spritzer

Sorry, the links I used to buy them are dead but they are floating around on goofish

Multiple on both accounts... I might have a bit of a hoarding issue...

It could be the 20AWG wire but going by the price... I doubt it. Maybe some Chinese clone

Yeah, this is shockingly bad. Why they didn't just adapt the many headbands on the market in China is beyond me. The CD3000/R10 units are very well made from the right supplier.

When I've had time recently I've assembled a few more DIY electrostatic headphones: First off, the last of the Superex chassis I had in stock so I designed a new stator design for them: This has been a long running project to to make drivers and test the various aspects in a controlled housing. They are not ideal as they are mostly closed but I got a bunch of them for next to nothing years ago. New stators with some minor tweaks and a protective grill too: These are not really built for sound quality but to test different coatings, distortion tests on drivers and all that jive but still fun to have a pile of these here. Since the Superex is just a Beyerdynamic clone, I found some DT880's with blown drivers that could also work: The need to be modified internally a bit to open up the back but nothing major. Different stators on this one and the drivers have to be at a 45° angle to get it all to fit (not that it matters at all) but same basic idea as above Round them off with some nice leather pads, silicone 6 core cable and my new Stax plugs that I've been refining recently. These do sound better than the Superex shell as the backwave is more open. Finally, the second of those Kiwi Ears headphones was fitted with drivers: No major changes here except I didn't use the bayonet plate to fix the earpads, I rather slipped the stock pads over the lip of the housing which helped a lot Also some simple tweaks to ensure better baffle seal: Thick cloth tape here and it works nicely. These are okey sounding headphones for next to no money at all.

In other news from China, here we have the fake SR-X1: I've known about these for a while and I finally bought a set as they are so cheap... and very, very rough. They didn't arrive with any earpads but the knockoff leather X1 pads you can find in Asia do work nicely. They are clearly not a 1:1 clone and that headband is something really special in terms of being pure and utter garboleum but it was stupid cheap to add it to them. Housing is 3D printed and quite badly done but look at that cable... to make the 3D print soft and pliable it looks like an absolute mess. Same on this end but the actual plug is nice quality. Nothing wrong with those pins and the spacing seems just fine. Better look at the actual cable used, it is pretty stiff and unwieldy but at least it is 6 parallel cores so the capacitance shouldn't be too bad. It's too short though at 1.5M or so and who knows what the voltage rating is on that thing. I did order a couple of extra ones (and some extra housings too) so I'll zap it with some high voltage and see how it holds up. Anything that can't withstand 1kV AC over an extended time isn't really suitable for this role. Better shot if the actual plug, nothing wrong with those pins and it even has the cutout relief for the bias pin which I always skip on my own plugs. The driver face and the electrodes are etched aluminum or stainless steel. Not sure which as I haven't taken them apart yet. This headband was clearly an afterthought and that metal bends if you look at the wrong way but it does function... kinda. Here we can see the assembly "quality"... or very much lack there of. The housing does not fit correctly together and you might ask... why was this printed in white and the painted? Well I paid extra for the paint... but whey when there are excellent black filaments. Dunno and why not resin print this? Done right and that is superior to injection molding. More of this ace paintjob and the headphones falling apart but nice gold pins there as well. As for how they sound... well sound is produced but something is very wrong inside those drivers. They are far more inefficient than a stock unit and there is audible distortion... quite a bit of it actually. It gets worse and worse as you push the volume to normal levels for me so I'll have to take them apart and see if the drivers are misaligned. They are balanced between the channels though and at low level listening... these are not the worst ever. Now all of this is pretty terrible but clearly a work in progress and not done by some estat fanatics as one would suspect. The drivers don't really work (well they do produce some sound) and the quality is downright atrocious but funny enough, that crap cable does have strain reliefs on both ends which the aftermarket Stax cables do not have. Needless to say, best to stay away from crap too...

I'd rather not say but I'm missing 3-4 units at this point unless something super, super rare pops up.

Since I just got these, might be time to talk about possibly the rarest stuff Stax ever made. Let me introduce the SRM-Monitor Mk2 and the SR-Lambda Pro New: I've only seen a couple of these for sale over the years so very rare indeed. The headphones are basically the modern version of the Lambda Pro's but not the Spirit/Pro Classic, made later than that. The SRM-Monitor has been called the Mk2 but the changes are mostly to the chassis. Inside there is still a SRM-1 Mk2 and the ED-1 but with different parts. They are all Pro bias only and notice the extra output on the back. The volume knob is also similar to the SRM-T1S/W knob and not the SRM-1 Mk2 unit found of the original Monitors. I have no idea when these were made but I've heard late 90's and for special customers which wanted to replace their older Lambda Pro sets and SRM-Monitors. With these here the Lambda collection is almost complete...

That doesn't look like a stock unit to me but SRPP off a common heater supply...that's such a terrible idea. I do find it funny though that the High-amp circuits seem to be regressing, getting worse and worse over the years while still being filled with parts that are long out of production.

Better yet... Single Power ES-1 board!! Seriously though, as fucked as the ES-1 and ES-2 were... there was less wrong with the actual circuit than this pile of fail. Let's put build quality aside, the permanent 100V offset, non floating heaters chewing up tubes and some other "minor" issues... they did produce enough volume for a normal listening session.

Given the number of windings there, it has to be at least a couple of transformers. That is also clearly a Toroidy transformer, based on the color of the wires, and they never do tall transformers, they always just get larger and larger in diameter. That means it could just be transformers in there.

Yeah I agree but one possible major, major issue... one filament supply per channel for a balanced amp. These are no indirectly heated tubes... the filament supply is the bloody cathode.

