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Tyll Hertsens

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Posts posted by Tyll Hertsens

  1. And as far as the HA-2 goes, well that just makes me nervous... ;D

    Me too! I think it's idiotic for HeadRoom not to be in tube amps. But you're right, I only have so much money, so I can only do so many things. What to do? No shit, what to do? This is a private forum; I'm willing to talk a little more freely as long as it stays that way. Which should I make as an interim product: DAC; balanced DeskTop; or HA2? nI'd be interested in your opinions.

  2. BTW, this is probably a good place to mention it as it is specifically related to the OP. As Recstar24 so legitimately pointed out our amps really haven't quite kept up with the state-of-the-art solid-state crowd. The current module was first designed over two years ago, and times have changed. We've gained some ground in the DAC area, and in the over-all looks, but we have been dissapointed with the amp electronics...bottom line the HA5002 just didn't cut it in the balls department. So we've been doing some work on modules over the last year and have found something we really like. It did seen a little early to revamp the module so we decided we were going to wait to introduce the module until Stereophile or some other magazine realized that you have to measure headphone amps into 20 ohm loads to get a good feel for how the amp would work with dynamics and low impedance cans. Well, guess what?! JA decided that he needed to measure down to 50 ohms on our DeskTop Amp. If you look at the Stereophile data you can see that the HA5002 doesn't measure---or sound---great below 100. The result is slightly less snappy articulation and cleanliness of sound as you might hear on the current state-of-the-art crop of headphone amps; and probably results in Recstar24s (an others) less than enthusiastic impression of the outright performance of our amps.

    So, currently all Micro, Desktop, and Home modules shipped are the new design; Max modules will be shipping by the end of next week. The new design is essentially the same in the input buffer and crossfeed implementation, but the output amp is our own spin on the Diamond Buffer design. They sound SICKLY good. You can ask Sloth, he's been listening to them for about a month.

  3. I've actually tried to argue for it recently as a short term way to some incremental sales. But bottome line we can't afford to increase the inventory at the moment. It's a tough call. I think the odds have actually gone up recently of a stand alone DAC but they are still long. A DeskTop Balanced Amp is also a modest likelyhood. The most likely thing over the next 18 months is a tube amp, and even that's a bit of a long shot. As I said in the AirHead paid thread, we're working on a low cost line for two years or so from now and we're going to have to save a lot of buckies to pay for tooling up for 3 or 4 sexy plastic enclosures. Consequently we are not going to be doing anything that doesn't pay for itself quickly, however, of the three optional products mentioned above a DAC may have the fastest payback.

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