TheSloth

Definitely moar bass vs. HD800. Usual Beyer 8k peak too.

I can cover this part at least. The volume control in the CDP is exactly the same as the controller in the 99 preamp, i.e. microchip controlling analogue output. So, it's completely in the analogue domain, no bit trimming going on there.

I'm not sure - the $1k could be doable. I just can't imagine Apple will release anything remotely similar to the flop that is Windows tablet. They have been working on this in one way or another for years, and I'd be very surprised if you didn't end up having usage possibilities for this that you do not have on a standard laptop. I can see a situation where, as a general purpose machine, whatever this tablet is called could be more useful to me than a MacBook. At which point, it being a bit more expensive no longer seems strange. I see it this way: Apple has absolutely no need to bring such a product to the market. No-one out there has made a convincing tablet, and no previous tablet designs have taken off to any significant degree. The justification for them getting involved is that they believe they can redefine the market, and if you look at the iPod and iPhone as the last two 'new' form factors they introduced, they seem to know how to do it. Though the iPhone does not have the kind of dominance that the iPod has, it has still clearly redefined the smartphone market. Btw, seeing the YouTube clip above, I'm loving the new HTML5 version. It is so much better than Flash - it doesn't crash all the time, and the CPU usage is much better. I hate flash!

I think they are a lot better. Yes, the panels are basically the same, but the performance potential of those panels is way, way better than what the structure of the 63's can deliver. Not that they sound bad - they are great speakers. But the structural improvements with the 2805/2905 are very significant, and take the transparency to a much higher level, whilst improving transients, dynamics and bass response. Basically, take everything good about a 63 and improve it. As Peter Walker said (can't find a quote...), the 63's were the best thing they knew how to build at that price point with the manufacturing techniques and materials available to them. Things have moved on since then.

Whether you'll get any degree of benefit from these totally depends on your foot. If you have a foot shaped like the one the used to model them, you'll be fine. But if you have any acquired deformities, like flatfoot, and consequent forefoot varus or vagus, despite the fact that the shoe will 'fit' on the foot, it will be working against the flow of things and creating an unnecessary impediment. You could say that about any shoe, however because the toes are locked into a specific position in the sole with these, it's much more of an issue. I'd say that unless the forefoot/toe relationship is basically straight, you'll have issues (pain). My feet are too messed up to get good use out of these.

Second try with the pictures... Ok, it's not working. How do you get the appropriate link to link to mobile me gallery photos?

Ok, here's the little flea and tic infested bugger on one of his regular climbs: And he has arrived at his final destination! The towel is for neck protection, and makes a good climbing aid! What's the deal with the fleas/tics (little things running around all over him)? I've seen things ranging from a special comb (can't get that until Sunday) and a good shampoo wash (he screams bloody murder and generally goes a bit nuts in water - I'm too much of a pussy!).

Hi Genetic, There are no shelters for cats in TA that I am aware of, because the city is totally overrun with them, and for the most part if they survive to adulthood, they survive quite well. They are usually well fed, and at the worse, tolerated. So that wouldn't be an option here. He'd have to go back to where he's been living, which is in the garden area of the apartment building I live in. I can still make sure to leave him food, etc, and even leave him some kitty furniture. The only issue is it being in other cat's territories, but as no-one from this building really feeds the cats, no cat that I've noticed really seems to have claimed it.

Thanks for all the responses guys. First off I'm just trying to see if he can can adapt to life here or not. Every time he sees me, he starts crying like he's in danger. He comes up to my trousers and stars to crawl up them if he can. If I get him all the way up, he walks around my shoulders around the back of my neck, taking a good look at my ears on the way (I'm afraid he'll bite them) and then goes back down, only to repeat. It's like he needs something (mother probably) but can't find it. It's really sad. The other problems is that he doesn't quite understands that my hands aren't for eating. He wants to use them as a play toy. I hope. I can't really tell if he's angry at me for stealing him, but the way he bounds up to me, it really doesn't seem like it. I guess I don't really understand kitten behaviour, and want to know everything is ok.

Ok people, really need some advice. Rainy season just started with a vengeance here in Tel Aviv, and I found the little kitten who is often sitting at the bottom of my building, alone, crying its eyes out soaked and shivering. He came crying up to me and climbed all the way up my clothes and sat on my shoulder, parrot style. So it looks like I've accidentally adopted him. I'm really not sure how long I can keep him, and I've never had a cat. I live alone, and do have to go away from time to time. I don't know how old he/she is - let's say it's he for now, but he's pretty small - I can sit him on my hands if they are cupped together. He's a street cat, and is happily lapping up some warm milk. I am going to see if he can/will eat cat food later - I don't have access to kitten food over the weekend, so I'll try him on some cat food and make sure the pieces are small enough. My hope is that I can get him well enough that he can go back to living outside - there is plenty of food around, and cats make a good living here in Tel Aviv! But I'm worried that he really won't know how to fend for himself. Obviously I'd still put food out for him, but I really don't know how it would go. Anyway, I have no cat stuff, and don't really know anything about this, so any advice that you have would be greatly appreciated! Photos of the little cutie later. edit: oh, and he's pretty dirty. any ideas on that one?!

