spritzer
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Posts posted by spritzer
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13 hours ago, Timb5881 said:
The old SRD-x Pro was a transformer driven by an amp. That may be a he best comparison for this amp.
Indeed but I hope the power amp has moved on a bit from the early 80's...
9 hours ago, thebrunx said:aren't Topping known for being giant killers?
It's mediocre crap from China, I don't see how that would be the case. It's one of a host of similar products that don't stand out at all.
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Yup that's the M03... it's not good and there are some others on the Chinese market.
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8 hours ago, thebrunx said:
New King?
King of the trash maybe, not much more. Assuming that it is well made (a big ask for Topping), it made to spec (also something I really doubt) and will not burn up headphones... This will be on par with the Stax SRM-1Mk2/3/313/323 amps in terms of performance. Might be ahead of the 353 or D50 as they are both trash.
26 minutes ago, justin said:this is why it's basically pointless to advertise specs anymore
Indeed and also a small issue with the 2000Vppss voltage swing, if you go much above 1200Vppss... there is a major risk of burning up the headphones. Completely useless stats.
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2 hours ago, Kung said:
From topping's previous amplifier products, the EHA5 normal amplifier section is likely to be a composite amplifier, just like the amplifiers of jds atom and benchmark things. The common practice is to combine a precision opamp1 with a higher idle current opamp2 which has a specified closed-loop gain. opamp2 is placed inside the feedback loop of opamp1, which is the "feed forward technology" claimed by some manufacturers. In fact, it introduces a huge amount of feedback, the distortion test is usually lower than what the manufacturer's specs , but I don't know whether it can drive the transformer to output such low distortion though...never tried before 😟
So it is basically what Quad was doing 50 years ago? 😉
Now given it is a step up transformer solution, the light weight of it does worry me as good quality iron has to have a certain weight to it.
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The Topping EHA-5 was released today and I've naturally bought one. I don't have high hopes for this though as of yet, no good electrostatic amp has come out of China - just different shades mediocrity. We are currently taking bets as to what's inside, I think it is either a Koss clone or a speaker amp driving a pair of transformers. That or the SRM-001 circuit (yeah the portable one) is about as it good as it gets from China.
Speaking of China fucking things up, I've been trying to source some Stax parts recently and everybody has the same story, Edifer has fully taken over Stax and fucked it into the dirt. Maybe they are just trying to get rid of the old distributors to do it themselves but yeah, nobody is happy with the way Stax is run now. I fear we may be heading into a very dark time indeed, similar to what happened to Quad back in the day.
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If these were new tubes, then that can happen.
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I agree, I don't see anything terrible here nor anything great for the matter. I don't see why they are using 5% resistors in this day and age but nothing else really stands out. Well only that they really like their flag connectors...
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We did release the full schematics so yeah... it might be a clone. A clone of a terrible amplifier...
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Yup, they are very hungry tubes. Given what these are designed for, tube life should be just fine if not run on the extreme edge.
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Good point, can any of the mods copy it over?
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This thing is 12k$ so with a total of 500$ in parts... how much is the paint job and how glorious is the very high distortion at the output.
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I only see two wires coming into those C-core lumps, red going to a bunch of resistors on each channel and the green going to the 300B's. Could be outputs on the other side but how else are they making a balanced output signal. Schematic points to the - output just being grounded but that can't be right.
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This is very sad and a lot of Single Power influence here, cheaper parts used in series and parallel.
I see the A, B and C markings so is there a PSU schematic as well?
Edit: Never mind, I found the thread and wow... google translate may not be doing some of those people any favors but there was some class A stupidity going on. Point to point always sounds better than PCB's!!! The Viva may be crap but it sounds so good with the X9000!! Yeah... might be because the X9000 is also crap? Just an idea...
Anyway some more pics from that thread:
Just look at this mess, hot glue everywhere (where they should have used lacquer paint) and cheap parts everywhere. Not sure why that woolen stuff and zip tie is on the selector switch but that is the ultra cheap switches I can buy at the local store for 2$.
Then we have this gem... why is a part of the shrink wrap on the cap missing and just what on earth is that supposed to be? A bridge rectifier? This might actually worse than Single Power but remember kids, a nice PCB with length matched traces sounds far worse than this!!
Now look at this picture of loveliness, a Rifa X2 (as in power supply suppression cap) ,known all over the world for their tendency to fail short (look up Rifa madness) being used in a "high end" amp. Not even Single Power stooped this low, he might have "tuned" the circuit by placing an Audio Note silver cap in series with an Orange Drop but they are at least good caps. This is just pure and utter garbage.
I just love this picture, look at that mess of wires into a bundle of solder. Extra price for the burn marks on the cap as zero fucks are given here. They should seriously have this as a promo picture.
Last picture and would you look at those XLR inputs... yeah that's one way of dealing with a XLR to RCA conversion... just not hook anything up to pin 3 of the XLR sockets. I'm sure there is some owner of this piece of trash that claims massive improvements when it is run balanced... Also, look at the soldering on that, I'm sure those RCA's came with nice ground tabs but nope, fuck it, let's just solder directly to the thread and have it leaking down and almost touching the center pin.
Lastly, I just love we are getting this from my good friend at JR Audio, one of the few builders of electrostatic equipment who is actually worse than this. I wonder if he's looking for pointers to becoming even worse?
