Tachikoma

There are two SR-5NBs on ebay germany - get one of them and you should still have enough to buy parts for the EXstata amp.

Why doesn't the strain relief on the O2 work like it should, anyway? What kind of strain should I be especially careful not to apply on the new O2 cable I'm about to install? My old cables were working fine until that one time I stored it in the box for a relatively long period of time.

Lol, how large would something like that need to be? I barely have enough space for a regular sub/midbass as it is.

Little update, I've gotten rid of the buzzing after 2 hours of scraping and picking at the magnets with a pair of tweezers and a bent staple bullet, and they sound pretty good... once I ditched the amp that came with it at least (yes I would rather listen to the sats without any bass than to wire the sats to that POS). Now I have a little problem; I like my bass but I don't like the sub. How do I replace it? The sats are supposed to be flat to 1000 Hz but they roll off quite quickly beyond that (Monsoon made it flat-ish to 250 Hz with EQ).

Have a good one

I can't really read Japanese but guessing from the kanji that I can read, the drivers worked and sounded pretty good.

I got the speakers, and the problem is a bit worse than I had anticipated. But then again it should be repairable; it looks like the problem is caused by the coating on the magnets peeling off, so all I need now is some L shaped wire to scrape the magnets... I hope. The hiss is quite annoying though, but I can't complain since I got it for $30.

Happy birthday!

Heh, if you hang out around here long enough you won't be opting for an RSA amp.

I don't have a PC (and have little use for one), and I can't afford an expensive master clock generator Besides if the DAC can't slave a transport to it (and thats the majority) the RME doesn't have a huge advantage over USB. IMO the best solution is to just take the PC out of the equation, and replace it with something like a Squeezebox Touch (plays directly from a HDD), or better yet a Naim DAC that eliminates the need for SPDIF altogether.

First of all, what kind of amp are you looking at?

Yay, won me a pair of Monsoon MM-1000s on the bay (local). The seller mentions that one of the speakers distorts at "certain frequencies and volumes" - so what sort of repairs should I be prepared to do?

I'm just wondering whether Beyer had actually used too low a bias voltage on their stock amps, but I guess the only way to find out is to measure the amount of space inside the driver.

Hmm, if it wasn't arcing straight away is there any reason it would get damaged?

I would be surprised if USB and SDHC did sound identical, actually.

Like $2 whores

I believe the guy compared them out of a scope as well so all that is moot. Jitter isn't really a "problem" per se, but its the only thing that makes one bitperfect transport sound different from another bitperfect transport.

I think of it as different PSUs = different quantity/quality in supplied power, different components = different EMI/RFI, etc. Hell even using a different mobo might result in different voltage regulation at the PCI slot. Whats NTTAWWT supposed to mean?

But why use blue LEDs...

Actually, I should have said that I've heard _one_ person say the RME 9632 is better (there aren't many who have owned both cards) but like I said, given that every computer is its own environment, its hard to tell if you can reproduce that result.

Just one thing to add, an async USB DAC works exactly like a DAC with a wordclock output slaving its transport, which is why we're all harping for the async USB protocol. The argument for having an async USB transport is that if you can't have the DAC directly slaving the PC, the next best thing is to have a transport that slaves the PC (for computer audio).

Ideally the master and slave relationship should be the other way around... shouldn't it? Edit: Ah, nvm. People have reported that the AES16 isn't necessarily "the best" soundcard for that purpose - but with the variance in computer setups it probably doesn't matter.

I honestly don't understand why most megabuck (my defintion of megabuck being $1k and above ) DACs can't have that at least. Its easy to get a source with a clock input though - just get an RME or Lynx soundcard.

There's no such thing as a standard 12S input to begin with, afaik.

The TAS1020B isn't capable of USB 2.0 so if its _exactly_ the same board as his converters I don't think it will do 192khz anytime soon... although I guess he could just use a different USB receiver chip. The chinese thingy is full of little compromises like a poorly generated clock and a reliance on USB 5V, so I have little doubt that Gordon could do much better than that. Hopefully for a lot less than $900 though.