Leaderboard

Now it shouldn't come as a massive shock to anybody but I'm not much of a SR-009 fan. From day 1 they always sounded messed up to me and the BK and S didn't really make it any better, even a bit worse with the 009S. To this day I have only one 009BK (as it is a limited edition) in my collection and one regular 009 that showed up here randomly and was a stark improvement over all the other sets I've owned. No idea why those sound different but better not mess with them. Now the plan was always to do something with the 009's to improve them but there was always something better to do. Well with surgery pending a couple of months ago, I finally had time to do something not too taxing. First off I needed a donor set and here is where that came in: I got these three years ago and they just sat there in a box. Too many parts missing with no spares available, three out of the four dust covers were trashed and I took off the arc to rescue another 009... so a pile of parts with fucked up drivers. The plan forward was clear though, the drivers needed new dust covers, new diaphragms, a way to mount the cable and finally some way to attach the earpads which wasn't 009 levels of stupid. Now none of those parts could be reused or they simply weren't there so time to do some designing. I still suck at 3D design but practice makes perfect... or it should in theory. Now first off, dust covers and diaphragm holders. These are easy to do as PCB's but materials, thickness, films used etc. are all large variables. Here are my first drivers, actually using the third batch of diaphragms as I slightly tweaked the dimensions once I started test fitting: Those familiar with the stock drivers might spot the bias connection is very different. I had to spend a lot of time cleaning the stock drivers, as they had been open for who knows how long, but this first test was successful. Fully balanced drivers and no noises from them at all so they are as clean as I can get them. The dust covers are 2um mylar-C, just lightly stretched (hence the slight lines visible) and the main diaphragms are also fairly loosely stretched 2um mylar-C, then heat treated and given a coat of fabric softener. The drivers are easy to align but one major part of this project is to find all the correct o-rings used to assemble these and in the right grade. When I had waited a month for a large shipment just for the one size I needed to not show, I even bought some stupid expensive examples locally. That got me here: All new screws used to get the drivers into the housings. You can see how beat up the aluminum housings are but hey, fine for a project like this. Now there was the next difficult bit, the cable entry: On the stock set it is a plastic guide which sits in those holes, the cable fits in that and the whole assemble is screwed down. Now the stock cable I had was not perfect so instead of making my own version of that... I just used a standard Lambda cable. A L500 was going to die for this set anyway (as I needed the arc) so why not use that cable. Here is my solution for that: This is 3D resin printed and is the second revision. First was just to check for hole size, alignment and if it was fouling on anything but it was way too shallow. This version still had to be sanded a tiny bit but it fits nicely. I did make a 3rd and 4th version which is incoming to clean up the design a bit and give me some more internal room. The earpads above are simply stuck on with some blutack so more on that... For the earpad mounting, there two problems there really. None of mounting hardware was included and anybody who had changed the 009 pads knows just how fucking stupid that mounting setup is. I also wanted to use non Stax earpads (not paying 300$+ for pleather crap) so here is what I came up with: Same idea really but I added a spacer between the plate and the driver housing so there is room to slide the lip of the earpads underneath it. The two layers of the PCB sandwich are visible there (along with the production number as I forgot to have it removed) and it works nicely. I could have made this from aluminum but it wouldn't have cost roughly 4$ then... This is the fitment with some random test earpads and standard 1.6mm PCB's. Works just fine and I can't find any issues with baffle seal... quite the contrary really. So here we are, the MA-009 This set of earpads has already been replaced and it takes a matter of seconds to swap them over. What a novel feature... Now what was the true goal for all of this, well besides having some fun doing something new... make a set of 009's I would actually want to sit down and listen to. Now this project is far from over but here is something novel... a SR-009 that has some actual bass output. They are still forward sounding but it has been diminished by a large extent. I can use these for hours quite happily, even at my usually higher volume levels. The decision to use 2um mylar was to try and tame that forward edge and it has been partially successful. A stock set of 009's is terrible on most music I try them with, this one is mostly good with just some tracks which show how bad that stator design really is. There is this slight forward sheen over everything and it simply has to be the stators as the rest of the headphones has so much in common with the 007 overall design. Now the major issue is driver stability as the left diaphragm really likes to get stuck to the stators and I have to open up the driver to get is back on song. I might have gone too far in sealing them up but I wanted some bass dammit!! I will make some more test diaphragms and see if I can make some which can handle the pressure of going on the head energized while giving the sound I want. For now I'll just use this pile of parts to make some music... So to end off... if anybody has a set of 009's with blown drivers that are collecting dust... hit me up and I might want to buy them.