They are very different headphones and the ES-2a easily beats in terms of price but I'd lean more towards the 009D in terms of raw performance. The 009D is really growing on me and what amazes me is how Stax can release crap like the X9000 and the 007S and then this... Both the X9000 and 007S are headphones I'd never listen to for fun while I've been logging a lot of hours on the 009D.

Look like 1544's to me too and that's not good given the gain is a quarter of what it should be. It is just me or are the output tubes AC heated? Those wires seem to run right to the transformer...

There is not enough detail to retrace anything or know what is on the heatsinks but from a build quality standpoint... this is very dire. One thing springs to mind... where is the power supply? Seriously, where is it? Also signal wires make no sense, that bias supply has be scratching my head, that's not how you do point to point wiring and servicing this would be an absolute nightmare. Does anybody see 20k€ here?

I've going over my collection, filling in any items I'm missing, I felt I really should have a modernized version of the Sigma. I came across a rather abused normal bias set which needed new drivers but wanted to try something different... so here is the SR-Sigma 507: The housing was very discolored so I wanted to try my hand at painting it. The frame was primed and painted satin black but I left all of the other parts in the primer color. The plan was to make them gloss white but this looked too cool so this is how they stayed. The drivers and cable are from a 507 so it took a lot of work to get this right. The drivers are in the cage that Stax introduced with the x07 series so I glued the drivers and fitted spare metal grills to them. In terms of sound, this is the best Sigma I've ever heard. The bass is overblown, as is always the case with Sigma's, but it has some real power to it and is more controlled than every other I've heard. The top end is nice and clean and the midrange is just sublime. A fun addition to the collection.

Figured I'd post this picture here as well as in the Stax thread, MA-009 vs SR-009D I've just been on holiday so no work on this project but I'll probably make some new diaphragms for the MA-009 soon. The ones in there are just too unstable, any major airpressure and they just stick to the stators.

Well I've been away and a certain SR-009D showed up in the meantime... Sorry for the crap picture but I've only had a couple of hours with them and I should have been in bed an hour ago... First impressions, I like the color but it's clear that Stax have cheaped out with one of those surface treatments that are so popular in China. Nothing as nice as the 009BK here, it's that matt but shiny black except in the grove on the back. It's okey but we are clearly seeing production moving away from Japan here of crucial parts. Same is true for the earpads, very different from regular 009 pads and the smell and feel is identical to the various earpads I've been buying from China. Nothing wrong with that really... if they didn't resell the 10$ pads at 200$. They are also odd as they don't seem to fit nicely on the headphones but feel nice, much better than the 007S trash pads. They are similar to the Omega pads in some ways, large opening and pretty thin. The headpad seems also different from the older models so likely a new supplier there too. Same basic thin pad design though but a bit wider overall compared to the L500 part I have on the MA-009 in the picture. Same cable as the SR-X1 and the 007S. I'm not in Japan so I'm not getting the shorter cable as instead of throwing them into the boxes, Stax wants you to send in for them, in Japan only. Gotta love companies living in the 70's. As for the sound... I was expecting to hate them but no... these are the first 009's that aren't way too colored for their own good. For the most part, they are easy to live with with plenty of bass and presence. Maybe a tad dull and uninvolving at times but still easy to get long with. Now they are not perfect, there is a distinct "bass drum" resonance on many tracks and some certain ranges make them way too shouty in the midrange but it's far from as bad the originals or what the hell the 009S was. Nice controlled soundstage with some depth to it, good extension on both ends of the spectrum so yeah... I'm pleasantly surprised. I haven't detected any of the serious driver resonance issues as with the 007S either. Only a couple of hours with them but some volume matched comparisons with the MA-009, I prefer the fuller sound of the latter but it's not a long way off. I do feel the irony of me finally tackling the long planned project of fixing the 009's, only with Stax releasing a new version which doesn't suck like the older ones at the same time. Still, this is good move in general and at present I'd recommend these over the 007S and the X9000, let alone the older 009 models.

Dear god this is bad... seriously, what the actual fuck. So we have tetrodes... feeding triodes into beam pentodes? Or they stole the Megatron output stage and picked the worst possible input stage on the planet? Now where to start, 20k€ for an amp with a quarter of the gain it should have. Trash input tubes, adjustable bias to guarantee somebody blows up their headphones trying to compensate for the low gain. I can't wait for the internal pics from China to showcase what a clusterfuck this is.

I've been following along with it utter crap springs to mind. The amplifier is a Stax SRM-1 Mk2 with some cobbled together power supply. I have no idea what output devices are being used but they look modern so holy Cob batman... yeah... As for the headphones, I've not heard anything good about them. Going by his speakers, this is amateur hour. No dust covers, the bias supplies in the speakers are those 3$ modules from China which ring like mad and spew out trash... for what 100k$?

This is the statement, translated: ...so I don't think they are going to replace them. The Shure KSE's are also discontinued with no replacements that I've heard of.

I truly don't get why Stax didn't just modernize the SRM-002. Make it all SMD, add a couple of li-ion cells, a bluetooth receiver and just profit. Make it in a nice plastic housing with both a 5 pin output and the 002 plug. No stupid USB input which just complicates everything.

Hehe, I should have been more specific but they have stopped production of them. No replacement for the SRS-002 as they hope people will use the SR-003Mk2 with the D-10. That makes 30 years of continued production of the portable system coming to a close.

In other Stax news, the SR-009S and SRS-002 are both dead now.

There is no way to do that, that would have to be awfully thing metal and how would it be attached. If you attached it on the diaphragm side then it would short out the driver and it would simply cause more reflections on the other side