They are both aluminium - that's my guess anyway. There's no way they can do the unibody process with polycarbonate. They are just coating it with shiny whiteness.

Lombard FTW! They took the 'G3' out of the label 'PowerBook G3' for the Pismo because they were embarrassed that it still wasn't a G4. My lombard got stolen when our house was burgled. This was 7 years ago and I'm still sad...

I find the Astrodyne a bit harsh sounding. Are you happier with the sound with the DPS? Because even in my much more humble setup (DPS->Desktop Portable (Home Module/Max DAC)) there's a noticeable difference.

My 1st gen MacBook Pro refuses to boot into OS X as of today, though embarassingly it doesn't seem to have any issues with booting into Windows 7. This machine has been through a lot, between drops, being hit, and having the hard disk changed too many times. But still, there is no apparent cause. It was running fine, then it started refusing to load an application properly, so I restarted and it gets permanently stuck at the spinning thing under the apple logo screen... I'm loathe to go through a complete reinstall on this machine, plus I don't have any of the disks with me. Perhaps it's punishing me for spending most of my time on my hackintosh Mini 9. Shame on you Apple, the I've been buying your stuff since my first Performa 475, and at the prospect of replacing this machine, I'm not sure how much I can be bothered to spend the money on a MacBook.

Excuse my laziness at not searching, but can you explain that a bit?

I don't understand Apple's seeming hatred of the netbook market. I use a hackintosh Dell Mini 9 and really love it. I type a lot and have no issues with the little keyboard, and love how tiny it is. In fact, I haven't turned on my 'proper' computer for over 2 weeks... They have an OS that can seemingly run extremely well on rather underpowered hardware. This little machine certainly runs OS X better than the Windows .junk it came with. I hope that they do decide to enter the netbook or similar market, and don't insist on crippling it with a proprietary version of the OS like the iPhone. OS X iPhone makes sense for the iPhone, but don't see how it would work on a bigger, more powerful machine

Great idea, but I can't quite get the fit right. I also find that though there is freedom for the toes, they also restrict their movement by tying each toe to the rubber sole. It's flexible, but not as flexible as nothing and I find that a bit of a strain. I prefer vivo barefoot shoes/sandals. They look more like normal shoes but have perhaps an even more flexible, thin sole than the vibrams. Also, the sole is very bad at heat insulation. I went hiking in the Golan (Israel) mainly on super hot rocks using the 5 finger sprints and burned the soles of my feet!

