Leaderboard

Taking away a balcony door on the top floor rental of a home in the Sunset District. Replacing old door with a window. My boss is a stickler for matching the height to the existing window, down to the 1/16". That's the hardest part, especially since the existing window is nothing like the new one. Turned out great. Once the painter is done it'll look like it's always been that way.

Well this just arrived and as is our fashion, it has not been plugged in at all before I rip it apart. I'm having some camera issues (bloody Lightroom) so not as many as I'd like. Now first off why this belongs on a trashpile... here is the output: It's a pain to get a camera to focus between the transformers so I ended up grabbing the phone. Those are the ballast resistors, two 1M units in series and one 3M3 unit, all in 1206 package so likely 150V rated. Yeah no... just no, this is not good enough!! It gets worse though... It's a shit angle but here is how the transformers connect to the output socket: Now do you notice any parts on this PCB except connectors? Nope, neither do I... there is no protection on the output at all. No 5K1 output resistors nor the clamp circuit found on all later Stax adapter boxes. This thing will kill your headphones when pushed hard enough and there is nothing to protect the user if something goes wrong. Yup, pure class here... zero fucks given. Some other random pics, main amp runs off a +/-15V supply and the PSU brick is 15V/2A. Preamp presumably and the whole thing looks to be AC coupled through those electrolytic caps so that will not sound good at all. I see no other reason for those caps to be there so yeah, who does something like this. At least the volume pot is 4 gangs so the thing is fully balanced. Conclusion, without even plugging it in, this is a pile of crap and should not be used by anybody. The small changes to make this secure and sound good cost next to nothing but nobody cares. Best avoided unless you want to have a special talk to the manufacturer of your headphones as to why there are holes in the diaphragms... Now if I have time, I'm going to fully strip this thing down and design a PCB for the Stax socket which adds full protection and a clamp circuit. Fix the input caps and other issues that I find and this might a semi good 400$ amp. Personally I'd take a Stax SRM-313 over this pile of crap.

Jest before I stopped playing with it last night I took some measurements, I fed it a 10kHz squarewave, 1Vpp from a function gen and while it was a pain to get a good ground in there, we are not dealing with high speed signals either. Here is the input to the amp: Nice enough squarewave but here is the output of the amp, set to my usual listening level: This was one leg of the output of the transformer, here is the other: Yeah.... this isn't great, is it? Might be the worst I've ever seen but I naturally forgot to measure the primary of the transformers and I've already started to rip the unit apart. I may do that later.

Assembled my balanced Dynahi old version of 2004. Using it with HiFiman HE-6. Sound: entertaining, opened, dancing cheerful. Compared it with beta22. Have only couple of questions: * does it make sence to change main capacitors from Panasonic FC 470uF on Nichicon KG 680uF * DC offset without opamp +-10mV, with opamp OP27 +-2mV. Is it ok, left as is or try to make it better by changing on opa134 or something like this * does it make sence to make some other mods What you think?

Cheese Buldak. The rice cakes were sticks and looked like marshmallows poking out under the charred cheese. Divine, if I do say so myself.

So, I listened to it (as next step it to fully rip it apart) and in my regular test rig which is a Teac UD-503 dac driven over USB. Output set to 0dB on the DAC (no attenuation and no gain either), balanced inputs and I had to use the high gain function and volume control at 2-3pm on the dial. I could listen at full volume level, not something I'd recommend but yeah, this thing is just fucked. This is with SR-207's (my go to test headphones) so anything more power hungry will suffer even more. Now how does this sound... well mushy and very peaky. The midrange has this haze to it and the treble is very... alive. Bass is exaggerated but not always so, it kinda comes and goes as this thing struggles to get any output. Sound-staging is also pretty terrible so I find it hard to recommend this over the Stax SRM-252S. I also put it on a Kill-a-watt and at full output it draws 7.5W from the wall. That's not a whole lot of power there...

Something for those suffering banana withdrawal, and how else do you think the naan was bisected?

