kevin gilmore

Kerry will have to answer that. mikhail's biggest problem was the fact that everything out of his mouth was a lie. every es1 burned up the hand selected tubes mikhail picked for them due to major cathode voltage violation. After that the amp is toast. There were 2 other es1 with the gas tube power supplies. One of those is known toast. also the price of 33000 yen for the t8000 is clearly way off base, it is 550000 yen and the website has changed!

The Kerry version of the T2 is a one of piece, and I'm pretty sure Kerry won't sell it for anything less than $50k. none of that stuff is available, including the 2 singlepower pieces. At any price. There were only 5 X es1/es2 total made, I have one, Birgir has one, and I know where 2 of the other 3 are. And that sdsxlr is also a one of piece.

How does this scam work? The solid silver seems to be the only thing that might exist for purchase.

I don't think that a single amplifier on that page is actually purchaseable. and the bhse insides picture is labeled wrong. the singlepower pictures are also kind of funny these days.

Yep, a few more parts and more $. But usable for just about anything.

you will effect the frequency response. best to use the right part in this case.

years ago I designed a r2r/sacd dac which I would still like to do. But the fpga code was something I knew nothing about, and when I went searching for someone to do the code I ended up with absurd prices in the $350k range. Now given the amount of time that may have been put into this, that was probably not completely out of the range of reasonable. Over the years that price has dropped, a lot recently, someone is willing to sell me the code for $5k. So its clear that the code has been ripped, or reverse engineered and the source code is now readily available. Its also clear from those pictures that the massdrop board is a virtual identical copy of the hibiki board. There is evidently software out there that will take gerber files and turn them back into editable layout files. my guess is that the firmware in the 2 boards is at least marginally different. so they are not the same even though from a hardware standpoint they are completely identical. in the end its probably going to be shown that even the stupid high priced spreads (msb,totaldac…) will have a code base that started at the same root. another year or 2 and this will all be public domain. Then the math wizzes out there will be able to work on the FIR and IIR code for optimization.

I expect that the fpga code has been leaked and pretty soon everyone will have 24 bit sign magnitude dacs that convert dsd. also this uses actual switches, not the 8 bit shift registers, so it's a better quality product than some of the stupidly priced things. massdrop seems to be doing their best to drop the bottom out of the audio market

you can listen to it. But better to pick pairs of tubes that result in better balance. or trim the cathode resistors, but really better to pick matched tubes. yes it gets pretty warm. touch a 120 watt fender head sometimes.

Heavy plexiglass shield absolutely required, rounded is better

try removing the 2n3904 current limit transistor if the voltage is right without any load

Original downloads work for me?

Balanced done right gives you double the slew rate and 4 times the power. If it's a 4 pin xlr it's good to use on the gsx. Best with balanced source. the headphone cannot otherwise know if it's driven from a balanced or unbalanced source.

The esx exceeded cathode to filament voltage by 200 volts resulted in leaking output tubes that sat at minus 150 or more which raised the bias voltage enough to damage the headphones. 20 volts offset is not a problem.

More important is for example cavalli liquid platinum at $700. Pretty much guaranteed to perform similar or worse than these 2. you can get an audio-Gd balanced amp with high accuracy attenuator for $500. With plenty of class A power.

so birgir sent me 2 pieces of cavalli to test all at 20khz into 50 ohms top is output, bottom is input first up is the CTH which does in fact invert phase, check out the feedback spike next is the lcx, much slower slew rates (mosfets, no surprise there) and the ringy dingy

scratchy on the pot means there is some dc offset somewhere

10 times the input capacitance, 20 times the output capacitance. Yes it will work as the gate follower, but in the gain stage the frequency response is definitely going to change

flyback switcher on board. another stepdown flyback switcher for the filaments

the 5.1k resistors are to protect the headphones.

so all sorts of problems actually building this. 1) input transformer needs a center tap probably tied to about -420v 2) voltage swing on the ecc88 is such that you are going to loose 40v or more on negative swing 3) 6sn7 filaments would have to float and then you are still limited by the cathode to filament voltages to about 400V 4) 33R output resistor absolutely a bad idea 5) available 900V mosfets are high gate capacitance limiting frequency response 6) resistor plate loads for 6sn7 a bad idea 7) 900V npn output transistors no longer exist have to use obsolete parts, or currently best transistor is 800v no servo to control output stage dc

about 1V

absolutely stunning, but I think the triumph would be a lot more fun, too bad i'm way past my prime to ride something like that. more than 20 years since the K100RT

hum and heat are 2 issues the lyr3 seems to be getting a reputation for.

yes the amp is balanced. whether there is a opamp unbal to bal converter like the liquid carbon or lcx, is unknown. But there is no reason why the front end cannot be a differential amplifier and then its balanced. of course that depends on your definition of balanced, its not the same kind of balanced as a super symmetry dynalo. its a unbalanced/balanced to balanced converter and then 4 x cfa output amplifiers. Same as liquid gold, liquid carbon, lcx. I see the confusion from my post, the single ended output is going to be limited to something like 18vpp (30 volts - VGS(x2)-2) whereas the cth would be about 26v This amp is definitely to compete with the lyr3. whether they knew that the lyr3 was coming or not. Both amps have serious limitations and issues. also that picture is the cavalli version the monoprice version will probably be different just like the differences in the original cth and the production version