spritzer

Just buy an APL player and be done with it. You can have a digital input, volume control and a universal player that plays any of the old formats. I don't quite know what the price and features of the newest players but you should drop Alex a line. The guy who sold me my APL 3910 compared it to a dCS P8i and ARC Ref3 line stage (the APL has a built in volume control) the last day before he shipped it out and the other gear was blown away in every aspect. That's 25k$ against a 4k$ player and it's not even the newest version. This was in an email sent to Alex and not me where the seller said he was nuts for selling me the player and he wanted a NWO soon. Now mine is even better with the new AKM 32bit.

That will only happen if they are left to fully loose all charge over some weeks. Then they will require time to spring back to life. The 500v he is referring to is driving voltage and not bias voltage.

You only need about 100-250v to get the phones to a normal listening level so 500v has plenty of headroom. These are all RMS numbers so peek-peek values would be higher. The bias voltage has nothing to do with the drive voltages other then that they have to be with in a certain ratio to function correctly.

Ahhh no,no we are talking about two totally different things. I thought you wanted to connect a Stax trafo to the tubes but I now see it was a result of me being barely awake. All the amps see with a Stax trafo is a benign 8ohm load but the transformer turns that into the 5kohm that electrostatics like (transformer ratio 2*input impedance) as well as stepping up the voltage and reducing the current.

I wouldn't connect them to a Stax transformers except maybe the other way around for a cheap/small/crappy output transformer for a push-pull amp. If you were to connect it before the output transformer of a SET amp you'll end up with a 1:25 step up of the output voltage of the tube. The output transformer steps down the voltage, impedance and steps up the current for dynamic speaker use. You can connect Stax phones directly to the tubes through a capacitor, no transformer needed. You will need some load on the tubes to make the amp more stable but thats given.

Not with all channels driven at once, apparently.

One problem with these drivers is the single point bias system so if there is any corrosion you'll get a very reduced output. Still I hate working with these drivers as they are very fragile... That would be cool. just make sure that the builder seals up the baffle airtight.

I've never had this happen to me and there is no theoretical reason for this...it could be a bad connection but the old SR-X driver are very temperamental beasts... \ I think it would be worth a shot to talk to the local distributor, Senn USA or some of the big ones. I'm sure they still have the parts as they cost next to nothing to make and Sennheiser has a bit of an obsession with spare parts. The Sennheiser cable is pure crap so you are much better off with a Stax extension.

Did anybody notice the power consumption on the right...13A

That's a whopping 3.33% difference so no. Such a small difference will not be noticeable. I'm much more interested in the recommended bleeder resistor as that might cause some compatibility issues.

We are getting screwed constantly. One nice thing this evening was that the post came with a package and I didn't have to pay anything... I'm really digging my Stax Gamma Pro's The RK40 is a very nice pot and I have a small stash here with me. It's a bit sad that my new source makes all volume controls redundant...

Ok cool. It's still odd that something is cheaper over here with our fun VAT and other small expenses the state burdens us with.

They are 50$ here in Europe... on ebay.... You can find them even cheaper in Japan if you know where to look. I know full well about the recent price influx... it's making my collection so much harder to put together.

Less vibrations is always better. Have you ever watched a cd spin as it is quite a workload for the error correction.

You can get an RK40 for about 50$(edit:typo) and it was even cheaper when this amp was made. I wonder what those caps are?

I feel the same way. I'm not going to use some crappy 2k$ player and invest a lot in tweaks to fix something that is a fringe tweak. Some disks are way off balance and they will benefit from this with the reduced vibration and wobble. I will also try an APL tweak to resample some of my disks to 88.2/24 and burn them as DVD-A's. It is supposed to be a good step forward.

The lathe is to make the CD perfectly round. That makes perfect sense given how they are produced since the center hole is rarely completely in the right place. That beveled edge might work but I file it under green markers and other fringe tweaks.

Poked a hole in the diaphragm!!!!!! I think going to lay down a cry for a bit... The driver should work just fine with a small hole. One of my Micro Seiki's produced sound with the film in small flakes... Are you sure you can't order the two pieces from Sennheiser? I'm pretty sure they get exchanged a lot during repairs because of the stupid screws they used. You need the front and back parts of the housing, the rubber o-ring that seals the baffle and a headband... and a cable... can't be that hard to get.

They are a necessity in todays world with all these digital sources.

The player was originally modded with a digital input as well as XLR and RCA outputs, both available with the flick of a switch.

I'm not getting a NWO but a fully upgraded 3910. It will be fine in my headphone setup but I'll get an NWO when I switch to speakers.

Yup, every thing is converted to PCM and fed through a 211kHz/32bit upsampler and then into the array of 32bit dacs. My player should be at APL in the morning for its 32bit update.

There is a lot more experience in PCM decoding compared to DSD so PCM is a lot more advanced even though DSD is technically "better". If DSD won't die a quiet death then some real progress could made in the next 10 years.

Pretty cool but I'm sure that the Gamma's have a 1.5um diaphragm. I think the NB could be better then all of the other SR-5's as the plastic is different but I haven't tested this theory.

I'm certainly not going to reveal my sources but I can assure you it can be done. I just bought a SR-Sigma for 55$ and a Lambda Signature for 74$. There is often a chance that they won't work but then I'll just have some extra spare parts, no harm done. It is very much possible to put together a killer setup for 500$.