I 3D printed a cover to my filament power supply today. Just four Traco TPP 15-105-D and some tblocks. I don’t think my tubes need slow start – and if they do – they are not my tubes.

DIY T2 amplifier with 300B tubes. Amplifier is built on Kevin’s board. Only modification is decreased high voltages, +/-400V instead of +/-500V. Homemade 300B to EL34 adapters connected to four Traco 5V switched PS for filament power. I only replaced the EL34 with 300B along with the filament power supply. No other adjustments. It works – I’m in no harry to change back to EL34.

I'm happy that at least got him to stand up and move from that fucking chair... 😉 It was funny to see the difference compared to other vendors who had perfectly affable people working there and this shit show. I wonder if DCA is doing the Cavalli route, have some idiot show up with an investment and blow through all of it and move on to the next sucker? But vaping in and around delicate electronics like this is beyond stupid. What does think is in the smoke, magic fairy dust that makes electrostatics better?

I listened to the Cortina three times, twice off a BHSE and once off the new GC amp. Unfamiliar sources are an issue plus regular meet conditions but there was something about the midrange that bothered me, like an etch to voices which came off as very artificial but I need more time with them to nail it down. I also feel that headband is utter trash, on the second time I put them on my head the headpad caught on the metal springs causing the headphones to make a very lough "twang" sound through the earcups. I prefer the older type on the Voce, seems much more solid and better made. I'm also not sure if these are worth the price, just put them next to the CRBN and it looks like some cheap fake out of China, The headpad and earpads feel cheap and nasty and not high end in any way. This is always a personal thing but they were both sitting in front of me and they don't look, or feel, like a comparable product. The biggest issue for me though are the people who were there from DCA, I mean fucktards doesn't really cover them. I know fullwell I can be brash and bombastic but these people are utter fucking idiots. I went to their table to try the Voce and wanted to know when they were fixed as the original release of the Voce... they were fucking awful. This earpads never made any sense and it's clear to anybody who has messed with electrostatics for s long time. Same issue as with the King Sounds back in the day and they now, too, have moved to new earpads. Now the guy there, who was quick to point out he was the president of the company, said this gem when I said the Voce was awful, "Ohhh you like electrostatics so you don't like bass!" Yeah... and he also wanted to ask if I had ever designed headphones and when I started to listen, he ran over to Justin to bitch about me... which I heard most of. What a fucking idiot. Then we have the lady who was there, when I said matching of earpads was stupid loudly said this "SIR, THEY ARE HANDMADE!!!" Well fucking duhhh, all earpads are handmade outside of the molded ones super cheap ones. Most of my life I've been making things by hand, which have to be extremely consistent and it is easily done with far worse materials than these. Now I reached out to two manufacturers and asked if they had measured earpad effect on the sound. 0.1-0.4dB is worst case and with large production runs of earpads they are much closer. So the bottom line, the people making them are fucktards but I need to spend more time with the headphones. I don't feel they are worth the extra cost over the Voce, which looks much better made, and now sounds far better than they did. Add to that the Audeze CRBN being sold as B-stock for less than 3k$ and this becomes a pretty hard sell.