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Maybe better to go with the 2SA1627A in TO126 form. These pretty much the only 600V pnp's though.
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300B's have been ordered so time to show Woo Audio and Hifiman how this should done.
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Thanks.
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I take a large piece of mylar and do it all by hand. I can get good repeatability but I often stretch 10 diaphragms at a time this way so it's easy to match them into pairs.
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I did search but I couldn't find a dedicated thread about DIY electrostatics so in the spirit of getting the discussion started, here is something I've been working on.
Well over a decade ago I bought up all the spare Sennheiser HE60 parts to assemble new headphones. The first thing to go out of stock was the main housing so to assemble the last pair, I had to adept a HD650 housing to take the HE60 drivers. Ever since then it has stuck in my head to make my own drivers for those housings and well... here is version 2.0:
I bought a ratty old HD650 and completely stripped it apart. Headpad, earpads and cable went into the trash while the rest went for a long bath. First step is to make the baffle flat so a lot of cutting with nice, sharp, flush cutters. I naturally forgot to take a picture of that step...
Next step was to fully measure what area I had to work with and design PCB's to match that, while maximizing the open area. The end result is three different PCB's, as they are all setup to be dual sided. One for the stators, one which holds the diaphragm and finally the simple outline which holds the dust covers and can act as a spacer. Some pics of them assembled in the housing:
Four nylon screws hold the sandwich together, fixed with PEEK nuts to get extra gripping power as the assembly had to be as flat as is possible. Dust covers placed away from the stators so they don't cause any issues. Earpad side:
Due to the screws, some earpad mountings have to be cut up to get the pads to fit but yeah, they are just cheap crap from China so who cares. I could cut a slot in them to try and make it fit but maintaining as much pressure on the drivers as I can is far more important.
Final assembly with a King Sound cable as I have a couple of those sitting around. For the diaphragm I used my usual stock of 1.4um film and the earpads are just the cheapest leather pads I found on ebay. I have a couple of nicer ones but these are the thickest and that helps make them more balanced sounding. The diaphragms were stretched by hand on a mirror (which is my preferred way) and glued with wood glue (thanks for the tip Aumkar!) which is just perfect for this. Coating is anti-static spray which means they energize in five seconds or so which I can live with.
Now for the sound... pretty damn good for something so simple and literally being the second set I assemble. Well that and zero effort has been put into sealing the baffle or just any sealing at all. I just stuck the PCB's onto the baffle and built up the stack.
Overall sound signature is similar to the HE60 but not as diffused and with far more bass output. Maybe a tad too much at times as there are some oscillations that I can pickup at very high volume levels and under high excursion. I tend to go with slightly less tension on the diaphragm so that might be it. Treble is very pronounced with the thinner pads but with the ones pictured, it is just perfect. These are not forward at all and the soundstage is excellent for this size of a driver and non-angled earpads. Sensitivity is slightly lower than the regular Stax sets but still only marginally so. All in I'm very happy with the roughly 150$ outlay for these.
Now this is version 2.0 but the first version used a HD58X from Drop, brand new in the box that I cut up. Same driver profile but thicker stators so the efficiency was really bad plus the stators had full solder mask on them. Now I'm out of the spacer PCB's for the dust covers so next time I order PCB's, I'll make another set. I also have some diaphragm spacers which would work well for normal bias as I've always wanted to mess more with that.
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They are identical in every way, just the color of the housing and the embossed logo in the headband differentiate them.
Stax serial numbers are a complete bust, you can have a very early set with almost the same serial number as nearly new one.
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There is no Stax mafia....
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I must say this is a pretty shit attempt at trolling but what the fuck is a torus and I most definitely don't use that...
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I only spent a few minutes with it using the new DCA and Shangri-la SR with an unfamiliar source so I can't really comment on it. No issues I could hear but I'd need to spend some more time with it. It's an impressive beast though.
I forgot to mention I also tried the Warwick Audio Bravura... what a piece of shit that is. Now the amp was broken so no high gain mode available so I couldn't push the volume far enough. Still it is the blandest sound imaginable, it does nothing well and you can clearly hear the DSP doing its best to try and fix the sound of the single ended transducers. I suspect this will be far worse when the volume is pushed to normal levels.
I actually have a couple of the Sonoma M1 headphones (dirt cheap now) and was planning on designing an amp for them (the Bravura uses the same amp) but I might not bother. They clearly can't work with a direct signal so my plan is to just reuse the housings and design proper electrostatic drivers that fit in there.
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It's a bit amazing how people like this are like leaches on the industry. I did a little bit of digging and yeah... found this:
https://www.startengine.com/offering/danclark
So sites like these are iffy to say the least and a good way to be utterly fucked as the investor and why would any legitimate company go down this route. There is Bluto himself singing his praises...
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There was at least the combo board with the TKD 601 as well
The Headcase Stax thread
in Headphones
Posted
Holy fuck that thing is ugly and yeah... color me skeptical
of those numbers. 1800Vpp would point to either +/-450V or +/-500V rails (given the regular losses) so either 900V or 1000V at 200mA. That's 180-200W, per channel and those heatsinks are not big enough for even a tenth of that.
I also love that Ray dug out a 20 year old CD player (which I'm shocked still works as I had one of those)...