Thanks all! Wasn't the celebratory day Karen would have recommended.... Fighting a cold, and did some work starting at 4:30am! But after all that, was able to chill for much of the day. Realized I hadn't done that for a long, long time - a few hours here or there but not for basically a whole day - and it felt damn good! Needed to recoup some but also just shut things off. And having Andrew's cat June purr in my lap was good medicine, too. Andrew ended up bringing in Thai for us for dinner; our planned excursion out will be a rain check.

Robert Earl Keen's Greatest Christmas on Earth John R Miller opening https://archive.org/details/rek20251209 https://archive.org/details/jrm20251209

I won an album today. Sharon Mansur's Trigger -- which is jazz fusion and unholy carp, this might break me -- it's right up there with Hiromi and Fox Capture Plan! Just listen to this shit:

Meanwhile, in San Rafael , it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

New Tricky album I got for my bday... feels like I'm in Highschool

Cheers Matt!

Have missed a few of our normal holiday events this year, so happy to see Mountain View went all out for last night’s tree lighting ceremony.

It's the start of the Holiday Concert Season at the College of Marin

More Vocals With Seasonal Rudolph!

Nobody Speak - DJ Shadow [feat. Run the Jewels]

Thanks every one pretty much a uneventful day ,turning 74 which was okay.

Didn't want to embarrass those kids.

I forgot I had a bunch of 1975 (50yo) albums in my queue. so Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John (1975) https://album.link/s73nbgfjm47tw (hey look album link is working again) 🤷‍♂️ Example: I was going to share the title track which I like so much, but this is just prettier. I grew up with this album, my sister had this. I spent a lot of time with looking at the cover.

Been in the Seattle - Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP) - many times - always enjoyed the building as much as the collections. Here is an exceedingly boring shot.

Saw Mary Fahl last night, I think the 6th time I've seen her (7th if you count October Project in 1995). Wonderful concert, some of her hits, October Project hits, and covers. The whole second set was her adaptation of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, pretty stunning. I think this may have been my favorite show of hers. Got to chat with her and her husband after the show, and also met 3 folks with whom I'll keep in contact ongoing; just some amazingly nice people.

My D200 is now over 20 years old, and while it shows its age, it still works. The 300 F/4 I keep permanently attached to it is from 1987, but it has aged like a fine wine. I use the combination to catch the local wildlife, usually without leaving my house. The "lawn crew." This is from September, and the Hathaway house has now seen major renovations. More on that later. An osprey looking for lunch. The corner of the mower shed is a prime squirrel snack bar. "I have an acorn, and you don't!" *honk* *honk* Canada geese don't actually like the pond that much, because it's surrounded by trees. They prefer Sweetened Water Pond, across the street. Even though it's a much smaller pond, it's open and they find id easier to access. With that said, the geese will sometimes slum it and land in Jernegan pond. The ducks are slightly more frequent in their appearances, but they too prefer the more open pond. A great blue heron taking off the moment he caught sight of me. Herons do NOT like humans. *gobble* Survived another thanksgiving. I took a bunch of photos of this fatso, but I've only one I've edited so far. Tune in next time for fall colors, antique lenses, and irritated kitties.

Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time by Jacob Garchik

Firm holiday party is in Monterey. Think I might bring the bike down with me. Don’t let a free hotel room go to waste, right? I’m not quite sure I have the legs for this vertical, but I’ll practice on Zwift this week.

Which makes me think of...

