TheSloth

It's very difficult to get STAX to arc. He must have been trying to use them as speakers!

I'm guessing the guy dismantled it to see how they managed to work with a closed stat, as STAX are extremely sensitive to rear reflections and putting your hands parallel to the backs, even a few feet away from them causes the sound to go a bit weird.

Any evidence the 250-250 sounds any better/different to the 250-80?

It uses titanium coated mylar, but the impedance, sensitivity and frequency response specs are completely different.

Why is it so pathetic? Speaker manufacturers have managed to make excellent closed box loudspeakers. I suspect it's more a matter of the fact that with headphones, you can have an 'open baffle' without any negative consequences save isolation, so the manufacturers just can't really be bothered with a top shelf closed headphone. I wonder what that Ultrasone Edition 9 sounds like. The price is now only somewhat ridiculous, unlike the edition 7 which was completely ridiculous. The specs aren't like any of their other cans, so the driver and design is clearly different. Who has actually heard a 4070?

I'm looking for a pair of closed headphone for myself and a friend, and we'll be using them for classical music, with decent amplification. Not looking for IEM's (I have Ety's). I've heard various AT closed cans and they just don't work for my ears with this music, so I'm not considering them. I've also heard the Ultrasone ProLine 750, which also didn't work, but I haven't heard the other ultrasones. That leaves things like the Senn. 280, Beyer 250, Beyer 770 (I suspect I will find it strident), AKG K271 (the graph seems to have basically no bass), AKG K81DJ, and the Ultrasones I haven't heard (HeadRoom rate the Hi-Fi 700 and ProLine 650's highly, and in general I've found my ears to be quite similar to theirs). Anyone have any suggestions?

Wouldn't the higher power result in increased noise and distortion, purely theoretically?

Yeah, the new modules have nothing to do with the Gilmore designs any more (the lite of course is unchanged), expect perhaps some inspiration.

Isn't the dynahi a much higher output version of a dynalo? Isn't it the same circuit give or take a bit? Shouldn't that mean that in some ways the dynalo will actually be better if it has enough power for your headphones?

I could never get on with the Sqeezebox interface. If I have to be tethered to software, I'd rather it be iTunes.

Why not one of those sexy SE Lites w/DPS in black...?

One thing about these that makes me appreciate the new jellybean look of the HR products is that these v3 cases are covered in sharp edges all over the place. Whenever I grab one to move it I scratch myself!

Just got this stack last week (except the top bit). As a combo, it sounds really fantastic and it's really got me listening to my headphones again. Way better than the Desktop DAC in that little convertible (that isn't wildly surprising...). I was somewhat skeptical about the X-10 (tube buffer), but I think it sounds better with than without so it can't be complete BS. Anyone else heard this setup? (I'm selling the X-CAN v3 that came with it if anyone wants it...). I see there is a new MF X-DAC v8 (3 + 1 = 8?) which includes the PSU, and tube section, as well as USB input in 1 bigger box. Glamour shot attached

I was just quoting, I didn't look at what the links were.

For the uninitiated, what does PinkFloyd sell?

I still think Parallels is a good solution, especially now that things like drag and drop between windows and OSX are round the corner. It does give accesss to almost all I/O functions.

They don't have the blue velvet in 4ch, but they do have a cheaper (and a lot less good by the look of it) 4ch pot as an example here: http://www.ampslab.com/accessories.htm

The 595 really isn't bad. It's good enough that, even compared with a good DAC playing back the CD component of a hybrid, you get some taste for what SACD has to offer over and above that. I'm not sure it's SACD playback is better than CD on a good DAC, but it's different and shows something of what's there.

My guess is that you might be trading off a higher noise floor for that extra power, which really would go completely unused unless you were driving the K1000, at which point it still wouldn't be enough anyway. I'd do without it. As a benchmark, the HeadRoom modules put out about 1/2W and they can drive K340's with ease.

How about a Monarchy DIP. You can either get the non upsampling 24/96 model, or the upsampling 48/96 model, depending on your setup. Then you can use just about any transport with optical or standard coax out and convert it to AES, whilst reducing jitter and boosting the signal strength.

I don't have a link but I know that HeadRoom use the 4-gang Alps Blue as the standard pot on their stock Balanced Home and now the Balanced Desktop as well (the new pic of course has the optional SA, but that's extra $$'s).

The Alps Blue is available as a 4ch version - that's a good performance solution at a reasonable price.

Something very odd is going on in this thread...

This one mystified Jamey as well, but if you heard what it sounded like, I think you'd agree. The only other culprit would be the 1/4" to RCA adapter, but how bad could one of those be? And don't those rear RCA's have a different output impedance?

Well you can run into issues using the headphone outputs (at least the single ended ones) in that way. I don't know the science of it, but I know that using my 'convertible' as a preamp through the headphone socket yields very strange sonic resulsts - a very thin, lean sound, with an obvious bass roll off. Something is clearly wrong, perpaps relating to impedance matching or something, but either way it just doesn't work in that setup. I have used HR amps that had dedicated output RCA's which differed in their output impedance and some other factors I seem to remember from the headphone outputs, and they sounded fantastic in the same system.