave G?

From the little I understood in the video, slot 4 is for addon that are still in developments. Suzuki-san (chief designer) specifically mentioned about DAC or equalizer (phono that is?). He also mentioned this line 4 slot has its own transformer / supply, independent from the rest of the circuit. He mentioned great attention had to be paid to shielding giving how closely spaced these components are and the mixture of low level signals (including upcoming slot 4 boards) and 60dB circuit (or 54dB I forgot). So, encaged toroidal, encaged inpu stage tubes, encaged slot 4 board... Seems like a big effort just to make this all fit in one box to limit manufacturing / shipping costs and all. Oh, another thing he mentioned which flew over my head is presence of a servo (world first for stax) to make sure the amp operates within spec from cold start. Otherwise, you'd have to wait about 1h till warmup because of thermal drift. Hopefully I did not get this wrong but the heatsinks used for the SS output stages are face to face with close spacing to make this thermal drift uniform across channels (or differential signals?). I let the experts decipher and correct this ;-). Not sure if I'll have the patience to wait in line but I may be able to see it irl this w.e. arnaud

Love the classy face plate too. Maybe we should wait a bit before shitting full throttle on circuit / sound / price Maybe I should plug my Vali2 as a preamp on my SRM-1/mk2 Pro to have a taste of how T8000 could sound Ali

Here's a new layout I'm working on. It's a GR HV/LV, Bias and Delay circuit (with LED flasher) all on one 4 layer board (3.5" x 5.5"). The pass devices can mount to the bottom plate or a heatsink. Mostly SMD parts and uses the GR78/9xx modules. Once tested I'll make this all available.

If they are using 6922 tubes in the front end, they may not need a low voltage PS, since the LV PS in the solid state amps is just for the front end. OTOH, it appears there are a couple heatsinks in the PS, so maybe they do have a low voltage PS. If they are using the 727 for the rest, hopefully they will reconnect the global feedback. The output heat sinks do appear larger than the 727, and the power consumption is up to 95 watts, so it appears there is quite a bit more current in the output stage.

Not sure it'd really make a huge difference considering commissioned builds could also have a substantial increment from "BOM" cost attributable to labor and casework (especially since they don't benefit from the scale Stax has for amp chassis). Was the XF4 correction really worth making? They're just power tubes in a hybrid tube/SS amp and all the XF/metalbase hullabaloo is way out of hand IMO.

I got music!!! Thank you Kevin, Soren, Joe (beautiful chassis) and all that helped me!! running at 18mA.

Naw, it's just not great writing. The format of the piece - writer says gadget works > expert explains the problem the gadget addresses > writer weaves said explanation into his summary, is sound enough. He just didn't tie the threads together all that well. He could have simply let the reader make their own connection. He could have directed Rankin a little closer to the issue at hand. He could have framed his wild speculation in a transparent but yet amusing way. Woulda coulda shoulda. It's not an easy thing, especially when most publishing today has zero editorial supervision or quality control. [insert dead serious rant about how we can destroy our society this way here]. I have a lot of sympathy for reviewers and especially for the people who have to write advertising copy for high end audio goods. (imagine yourself trying to write a fifty word copy block for a cable ad.) Human nature flat out demands a "technical explanation" of why a gizmo works, whether or not that information is actually available. Our man here listened to the gizmo and said the gizmo works. He quoted some pretty reasonable-sounding PR from the manufacturer. He brought us a lovely primer from Rankin. He did all kinds of good work, but he felt he just HAD to go that one extra step and it detracted from his piece. Still, on balance, his review gives pretty good value for money, given that we got ti free and he probably made chump change writing it. He hipped us to two promising gizmos and gave us the Rankin bit.

Good info from Gordon Rankin. Kind of a big leap of faith with the writer making this statement however: Bringing it all back home, the iFi iPurifier 2 likely improves the sound of the Sonicorbiter SE because it minimises transmission errors by making lighter work for the Mytek Brooklyn’s USB receiver chip. I would think that the purifier may be changing the error(s), but whether it is actually minimizing anything can't really be determined without looking at it as Mr. Rankin does.