TMoney

Please take all of the following with a grain of salt. It's just one man's opinion. Having just gotten over something similar a few weeks ago, get healthy, then give us your impressions. I put zero stock into my own impressions even when I'm just starting to get stuffed up. It just isn't a great time to be evaluating audio gear. Also, there is no need for your impressions to be as long as they were. You aren't exactly dealing in unknown commodities here. While the KGSS and BH you currently have might be biased higher, many of us have heard some incarnation of both of the amps so there isn't much of a need to reinvent the wheel with your impressions. I think the Head-Case crowd generally prefers it to kept briefer and more to the point. Head-Fi is obviously a different story. I think if you tried to limit yourself to about 10-15 sentences, tops, you'd get down to the real nitty-gritty in the comparison. Again, just my opinion, take it or leave it.

I'm using the 50K. There isn't a ton of gain for those who listen loud but I listen more on the quiet side. No issues so far.

How does it sound with 007/009s? A nice change of flavor?

I've never seen one of these before http://www.head-fi.org/t/605095/fs-stax-ed-1-diffuse-field-equalizer-for-stax-lambda-pro-price-dropped

Agree, this looks perfect given what you've specified. When you are buying wine for a real collector, IMO it's best to not try and wow them with some obscure cult wine that they may or may not have heard of. I personally think it's best to stick to the big guns, even if there are better wines and better values out there. When you go with the tried and true, odds are the person will know what you are giving them and will appreciate the significance of the gift. In that vein, any of the Premier Cru Bordeauxs from a decent year are an easy recommendation. The place you want to order from can definitely help you with the year. The Premier Crus are (from Wikipedia): Premier Grand Cru Château Lafite Rothschild Médoc (Pauillac) Château Margaux Médoc (Margaux) Château Latour Médoc (Pauillac) Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Leognan Château Mouton-Rothschild Médoc (Pauillac)

You like em more than the HD600s? From your graphs it appears the HD650s slightly beat the HD600s out on technical grounds. That being said I do love the little extra bit of treble energy that the 600s have.

Looks like you guys had an amazing meet. Makes me wish I could hear a T2 again. When heard it I was still using an old SRM-T1. The T2 sounded so much better than the SRM-T1 that it was hard to make critical judgements. The difference between the amps was just too large. It'd be interesting to hear it again now that I've been grown accustom to the capabilities of the KGSSHV. I'd guess it'd be a much better standard to judge the T2 against than a SRM-T1.

In my case I've been playing around with tubes in a preamp. I've been trying to sell the preamp for some time, but I figured I'd break it out and do a little experimenting as long as I've still got it. While its not as optimal as listening straight out of the DAC, different pairs of tubes have pretty different sound signatures. Some of my older "tubey" sounding tubes sound pretty darn lush through the 9-HV combo.

In defense of the 9's on the Gilmore amps, I've found their transparent character really lets the source shine through. I've got a couple of sources around all they all sound very different when played through my 9-KGSSHV combo. If you are interested in lushing them, one possible method might beto keep the Gilmore amp and instead look for a lusher source.

Beautiful work, Victor!

Congrats Victor and best of luck, Doug. The reward is more than worth it so stick with it. I had a nice listening session last night and its really amazing how well the HV pairs with the 009s. So clear and so powerful.

Totally agreed. Because they know the hardware and the state of the hardware industry they can be so much more informative about both what is inside the tablet and also about whats coming down the pipeline in the next 6/12/18 months. Now if only Apple would send them advance review units like they do for everyone else, they might be able to turn around the review a little sooner. I can't see why Apple wouldn't. Apple's products tend to be very well engineered and the Anandtech reviews call attention to that.

That'll be an interesting experiment, for sure. I've sat down with both amps and both the 007mk1s and 9s and while I agree with Spritzer that the BH beats out the "stock" 500V HV, they both sound amazing. To these ears the differences between them are pretty small. Its nowhere near the difference you hear when you go from a production level Stax amp to either the BH or HV. You really can't go wrong either way.

Interesting read, Marv. It's sad to see they are still having issues with the 3's after the out-of-the-park success they had with the 2's.

The most in-depth new iPad review so far: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012-review TL:DR types can skip to the "Final Words" conclusion, but really the entire review is worth reading.

Whose BH did you end up with? Edit: Never mind.

On mine (32-BLK--AT&T) right now. Holy moly this screen is the truth. I haven't used an iPad since iPad 1 so this is a MAJOR upgrade.

If you are asking me about the mod, then no, I haven't played around with the mod yet. I've been meaning to try it.

^ Want to borrow mine? Someone else is borrowing it at present but I'll have it back in a week or so.

It looks like the same guy who started this train-wreck of a thead over there is actually going forward with his build.

32gb black AT&T. Been waiting for this one since iPad 1. It's a shame they appear to have missed out on the awesome coming generation of quad-core SOCs, but I guess that'll come next year.

Beautiful build, Spritzer. So how high is team overkill going to crank the current?

+1 Great read. It confirms a lot of what I've thought subjectively. Thank you for posting.

What an album. Stevie Nicks is a superstar, no doubt, but give me Chris McVie and her smokey alto voice singing with a minimalist arrangement any day.

If the CFA Exam wasn't the same day I'd be there for sure. I'm really going to be bummed out not getting to meet some of you. Oh well, hopefully we'll be able to have another mini-meet of Stax heavy hitters sometime before June 2nd rolls around.