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I'm in for the latter, one of the few to get the honor of my ignore list here. I can only take a certain amount of inane ramblings... Now some impressions, system has changed a bit since last time as I got a Denafrips Terminator DAC plus it is now fed by a Kimber KS-2436 silver USB cable...not that it matters and I only got it to prove that point but it's there. Amp is a stock Carbon which does look rather nice with the black aluminum Stax plug on these. They are certainly even more inefficient than the 007's but the Carbon drives them with ease. In fact I'm not even at 12 o'clock so I could easily drive them into arc'ing if I wanted to pull a Ray on this. Other aspects are just fine though, even though I can't stand the earpads the fit is just fine and the headband might work for those with silly large heads. The cutouts in the leather might bother those though without a full head of hair. The drivers are dead silent with no music playing so no dust migration issues. Anyway, I first tried them bone stock and initial impressions were ok. Not great but I first thought "at least they don't do anything seriously wrong", I just pressed random on the playlist and some Thompson Twins came up which was a lucky stroke for them. As soon as something else came up I noticed they just sound odd, the top end is both muffled and peaky at the same time, the midrange sounds distant and hollow and the bass has a very pronounced resonant frequency but limited extension. The soundstage is vague and diffused compared to the better units but far from as bad as say the HE90's. Next step was to remove those foam pads from inside the drivers. Now they are 5mm and not 4mm as I stated before (eyeballing while lifting up one end vs. actually measuring) and super dense. This is nothing like the open cell stuff Stax used in most models from 1977, that presents limited to no restriction on the sound while this foam... it barely lets any light through it so impact on the sound is huge. I'm a bit baffled why anybody would add this as removing it does wonders to the sound. Now where to start, everything is improved and much of the weird sound is gone. The top end is a still peaky and uneven (so much so that I need to turn down the volume often) but far more open. Same goes for the bass, that annoying "thump" is all but gone and the response is flatter and more natural. Extension is still limited compared a properly setup set of 007's but perfectly adequate. There is some of the same uneven bass response as the 009's and 009S's as they have problems with the same test tracks but I can live with it. Now for the all important midrange, yeah you guessed it, more open and "there" right in front of you. Now the soundstage is a bit lost and lacks the layering and depth of the 007's but compared to most out there, perfectly fine. There is still some reverb clearly audible but swapping out the pads should take care of that but we will know for sure soon. So the bottom line is, if you own one of these, remove the fucking foam!! This is a discussion we've been having for decades with the HD580 and all the successors so yeah... adding damping like that is about as retarded as the whole sorbothane BS. Don't try to tune electrostatics like this, it will never work. Change the earpads, change the distance of the drivers to the ears, change how the drivers are built but never, ever throw some foam on there and think you did a good job. Fucking pathetic.... Anyway, sorry for the rant but this bothers me so much as it is just so lazy. Now next step will be to swap out the earpads and I want to stick with something anybody can get so none of my custom made pads are eligible. This might take a while as I need to take stock and see what I currently have...

Are you waiting for Birgir's comments or Brazilnut's ban? I'm in for both.

So here are some pics as I begin to take these apart. My main camera was out of juice so I just grabbed the phone for this. Not perfect but blame Apple then... First off the Stax plug: It's hard to see but the pins are in this concave indent and clearly meant to be like that (see the next pic) but this might be why some of the pins arrived bent. Put on a spare socket and twist to unscrew the metal cover. Bonus shot of the new threaded teflon Stax sockets... I'm glad they put heatshink over it all but it also means I won't remove it until I can completely take the cable apart. To give them a fair shake they have to be as close to stock as possible. The pins appear to be super long though by feeling around underneath it but further research will have to wait. Here are the actual earcup connectors, spaced some 4mm apart according to the Mitutoyo. I need to find out what these were originally used for but they follow the stock Stax wiring (center wire is bias) so they will be easy to convert to Stax wiring. Here is the receiving end which ended up a bit out of focus. I blame my friends at Apple...you know who you are... What this is like on the inside will have to wait a while as too busy to take them apart fully. I did get here though... Pull off the earpad and remove the stupid foam pad to reveal pretty much what is on the outside. The black bit is rubberized so we'll see how the baffle seal on these is.

these headphones stopped by in Chicago on their way to Iceland, I listened for a couple of hours. My initial comments was that they were very sterile, but really I think it was the complete lack of imaging that is the problem. removing the foam probably fixed a bunch of that. The stax plug is a major fuckup. And I don't see why. Everyone else including stax,hifiman,kingsound,chinsettawong,birgir and Justin are capable of making plugs that are the right dimensions, no reason why this has to be a piece of crap. Yes they are about 6db less efficient. And the case is some kind stupid. I did not measure the capacitance of the cable, but i'm going to bet that its twice that of the stax made cables. birgir will hopefully do that. Next up the monoprice things once they actually start shipping.

