spritzer

No, not wasting my time on that pile of crap

One of the sets I received had that issue and Audeze replaced it, it was far too touchy.

Thanks everyone. Just got back from London, first proper trip since the whole pandemic nonsense and fuck am I tired... 😂

No KGSS Klassik has ever come in for servicing so highly reliable I'd say. Closest comparison would be a fully modified 717.

It's a voltage divider feeding a voltage doubler

Great work and Stax had endless issues with the SR-Omega... same as Sennheiser with the glass stators.

Well it is certainly not something brilliant but we'd need better pics of the amp section to be sure. I'm certainly not impressed by the 9$ Alps RK27 volume control...

That was excellent and what happened to that original Jr. set?

If you are using a Samsung drive they have their own utility which is excellent for this stuff.

I have plenty of them in stock but they were not cheap.

New design

Ehhh Mk2.95 now... we kinda boxed ourselves in with the 2.9 moniker... 😉 Not much different from the Mk2.9 (which dates back to 2014 at least) , new earpads being the biggest change.

They are a bit more relaxed sounding and neutral to me. It's not a huge difference but the L500Mk2 gave a wow feeling for the first time in a long while when I first put them on. I just got them for the bloody cable... 😉

The L500Mk2's are excellent and probably the best new Stax on offer aside from the 007's (which are hardly new at this point). Far more balanced than they used to be and easy enough to fit L700 earpads if that is your thing

No real change and I just put them away as I got new toys. I did give them another chance and yeah.. I'm never going to use these, it is unforgivable for me that they can't play all music without sound off, some songs are just not right. They are just placed in my reference collection now and... yeah I'm not happy about this. Hell I'd take the L500Mk2 over them...

This thing is actually worse than previously thought when you look at it. So first thing, never, ever use the balanced input... those are clearly opamps next to each XLR socket so... yeah badly converted to SE. Pure quality there... Then we have one input tube feeding both EL84 push-pull output stages so it has to be a phase splitter for them. There is not a whole lot of gain here plus the limitation of the choke being used... this is pretty dire A bit of context here, when you dig through history, the first ever mention of electrostatic headphones (DIY) is from the 50's and something like this is what was suggested as the amplifier to drive them... as there were push-pull tube amps everywhere at that time. Leave the output transformer secondary floating, take the signal through caps off the output tube plates, some high value resistors to ground after the caps and a simple bias off the B+. So this is somehow high end now?

Just this line shows the utter lack of knowledge at play here... speaker or headphones sure... but dynamic vs. electrostatic is sure as shit matters. Wow... just wow...

It has all the same issues as the Woo Audio WES, their absurdly expensive unit, probably the new ES8 (based on the tube choice) and the LTA unit. The biggest issue is how the tubes are being driven, i.e. a center tapped inductor. With a normal loudspeaker, this isn't an issue but with electrostatic loads, it creates a lot odd issues and they can be clearly heard, if you know what you are looking for. It is not linear and neutral as it moves through the frequency range so to be simple, a high quality CCS, is pretty much utterly inert to what the amp is doing, a resistor far less so but here you add an inductor to the mix and a lot of weird stuff happens. Now why use inductors, well they are cheap all told. Palatauf are using nice Lundahl units but compared to the cost of CCS's and cooling it, it is a cheap option. Second reason, lot of voltage swing but that is problematic on its own. I've been hearing through the grapevine that Stax are not happy about these amps and why they've come so hard down on warranty repairs for headphones. A brief burst from one of these amps will kill the drivers at high volume levels

So here in Austria, we don't use our brains at all and life is so much better? Yeah, I don't buy that.... It's been the same shit for the last 20 years I've been active in this hobby, Single Power, RSA, Woo Audio and all those other crap amps, the fanboys when faced with actual circuit analysis, it's fingers in the ears and this stuff sounds amazing!! Shut UP!! What I don't get is that you like the crap amp, fine, that's your problem. I'm not trying to sell you anything but because your bad tastes validate some crap design, that suddenly makes it good? So the KGSSHV, which is a monitor amp - designed to be as neutral as is possible, sounds flat and lifeless... might that just be the source? Just throwing that out there... Also, this has the be the lamest attempt to try a Carbon I've ever read...

No, I don't have any BH builds.

You need to replace those wires or it will never work and make sure they are connected into the transformer. You can lift up that plastic cover on the transformer to access the tie pins. Then bridge the following contacts on the PCB for 120V: 2,4,6

Any amp can be made with any bias so a Blue Hawaii with normal bias is not a problem.

The Paltauf is a bad joke... I mean look at it: It's a speaker amp with the electrostatic signal taken off the plates through capacitors. Yeah... all the issues of doing that.

Did you check the offset and balance of the channels? It's odd that it acts up but clears up when it is just running on the charge stored in the capacitors. Might point to an over voltage situation somewhere or some part acting up when under full load.

That is correct except I'd move the white wire to the other empty hole as it would be connected through the jumper anyway.