spritzer

Always start with the tubes.

I did that back in the day when fixing the SingleHour ES amps...

That was an excellent write up and goes to show, don't buy the BS the manufactures are pushing.

Anything is user replaceable and I built my own pack for the D10 I attempted to fix. It uses fairly standard batteries but who knows if Stax are willing to help you.

Yeah, I completely agree, this is not a big market at all.

For some reason, people really drank the Cool-Aid on this stuff so anything said about is fake or an attack. It can't be that it is just a crap product...

I would also check for HV breakdown as there is continuity and then there is continuity at high voltages.

One funny here, I've been working on a Stax SRM-007tA today and it is one of those long rumored units that use GE 8CG7 tubes and not the EH 6CG7's. It must have have been a fuck-it-Friday though at Stax as did they use a different heater supply for the 8.4V tubes? Nope... they jumpered the 1ohm resistors in the heater supply but it is still run off the same 12.6VCT winding, fed through a bridge and some caps. End result was a blown heater in one of the tubes as it was being run at 6V... 😂

The tuning is in the diaphragms so yeah, that wouldn't work

It's been close to a decade so I just don't remember but well over 1k$. Everything under Edifer is getting worse, they should have the resources to do something good but no, performance across the board is just worse and everything is much more expensive.

Indeed, the bias has to be + polarity for that reason.

I just used up my last pair of spare drivers for repair and I'm not sure where it is possible to get any more. Sourcing anything from Stax now appears to be a massive pain as the parts I've been ordering through various distributors, just aren't showing up.

Yeah, there are no shortcuts here. You could run a simple Class A amp off +/-24V rails but I'd stay away from the old Hood design. It has an output capacitor (as it is a single rail design) and that is just asking for trouble with this kind of load plus limited voltage swing.

Fuck this is dire, sure they were just on the cusp of making the best electrostatic amp there ever has been. That is a lot of transistors, any joy with piecing it all together?

I seriously doubt that but then again, people paid good money for the Single Power, Woo Audio, Cavalli, LTA, Ray Samuels amps (and the list goes on and on) thinking they sounded good...