spritzer

I'd love to see that, or just anybody trying to build a closed electrostatic. It's not easy as simply slapping a cover on it like the Koss ESP-900 was dreadful.

Excellent.

Yes, they have an identical headband it's not as strong as the 007 arcs which can be bent back and forth.

It is plastic covering a metal core

Thanks. The pictures coming in from Grindavík are shocking, rips in the ground, houses pretty much broken in half, sinkholes all over the place etc.

Well things aren't good but it's just a waiting game for now. One town has been evacuated, has suffered a lot of damage and people were given 5-7 minutes to go into their homes and save what they could. If the town is wiped out, that is worst case scenario along with the Blue Lagoon and geo thermal powerplant just to the north of it. If it opens up in the sea just outside the town, it is also pretty bad as Keflavik airport is very close by so no flights in or out of Iceland... perhaps the whole of the northern Atlantic will shut down for a while at least. Let's just hope this thing moves and opens up somewhere in the wilderness where it won't do any damage. This is about 30 minutes away from me so yeah... pretty close.

I've put Mk2 forks on a Mk1 but the pressure has never bothered me. You can bend the arc a bit on these but don't take it too far.

Nope, I'm keeping it

These seem to ship worldwide: https://www.audiosanctuary.co.uk/official-sennheiser-hd800-replacement-earpads-ear-cushions.html

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...

Anybody who measures for lowest distortion and thinks that is some sort of a golden benchmark, knows absolutely fuck all about amplifier design let alone the history of hi-fi. I have nothing against meaningful measurements but when something sounds like crap and measures ok... you are doing something wrong. Same goes for awful measurements, if you sit down and it sounds good then something is wrong. Like when Amir showed the world he's fucking retarded by not understanding how electrostatic amps work. A real Schrödinger's cat quantum phenomenon, the device sitting in two states at the same time. The issue for me here is twofold, it's a low power amp which is asked to do far more than it can deliver and then we have the whole can of worms of using transformers to step up the signal with all of their limitations. Anybody who's taken a SRD-7 and some cheap chip amp off ebay knows if can swing a lot of voltage (hence why Stax put a clamping circuit into the later ones) but it doesn't sound all that great.