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Last night at Aditi's... Green chicken Korma And they were playing a tune I heard on Testtone, and other Testtone-like music (Royksopp, Moby, and Bang, Bang by Living Theater and Erica Jennings -- no Pink Floyd, though). @Knuckledragger

I finally picked it up and it doesn't disappoint... Jesus this is bad and one funny thing, the surface coating on the chassis is very different from the CarbonX. Same quality parts, ZWEE output socket and the "legendary" SANNI volume control i.e. crappy Alps clone. Now the chassis is the same one as the CX but much better surface finish. The other one scratches very easily (as in I've already scratched it) but this one seems more resilient. One funny thing though, the hole for the tube doesn't quite line up. I tried to take a picture of it but it might not be as apparent as in real life. The space on the right is quite a bit bigger than on the left... No way this was done by hand so somebody was really sloppy... Now for the rest of the pics. The wall wart is also different, now featuring a built in US plug and 28VDC/1.25A output. The large cap in the PSU was flat down but I raised it up. That last pic is just baffling. Why on earth would anybody put MLCC caps this close to the socket. If they see any force on them, they can crack and short out. Instant fire... Shit engineering as usual...

So maybe Bing is not such a bad search engine after all..

Ornellaia for lunch is mega win in any rational thinking person's book. I am proud of you.

This was a 2lb cowboy ribeye and a bottle of 2012 Ornellaia for lunch at Quality Meats. The I-Banker bros three inches away at the next table (yay NY) were giving off strong “who’s this fucking tourist?” vibes so I had to go for the surreptitious shot. On the other hand, I also got to eavesdrop on their genius-level strategic analysis. Example: “You know I really think the sooner we can get something signed, the faster the whole deal will go.” [emoji966][emoji966][emoji966]

Time for some more musings on the 009S... After a week in NYC I got back to new EP-007's earpads and they are on the phones now. Not the improvement I was looking for to be honest and now the bass issues bother me even more. It's one of those things, when you notice the lack of impact it starts to eat at you. You hear it in every offending track and it really detracts from the listening experience. This is not a seal issue as they are clearly airtight. Over all though, the 009S is an improvement over the 009 but this one part just bothers me a lot.... Interesting to compare the earpads of the 009 to the 009S. The former are about 8mm less tall in the front and much softer. The back is the same height but again, the actual volume of the earpads is clearly different due to how much they compress. Last mod I'm going to try are the 009 earpads on the 009S before they are put away into the collection.

Even with the grossly inflated prices cavalli eventually went under due to too many hands in the cookie jar and shit quality requiring a lot of repairs, especially the liquid carbon. when there was only one standard for measuring distortion it was easy. Now that there are a number of adc based distortion devices each with different firmware and software, and digital filters you can generate impossibly low distortion numbers that are meaningless. jude might want to look at how measurements were done many moons ago and emulate that. Far more useful information. i think a reasonable number on sales exceed 8M$ over the 8 year life of cavalli. Lots of people are going to take a bath, just like singlepower

the thd+N is .0075%, and although it does not specify, its likely at 1khz. look at the schematic posted above. about 15db of feedback around the grid of the tube. Lowering the input impedance to bipolar levels or lower and kind of negating any possible use of an input tube. Also the plate current source. spice indicates a second harmonic distortion of -74db at 1khz (.02%) and a 3rd harmonic distortion of -109db (.0003%) at 1khz however at 10khz the second harmonic is -60db (.1%) and the third harmonic is -96db (.002%) you can work out the summation on your own. plus of course the messed up soundstage due to the inverse phase. Something the plankton experts seem to ignore. In reality, with an old school analog thd meter, the numbers are going to be much much higher. and of course this is all measured with a 300 ohm resistor. Use a real load especially low impedance, and the numbers go way up.

2nd harmonic and 3rd harmonic vs frequency is what influences sound signature the most. bipolar vs mosfet outputs makes the most difference. there is no cavalli house sound. This amp is bipolar outputs, the LCX is mosfet.

Been doing some testing using the Audio-GD as the dac... I've tripped the protection circuit on the CarbonX and the CTH just died when plugging in headphones. Returns for Massdrop will be super fun on this one...

8significant areas on both units have circuit board heatsink area. Still you could easily attach real heatsinks to those areas and put more holes in the case to let the heat out. And then bias up the output a bit more. This one uses a 28V power supply. So output rails are +/-14v, pretty low voltage swing. Outputs are MJD243/MJD253 and are bipolar. tube is current source plate load, capacitor coupled to a virtually identical copy of the liquid carbon output stage (current feedback/bipolar) with a different servo.