monsieurguzel

Heck, I'd be in for a group buy too. Plus it would help the confusion of having to buy something and importing it from Japan.

Actually, what I would really like is a T2 for dummies...if that's even possible.

Or maybe by then KG will come out with an even more insane amp...the T2SE

Yeah, with the advent of the upcomming C32 as well as possibly a new Stax amp in the next year (or two?) I'm planning on holding off from purchasing a stax setup for now. I really was close to buying a O2 mk1, but it's a pain finding a used pair that is in good condition and has been treated properly. The more time passes, the older a lot of the Mk1s are getting, so it'll be nice having a new flagship from Stax which will be easy to procur and get replacement parts for, etc. I'm also curious to see how amplification will affect the new C32 and wether or not a BHSE will be necessary (my guess is that it will

I also love how he compares different amps and judges how "good" they are just by how many parts are used in them. The more parts, the better!!

Yikes! $1800 is ridiculous for these headphones. I'm sure a lot of ppl are pissed that they were expecting the price to lower over time or Sennheiser dropping the strict marked price for official distributors. Amazon is showing $1500, so I'm hoping it won't be $400 more, especially since the euro hasn't fluctuated enough to justify the price difference.

That Woot deal isn't all that great. You can pick up a brand new one from Amazon for $20 more (no tax and free shipping) and it isn't some refurbished used one.

Btw, my new favorite iPhone app / music service is Mog. $10 a month, but then again you have unlimited access to any and all music you want. It streams at 64k while on 3G, but the one great aspect is that you can download albums/songs to your iphone at 320k when you want to do some more serious listening. The interface is wonderful and easy to navigate....and it encourages you to download and listen to all sorts of things you normally wouldn't.

I tried this app and it's a complete joke. I'm not sure why anyone would use this intereface instead of the standard iPod interface for playing music. At least they aren't charging $2000 for it like their new clock

Yeah, I also inquired about the LA office once (I live in Santa Monica) and it's pretty much no use to customers since everything happens in Florida. LA is where the music industry is though, and since Jerry caters so much to that crowd then it makes sense for them to have a small outpost out here.

No, to properly drive them with 'authority' (new HF buzzword), you need a 6W headphone amp that will drive your headphones to 120+db without distorting

I've been using a pair of EWS10JPNs at work for about 1-2 years now and couldn't be happier with them. I've had a ton of really high end headphones, but somehow still really enjoy the warmth and sound out of these. They provide enough isolation to hear the phone ring at the office, but also allow you to keep the music to yourself. I used to connect it to a headphone amp (RSA Mustang), but it sounds about just as good straight out of an iPod Nano. These are very forgiving of source and sound good with mostly everything I hook them up to.

So whats the concensus on the other 2 amps they released? There was a whole lot of hype a while back and now people aren't really talking much about them? I wonder if this one will be any good. On the bright side, I really do like hybrid tube amps, so it is a lot more tempting than the other 2 Schiit amps.

Can you imagine what a douche you'd look like rockin' to a pair of HE-6s out in the open, let alone in public transit. Granted you wouldn't hear any of the 'audiophile goodness' considering that they are open headphones and all the outside noise would make them sound no better than a pair of ibuds. Maybe that's why they feel the need for those headphones to have Ray Samuels approved loudness

I totally agree with you about this thread. There used to be a time when we cared about the quality of the sound and how a certain amp / headphone pairing would render a certain musical passage. Now ever since the release of orthos, all anymore talks about in amps is amount of current output and how loud something can play without distorting or clipping. Hell, if all I cared about was that, people could have saved themselves a hassle and just plugged their headphones into their home theater receivers and called it a day. The big buzz word with powering headphones now is doing it with "authority", whatever that means... Oh, and on a side note, who the hell is going to use an HE-6 with a portable setup?? To me that makes absolutely no sense...and for that matter a fully portable balanced amp makes no sense either...

Is it just me or does that driver look huge!! Did the original Omega driver have the 8-point star integrated in the driver or was it a seperate piece?

Then I wonder how Cypher Labs was able to convince Apple about digital out on their product. Then again, it seems that the product is done and they are waiting for the official certification from Apple...and who knows how long that will take. On a side note another product that gets digital out from iPod is Peachtrea audio...and they seemed to release a new DAC about the size of a Wadia i170...its not on their website yet but I saw it on the stereophile blogs.

Yeah, I could definitely see that being a problem. Apple is notoriously secretive and bad with communication, so I can't begin to imagine how hard it would be to start a conversation with them regarding licensing a small run of amps that allow digital extraction from the iPod.

Does that iPad pretty much accept any standard USB DAC protocol? Here's to hoping that the USB connection of the 3A won't be anything fancy or out of the norm (which it probably won't be). If I really wish Jerry would have thought ahead on this though and gotten the digital dock out certification for iPod/iPhone since i'm sure most people will want to be listening straight out of those...but it probably would cost more money to do so.

Technically, the JH3A will have a USB input, so you could theoretically just plug your iPad into the unit through USB camera kit and listen to music that way (no 24/96 music though). I heard people say that the USB through that kit has quite a bit of jitter, but I doubt anymore would notice on a portable rig.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think that these will be a higher end model than the O2? The materials, assembly, and driver are both reminiscent of the omega and O2, which makes me wonder if this would be a replacement instead of a higher end model. From appearance, the arc assembly of the new model seems to be plastic like the SR-507, which isn't as nice looking at the O2. The one thing i am very excited about in these new ones is the hinged earcups though! Should solve a lot of problematic fits for a lot of people and will require less messing around with earpad rotation, etc.

The problem is that this concept was shown on their webpage about a year ago and there hasn't been any word of updates or what not. I'd be super excited about this too and hope that such a headphone will eventually come out instead of just being fantasy. Btw, has there ever been another ribbon speaker headphone before? Also, as a technology, how good are ribbon speakers? I only know about ribbon tweaters in speakers, but not much about full range ones. Do they have more/less distortion than orthos/stats and how much power do they usually need to run properly.

I also went the route of buying the largest capacity iphone, only to realize that I hardly ever use it as an actual mp3 player. I don't know, the fact that it has so many antennas emitting all sorts of frequencies (GSM, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, etc., etc.) just doesn't seem like it would be the best solution when paired up with a portable amp. That, and its also a pain to hook and unhook your everyday phone to a portable audio rig. For this reason, it just makes more sense to have a dedicated music playing iPod, or iPad in your case. So long story short, I think you made the right choice

I'm be very interested in a board set and a kit of parts also if i'm not too late Thanks for everything Kevin!

Even though Jerry mentions Matt being charge of the amp, I'm pretty much sure he's referring to the package as a whole, not just the DSP portion. So i'm really not sure the final version will really sound the same or similar to the one everyone else heard at the show. I must say that I was a little skeptical at Canjam on how reliant everything was on that laptop and equipment outside of the JH-3A unit. It was also pretty darn buggy, resulting in Matt having to reboot the whole system after every couple listens.