Yes, Mach3, I fully agree with you. I hoped for some confirmation and backing by expertise for my pure guess. It was really only a guess because I never had any HiFiMan (or CheapFiMan , I like it .... cheap but very expensive...) in my hands. As Birgir already took HiFiMan headphones completely apart, I could now learn from his postings what cheap build quality is inside. And of course, I never listend to any HiFiMan, so any opinions and experiences like yours help me, here. And yes, how to test and compare when things are so extremely expensive and difficult to find as a demo device in a store. So, forums like this (or maybe better head-fi as the guys told me, here 😉) can open eyes (or ears). For me, it resembles to be a quite strange or unexpected new phenomenon that during the last 5 to 10 years so very many new "ultra mega bling-bling TOTL" headphones emerged in the market that was cultivated solely by STAX for decades (nearly STAX, only, but others appeared and disappeared again, like Sennheiser Orpheus 1, AKG K1000, Jecklin Float, and I don't know). But now: Sennheiser HE-1 incl. amp and DAC => 60,000 Euros (with special colours, marble, cables, bling-bling and other BS it can go up to 120,000 Euros ) HiFiMan Shangri-La Sr incl. amp => 50,000 - 60,000 Euros HiFiMan Shangri-La Jr incl. amp => 14,000 Euros (?? I am not sure. But something around that value) HiFiMan Susvara incl. amp => 14,000 Euros (?? I am not sure. But something around that value) T+A Solitaire P and HA 200 Amp => 11,400 Euros Warwick Aperio incl. amp and DAC => 25,000 Euros Abyss AB-1266 Phi TC => 5,500 - 8,000 Euros + price for the amp (??) Dan Clark (MrSpeakers) Voce => 3,500 Euros + price for the amp (??) Focal Utopia ... ?? Anything else? I really do not know, electrostats, planar magnetostats and dynamic TOTL headphones in a really hard competition Incredible line-up, isn't it? What an exploding luxury headphone market! Is this luxury headphone market so big that all can survive? But maybe only for brand image like "Formula One" for car manufacturers to sell the mass market stuff. BTW, who buys headphones for 25,000 ... 60,000 bucks? Audiophiles or sheiks? All those brands above tell us that their TOTL headphones are the world's best (of course they do ) but even Tyll and other professional reviewers quite support many of them. Two questions ... OK, OK, I know, wrong question, I shouldn't ask this here but at the other forum (head-fi) 😉, but nevertheless I dare doing this ... ... why? Because here it is allowed to skip all rules and to be "[...] sometimes quite rude, often irreverant, and regularly abusive. [...]" So again, two questions: 1) Most new extremely (over-?) priced planar TOTL headphones (electrostats/magnetostats) have gold-plated stators, the Sennheiser HE-1, the Warwick Aperio, the Susvara, the Shangri-La, ... ... and now also STAX: The STAX SR-009s. So, is this new golden bling-bling indicating some marketing gag to target on higher prices and exclusive customers? (i.e. marketing bla-bla on stiffer electrodes, lower resonances and better airflow through rounded holes ...) Is the SR-009s really better than the good old SR-009 from 10 years ago (2011) or is it more keeping up within this "shark pool" of TOTL competition as described in my aforementioned list? 2) What about this "best eletrostatic headphone amp in the world", the "Frank Cooter's 845 directly heated amp" which is highly recommended - or better said "praised" - by Jude Mantilla / Head-Fi: youtube.com/watch?v=U_pY7RI2Yok&feature=emb_logo ( at 8:50 ) Of course, it is not obtainable, and if so, for an unaffordable price 😉 Is it better than the Blue Hawaii BHSE, the KG GG or the DIY T2 (only tube amps mentioned, here, so I did not mention the SS amps)???

RIP a lot of images in this (and other) threads. My big loss of images is that I made the mistake of using photobucket back in the day.

FYI/FWIW: Imgur, the site to which I have uploaded images since 2009, is changing their ToS. All NSFW content as well as images uploaded not uploaded by a user with an account (that is to say, done anonymously) will be deleted after May 15. I've had an Imgur account since September 9, 2010 and in that time I've uploaded over 42,000 images (an alarmingly high percentage of which were posted in this very thread.) I didn't have an Imgur account for the first year or so that I used the site. I suspect any content I uploaded in that time period is on the chopping block. Also, while I don't upload anything I'd consider to be porn, I'm sure there's a bunch of photos I've posted that will not fit in with the site's new ToS. I have no idea how Imgur is going to go about pruning all the content they don't find acceptable. I remember what happened to Tumblr a few years ago and I'm a bit worried about the future of Imgur. With that said... Memes you can hear. This should make you feel old. "Knight to Bork 5." Least delusional RAM driver. me_irl Firefighters washing blood off the sidewalk following the mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama. Apparently the "beads" USB hub design is not a new one. This a USB 1.1 hub from 20 years ago. There are two cats. Cape Cod, Nantucket and (part of) the Vineyard on April 14 from the ISS. What a bunch of no-good punks.