Saw some talk about this and decided to make a new version. use either the tube unbal/bal to bal board, or the solid state version result is about 125 watts rms into 8 ohms at thd of .005% will definitely drive 4 ohms with suitably large power supplies. transistors are standard pinout, so pick your favorite output transistors. the to220 transistors are mje15034/mje15035 perfect for so many things, including esl boost transformers. pioneera09.pdf

Marcus Gilmore - "Journey to the New" Drum Solo (Nublu Performance)

From an engineering perspective, hfm and stax differ in design in many aspects, the mesh stator alone cannot be used as a simple evaluation criterion. I would like to briefly discuss the following points: 1. Different Assembly Structures. Hfm uses glue to bond both spacers and stators, unlike stax driver house. Their assembly method also borrows from early Sennheiser and Sony design concepts, attempting to isolate the shell and driver vibrations through flexible coupling. In other words, if you disassemble any non-latest hfm headphone, you can see the driver is sandwiched between the EVA foam and panel on both sides. These three headphone assembly methods—"stax（driver house + rigid shell）," "senheiser、hfm（flexible coupling assembly）," and "completely ignoring vibration transmission"— will produce some differences in subjective listening, but these differences are not significant in the frequency response curve. 2. Different stator acoustic designs. Stax stator acoustic surface size is consistently significantly smaller than the diaphragm size. This design improves sensitivity a bit and also provides a gradient radial damping for the diaphragm. Limiting the acoustic surface size at the stator level is also one of the reasons why stax have a bit different image compared to other estats. 3. Different mesh counts. Stax uses lower mesh counts, such as 60-80 mesh in the Omega and x9000, while hfm uses higher mesh counts, around 300 mesh in the Shang JR/SR. Lower mesh counts result in more transparent sound waves, while higher mesh counts provide more uniform but higher damping, leading to audible differences in subjective listening, but there are no winners in this regard. 4. Different earpad and wearing design. This goes without saying, it greatly affects the sound of electrostatic headphones, and hfm and stax have almost opposite design philosophies. 5. Different diaphragm. Whether it's the thin film material itself(pet vs pps), the conductive coating, or tension, hfm and stax are all different.

Just getting in under the wire with these birthday greetings, Todd, but that doesn't mean they're any less sincere! Hope you've had a good day, good food, good drink and good tunes. Cheers!

Happy belated Birthday Todd! Sorry you weren't feeling better, and understood regarding the circumstances.

I was curious, so I Googled it...nice!

Happy belated birthday, Todd! I do very much hope you had the best of days yesterday! (party favour noise)

Have a truly superb day - Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday Todd!

Happy Birthday, Todd!!!

Happy Birthday, Todd!

Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Todd!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Todd! Here is a cute cat crunching on treats: Şirin Says Happy Birthday too

A very happy birthday to you, Todd.

...and the Apple Peace Prize goes to Donald J Trump!

Frank Gehry will be missed. RIP. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/05/527785250/frank-gehry-dead https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/frank-gehry-dead-guggenheim-bilbao-1234765549/ Two bonuses... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/04/your-name-here and

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1367150871711845?s=yWDuG2&fs=e&mibextid=Nif5oz

Saw that some people in Marin are making an effort with their Christmas / Holiday decorations.

Met @swt61 in the Costco parking lot. By Chance.

Hehe, I don't think I'll ever be there but I have a lot of fun messing with this stuff. I might open this up as a DIY project if anybody is interested as this isn't all that hard to do and no bad chemicals are used. While on the subject, I finally got the last parts to get my reclaimed SR-009 drivers up and running with new diaphragms and dust covers. I skipped straight to the Mk2 version of the main diaphragm rings and they are now sitting on my head with nothing holding the earpads on them and cables just dangling off. I keep reiterating the new cable entry design so I won't post pics until the system is all complete.

It looks like the HFM diaphragm is stick to the stators. Most of the diy estats failures I encountered were due to conductive coating problems causing the buzzing sound. I found a frequency response test of Shang-mini, and it seems that the mini driver is a reduced tension version of the Jade2. Considering the diaphragm size(Jade2 and Shang sr are almost the same area as the 90mm Omega）, the DS-gap of the Shang jr/sr is 0.7mm+, while the Jade2 is 0.5mm. For low-tension diaphragms, 0.5mm DS-gap is difficult to work stably. I can understand the "hangs there in mid-air" of HFM estats. The bass of HFM estats are even weaker than many Lambdas. The main reason is that HFM adds additional gaskets on the stators for support to prevent the low-tension diaphragm from sticking to the stators, but the gaskets will significantly suppress the diaphragm swing, and the overly breathable design of the HFM earpads also make it impossible for the low-tension diaphragm to work like many planars. Perhaps this is what HFM thinks is good, cause there are many treble heads audiophiles.

Hifiman bicycle Jade 1 Hifiman bicycle Jade 2 Hifiman train Jade 1 Hifiman train Jade 2