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I just reread diamond age and snowcrash. Holy crap I forgot a lot in 20 years. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

^ One of my favorites. Tuchman is a brilliant historian. I’m reading Stilwell in China right now, myself.

I'd like to chip in here. On different tracks I sometimes had a slight preference for the sound of the GG or the BH, but overall I had a slight preference for the sound of the BH. This impression was pretty fairly arrived at as each amplifier had the same power supplies (all golden ref), wiring, volume attenuator and casework. The GG did have 450v supplies and the BH 400v. The volume was equalised as accurately as possible. It was a wrench but I had to part with one of my babies as couldn't justify keeping both, so the GG has gone. I did hear the new 009S with it and the combination was, on a short hearing, near perfect. I have noticed after many builds of Kevin's designs my preference has been for the versions with tube OP stages.

Yeah, I also like that one a lot. Not quite up to your guys levels, but my wife got me this for Christmas...

The Avalanches – Since I Left You Eclectic dance party ear candy from Australia... somewhat similar to Bran Van 2000's albums.

Hard for me to say that I prefer one of my amps over another in general. Depends on what I am listening to. I tend to use the BH BJT the most, following by about equal usage of my Carbon and my SRX-Plus. But just as with children, I would never part with any of them! SRX-Plus remains my 'most admired' amp because 1) it was my first build, and 2) it is such a simple design yet sounds amazing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mince_pie

Now here is something that has been out for a while but I've never really looked into. Now these carry a wide variety of names and there is a plethora of models but they are all pretty much the same, hybrid units with an electret driver to cover the top end and a regular dynamic driver for the rest of the spectrum. I decided it was time to look into this so I bought two units, the Mitchell and Johnson GL2 and some Cyberdrive unit for 30$ which looked the same as the GL2 minus the wood. The GL2 arrived first so some pics: Here the baffle which shows how the drivers are setup Small transformer and 10uf/50V NP cap are all there is to this and the electret driver is clearly angled. Now with that thick plastic sheet on the back of the driver... yeah it won't play nice but then again the housing design here is crap so that's probably why they did this. Let's just call it extreme damping... I played around with them for a bit and tried to upgrade the cap from the ChangX shit they had in there. Minor improvements but these are pretty crappy headphones to begin with. Now a couple of days ago the Cyberdrive units arrived. I forgot to take a picture of them before I stripped them down but they look like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/CYBERDRIVE-Noise-Cancelling-Over-Ear-Professional-Hi-Fi-Deep-Bass-Wired-with-for/223201026938?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 Now from the outside, these are clearly made by the same OEM as the GL2 even though the finish may be a bit...crap on some of the pieces. All of the chrome pieces look really cheap but they are identical to the same parts on the M&J set. Now for the nitty gritty... Yup, same baffle piece.... Same everything really except the cap is a different brand but that is to be expected as the production could be spaced a bit apart. Same PCB and the same transformer too... Yup... everything is the same so any claims that the M&J units are somehow better (as I've seen on HF) are just as baseless as most things over there. I have little doubt the entire product line has the same stuff in there. Since these are horrible headphones that I'm never going to use, let's do some digging: It's hard to see but the angle on the electret driver is some good 30°compared to the baffle and it partially obscured by the dynamic unit. I need to dig out the LCR meter to measure the drivers but I did some quick measurements on the transformer. It is clearly some off the shelf unit and the primary measured as almost no DC resistance (0.1ohm) and the secondary was 3.3K so high ratio indeed. I am going to do some more experiments with these though so I'll update in the future.

New The Faint -- warning, may cause seizure if you are prone: