spritzer

You can do single ended if you simply ground the other "stator" which makes them pseudo push pull. The Koss ESP6, 7, 8 and 9 do it this way and so do the odd Philips electrets from the 70's. Now how this is done is very important as to how well it works but it is never the equivalent of simply using a pure push-pull setup. I agree that this is basically what Beveridge did back in the day and relies heavily on bias with all the issues that entails. I'm highly skeptical of all of this but hey, let's take one apart and see how it works.

Indeed, cables made by people who have no idea what they are doing adding a level of danger to the listening session. Pure win!! I'd love to hear these but I'm very skeptical that they are any better than traditional electrostatics. Also that amp is probably utter shit...and wasn't the dac just a bog standard ESS Sabre?

Yes

They are a bit smaller but I need to series connect to bring down number of values used so space saving is pretty much zero. My goal is to have them assembled for me a thus cut the cost of the amps.

Last I heard there is no stock for anything Stax in Japan so they would be the newest version.

It is indeed all soldered by hand and they are 2510 resistors. Only size you can really use for electrostatic HV use even though I also use them for the LV stuff as well. That is mostly to use the same parts more than once. The through hole resistors are there because I forgot to order 200R and 300R units but I might change them to series connected 100R's anyway. With pick and place it helps to keep the parts numbers low so hello series connection. The 2SK170's are just covered with heatshrink and the HV parts are out of stock but I have thousands of them.

Here are the boards mounted to the heatsinks. One small mod wire as the bloody layout software doesn't check the ground plane for continuity... The board has already been through major revisions to adapt this to mass production and I doubt I am done.

Here is something new that I might make more of... the SMD KGSSHV. This is really my attempt to build a "cheap" electrostatic amp to bring a great amp to the masses. Lofty goal and I have no idea if it will succeed but its worth a shot.

Yeah that and the pretty shitty switching power supply...

WTF indeed. Notice that those are 230V models as well so not the Airbow stuff from Japan.

The RIAA in that thing has to be seriously shitty to not crush the Graham Slee so well worth the rebuild.

I would certainly swap out all the caps, diodes and the like but this looks to be a very nice piece of kit. I doubt our RUV (public broadcaster) had anything this nice at the time.. Nice P+G slide pot there.

Nope, just equally retarded and in a rush to loose some money.

A surprisingly small one. There is a mild suppression in the upper midrange where you loose some "air" and the bass is clearly tuned like other Pro model Stax so lean but insightful. Their major drawbacks are just how heavy and bulky they are. Also the first ones are so uncomfortable that it isn't even funny. Ohhh and as I found out...stay far away from ones that have been serviced. Stax will turn them into an unlistenable mess which sucks so bad that it isn't funny. Now we all know that the SR-507's are garbage but those drivers in the 4070...holy fuck that was bad.

The official Sennheiser schematic is out there but it is incorrect. We never drew up a corrected one.

Sure cost cutting was a factor with some designs but tubes had to become more reliable into the 50's so the build quality jumped by leaps and bounds. Take the sub-mini stuff. It was designed to be used continuously for years where it couldn't be serviced at all so yeah, these are far better tubes than the anything before them. Are some of them a bit more linear, sure but the designs were far more compromised in other ways. We have the full schematics of it but I did take my old one apart. Classic Sennheiser, nothing but the cheapest shit possible is allowed to be used. Then we have the small issue of at least half of them don't work due to the wrong implementation of the circuit. 4K7 output tube load in an electrostatic amp? This thing can barely swing any voltage at all. It's a HE60 so you will have dust inside the drivers, no way around that. That is a likely culprit but they might also have arc'ed at some point forming a hole in the diaphragm. This is possible when using them with so many amps so the driver could be pretty much toast.

Brain transplant might also help. If you can't get a viewer to work but want to build high voltage equipment...it might just be Darwin at work.

Stax SR-007's with any capable amp should be on the short list. If you like (can stand) the unnatural sound of the 009's, L700 and L500 then try those as well.

The EL34 can handle 800V all day long and with equal power plus it is a far more modern tube design. That's what I find so funny about tubes in general, people overlook that the tube design and build quality got better by leaps and bounds from the 30's to the 50's. Onto the 60's, the sub-miniature tubes are nothing short of stunning works of engineering marvel. Sure, cost cutting started to creep in but there is just so much nostalgia BS associated with this stuff. "NOS" tubes (i.e. old rejected crap nobody would have used) is always better and we must use the oldest designs possible. Where is the clamor for old transistors? Go, go germanium!!! We should setup a non-profit organization with the sole goal of buying audio equipment and take it apart for the world to see. I think Senn would be thrilled if we were to rip the HE1's apart...

They are indeed designed as transmitter tubes but that is of little use for audio, Class B and all that. As you push the tube further past its max op point it starts to compress more and more and yup...more and more distortion. Let's say the tubes could run at 500V, no way to implement a CCS for them in that chassis and you burn up most of the voltage in the plate loads. Another point, yup this has nothing in common with the GES. Much closer circuit would be the Eddie Current Electra and we all know what a massive clusterfuck that was. Didn't work and drifts like mad. Also, weren't we going to permaban mtoc after he showed up with an another account during his last ban? I mean I can't take this level of retard any longer...

I believe Kevin tested some 300B's at Stax voltages and they were really, really unhappy. Fang naturally claims they are some special snowflake tubes but who in their right mind would believe that? They are most likely the bone stock Psvane garbage rebranded. This is a 400V tube max and since it is a DHT, there are some major issues to contend with. The earliest datasheet I found is this one and it states it is a 450V max tube but the later ones all state 400V. That means the tubes probably weren't happy at 450V. I'd be interested to see the 700V one though I'm sure it is a typo. The modern tubes certainly aren't built to take that level of abuse. If there are no output transformers then this is probably similar to the WES setup, hell it might even use chokes as the output load (as that should in theory boost the voltage swing but brings in a fuck-ton of issues) but simply a quad of single ended amps which all drift like mad. Now you could drive the tubes with resistor loads off a 600V supply but yeah...it will be pretty fucking bad. No heatsinks large enough to take the current of the 300B's to be seen. Ohh and I would never get in a fistfight with anybody for the sheer fear of being able to kill them with a single blow. It's not easy being a giant...

That is just pure win. Can the powerful amps damage the headphones? Yup but we account for that. Cavalli, Woo Audio and others don't give a shit about this so yeah...people should take care with those. This is pretty much the same BS as when I was laughing at the Jade crackling new out of the box. Fang claimed that the film was supposed to do that as it was coated with nanoparticles (read dust) which was somehow supposed to make it better. The Shangri-La has the same BS so again, nobody with any clue has been involved with the design. The King Sound sets also squeal like there is no tomorrow but they don't charge 50K$ for them either... Seriously, I might setup a Patreon account or something like that for people to donate so I can buy this shit and rip it apart for the world to see.

If it is anything like the 009's/L700/L500 then I might give them a miss. So tired of that fake sound.

I think Stax clearly need a 50K$ amp/headphones combo not to be left out!!

Well I don't know where to start really. It's not that there is profit to be made, it's how they go about doing it. Now not all makers are bad, some sell good quality cables at good prices which will last for a long time. This is usually accomplished by using pro type parts so instrument cables and pro connectors that have been made for decades. Then we have the other lot, often selling stuff at insane prices with more BS claims than Cavalli or MSB. I mean seriously...how can a cable cost 5k$? How could it possibly cost more to make than a complex amplifier with hundreds of parts? This is just fraud, plain and simple. MIT selling "impedance networks" which are just resistors from ground to hot in a molded plastic case. The whole point here is that through the sheer profit involved in peddling cables, they have created something which might seem to the casual buyer an actual legitimate part of the system. Something which should not be skimped on for best performance. Sure, it's better to have cables than not have any but will they make or break the system? Fuck no!! For me it is equally retarded as is tube rolling. They play on the highly subjective nature of audio and the sheer ignorance/arrogance of the buyers. There will be differences, if you switch a highly capacitive cable for one which isn't, there will be a difference. Same with tubes, you switch out a fresh set with a "NOS" one with very little life left and even compromised vacuum and it will ofcourse be different. Better though, that's more doubtful. This is the same as tubes vs. transistors, analog vs. digital or what ever people want to compare. To even think things can be generalized like that shows an utter lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics at play. Throw up something simple and then marvel at the differences, not really wanting know if one is an improvement or not.