Of course it’s because I built my Hackintosh last week.

I didn’t take pictures and it wasn’t an exciting adventure. It did take a day of tinkering to get full video acceleration but that’s because I installed Mojave and the tools aren’t finished for that yet. My video encoding time went from 8 hours per hour of video at 1080p to 20 minutes.

Wow that new iPad Pro looks great. Good thing that I ended up not getting one a while back when I was thinking about it, since I heard the rumors about the new one coming out. Ha ha, just need to finish paying first for the shiny Ti implant, lol. I was laughing other day as many fancy aftermarket bike parts are made out of Ti and ceramics, keeping up with the trend, I guess. [emoji12]

So I've officially fallen off the wagon again as I got one of these just now. I swore I was done buying headphones but clearly not... So I just put them on my head so listening impressions will come later but first some over all impressions. Now the case...the case is super retarded whoever came up with should be patted on the back for being super "special". It's pretty much Head-fi in a case form, has wank factor off the scale but is utterly useless. Way, way too heavy too. Now the cable, from the outside it looks well enough made but I will open it up to see what's inside. The pins on the plug were all bent and it looks like the whole front of the plug has bent inwards as it is now concave. Not sure if it was supposed to be like that but it has clearly deformed a bit. I needed to bend the pins to get them to fit in our custom made sockets so something is off. Now this is a used set so I don't know what abomination it was plugged into... The rest of the cable is ok, I like the small splitter piece but the cable is way too microphonic for my taste. Even the smallest tap is transmitted straight to the cups. Now the actual connectors for the cups...again we reach one of those "special" design choices. So it looks like a DB9 plug (smaller though) but the actual contacts are tiny PCB mount parts so it is all for show. I'll take some pics later but this is super stupid. I'll also run some HV tests on it and see how it holds up as I zap it with some KV's. Now the actual phones, I like that they say "FLOW" on the headband which I presume is some other model. Too costly clearly to make a new molding for this... The earcups feel solid but those earpads are just crap. They are pretty badly made and the opening is far too large. They will be the first thing I'm going to tamper with. Then we have the circa 3mm thick dense foam on the face of the driver...in 2018!! Now this used to be the norm (though never for Stax) and the Koss ESP950 still has this but that's only because they haven't changed in nearly 30 years. I'll try them first fully stock and then start to mess with them. Pics will come later as I start to take them apart too but first some listening...

I have basically replaced my laptop with my iPad Pro. I didn’t replace my server or media editing machines with an iPad. Google docs is more than sufficient for my needs.

I’m actually pretty happy with my back. Rx580/i7/nvme/16gb. It’s a beast.

I thought about that when I was watching the Keynote. Then I was dazzled by all the pretty pictures again and totally forgot about you.

It’s funny because it’s true!

Dinner last night at the Buenos Aries Grill. Turns out to be Seattle Restaurant Week, so the giant pile of meat I was planning to order had accompaniments for less money than normal. Result!

This is very local to me, but the manager of the club where I used to do lights for a decade died recently. https://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2018/10/donal_rooke_northampton_music.html Don was one of the sane adults I talked to in the sea of drunken, tripping children that was the mid 00s drum n bass and house music scene. The club we worked in a seedy place, but I really enjoyed talking to him and some of the other elder staff. They'd seen enough insanity and still had appreciation for the music that it was an inspiration for me to put up with as much shit as I did and not go bonkers.

RIP Melvin Ragin (aka Wah Wah Watson) - dies @ 67 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/wah-wah-watson-guitarist-dead-746962/

RIP Hank Greenwald, longtime voice of the SF Giants. I equated his voice with Giants baseball throughout much of my youth. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/23/former-giants-broadcaster-hank-greenwald-dies-at-83/amp/