Finally got to listen to my HD800's. They are NOT burned in, so maybe I'll get flamed, but I don't believe burn-in makes a completely new headphone so there is some validity. As a bit of background about my ears, I am a classical musician, and my favourite headphones are the HD650's. That being said, I don't like 650's that much, I just haven't found any other headphone that doesn't have something about it that bothers me terribly. I have perhaps excessive sensitivity to harshness, and the I can live with the muddy nature of the 650 more than I can with anything else I've tried. Amplification is not spectacular - a modified Desktop Portable with Max DAC -> Home Module. I rather like the crossfeed, especially with IEM's, even though it does colour the sound a bit too much, especially in the bass which goes from muddy to total sludge on the 650. I'm not using it with the HD800. Due to my lack of great love for 650's and not having found anything else I preferred, I've listened to headphones less and less over the past year. It just doesn't 'do it for me' the way it used to. Hence my great excitement over the HD800's. Finally unboxed them last night, and they have only a few hours on them. Firstly, I find them heavy - very comfortable around the ear in terms of space, but I do sense the weight more than the 650. I have them on my head now and find the weight a bit bothersome actually. I find the cable a little more annoying that the 650 - it doesn't unravel and sit as easily as the old cable - it likes to retwist itself, particularly from the split that goes to each earpiece. I can't find any squeaks or issues with build quality - it is very, very nicely made. The design is nice, but I preferred the rugged simplicity of the 650 - I just grab them by one ear cup when I want to pick them up, and that doesn't seem like it's going to hurt them. These I feel I need to pick up carefully from the headband. Anyway, the sound. My immediate impression is that I don't really get it. These are supposed to be a totally different class from their predecessors. Indeed, they sound different. But I don't hear that different as revealing a new level of reproduction. I am not finding insights into what I am hearing that were not previously available to me through the 650. On the flight on the way over here I was listening to my ER4s and again don't feel that I'm getting anything special. In other words, there is nothing obvious to me about what is so special about this new-fangled driver that they have jabbered on about. It sounds like a dynamic headphone transducer. One thing I can tell immediately is that it is not 'neutral'. Neutral to me means that I do not hear a particular frequency emphasis within the tonality of acoustic instruments that I do not hear in real life, even across a wide variety of acoustics. The HD800's (well with all these graphs maybe I should say MY pair of HD800's) sin is in the upper midrange/lower treble. There is something accentuating the nasal quality of every instrument. It reminds me slightly of experiences with single driver dynamic loudspeakers, and some headphones such as closed Audio Technica's. Maybe even K1000's which have that thinness/dryness there. I'm not saying it sounds similar to those overall, just in the sense of the midrange colouration. I call it nasal because it seems to accentuate that quality of the human voice - every voice and particularly woodwind instrument gets the hint of having a stuffy nose. Violins are unrealistically thinned out. Colour me very unimpressed. Really everything else about this is good. But this new driver placement really doesn't change the world for me - it does have a tiny effect, but it really is tiny. Bass response is excellent, and probably a step forward. And as for this 'speed' thing - well I really have no idea what people are talking about. People say Grado's are fast - to me they have an FR with peaky treble and absent very low bass which makes them sound sharp, and people call that fast. In other words, I'm not sure people are identifying anything other than a particular (and unrealistic to my ears) frequency response. So yes, these are 'fast'. Except they are not absent in very low bass (HR's measurements seem to show they have a better response between 10 and 20hz than any other headphone, thought that would seem to be pretty irrelevant). I'm not totally sure about extension at the very, very top. I'm not quite hearing air around the sound that comes from those very top harmonics. Overall, as first impressions go, this really isn't great. I think I could get used to this headphone, and even like it. I am kind of enjoying it now, but I am having to do so by actively tolerating something I don't like. My initial reaction is to start taking photographs to post in a FS, though I will give it some more time. Overall, my sense is that this is a very good headphone. But if someone had put this on my head (ignore the fact I can feel it's different) and said it was a pair differently voiced HD650's with slightly angled drivers but otherwise the same fundamental technology, I would not have a hard time believing them. They are least bothersome to me at lower volumes. And I'm no head-banger to start with. That's great for my ears, but they don't seem to be quite voiced for that either - to get down to a volume where the midrange doesn't bother me too much, the bass is inadequate. Equal loudness and all that, they need a bit more bass at that volume. It seems that there is still plenty of room for someone to really get it right. But my lessened enjoyment of headphones over the past years (and that's not actually in comparison to good speakers, because I don't have any) implies that maybe I just don't like headphones. I can't believe what I hear. Oddly, psycho acoustically the things that bother me the least are my ER4s's. No idea why, that certainly isn't supposed to be the case. Anyway, perhaps my feelings about this headphone are marked by my dislike of the genre of product in the first place - maybe I was expecting them to restore my connection with the headphone experience and it seems pretty clear that isn't going to happen. And that's a fuck load of money to find that out! Oh, and thanks head-case. Would never bother to post this at head-fi.

I think I put this Rob guy on my ignore list at head fi some time ago. Was that unfair of me?

Slightly off topic, but I've always wanted to understand a bit more about this tube v. transistor argument. I understand that there are lots of sonic preferences involved, but from a purely technical perspective, is it possible to design/produce a pure tube amp that can measure as well as a state of the art solid state job in terms of output power/harmonic distortion/damping factor/FR linearity/anything else you can throw at it? I'm not trying to say those measurements necessarily 'mean' anything in the overall sound, I'd just like to know some of the 'science' behind the arguments. I have some dumb conception that I've picked up that somehow a good SS amp is more 'accurate' to the original source signal, and would like to know if there is actually any technical basis to that statement whatsoever, at least comparing best case scenario to best case scenario.

To drive what, 63's? I thought pimping out the 405 increased the max. current output, and there's certainly enough voltage to set of the protection circuit...

Absolutely, but it should be noted that the 63's are significantly worse than the 988's in respect to stiffness. I don't know if it's the case in America, but in the EU the 2905's come with a metal weight to attach to the underside of the frame, just to make it harder to topple over and comply with some ridiculous EU regulation. That bar itself, if you are really hard core and have the placement absolutely sorted, can be screwed into the floor directly. I suspect that combined with the tensions strut on the back pretty much solves the rigidity problems for good.

I know that but within that time window, clicking the edit button just gives me a spinning thing and nothing else happens.

ps: why can't I edit my posts? Clicking the edit button in Safari 4.0.2 just gives me an indefinite spinning thing.