spritzer

I'll hook up something to drive these or just fit some transformers in the earcups. Might be the easiest route...

Excellent. Looks like green and yellow feed the transformers and blue and red from each of the yellow taps goes to the headphone socket as well. Output from the transformer seems to be black and red. Red going to the PCB where a cap is added as something (compensation perhaps) and then green and blue from the small black sheathed cable go the socket. Dynamic driven off the speaker taps with a single ended electret element.... Seems reasonable.

Ahh so these came with an energizer!! I didn't crack open the drivers to check but can you shoot a pic inside the adapter? Mine came with nothing like that... Black is clearly common so all drivers driven single ended.

That is the old issue with these old units, use them and risk them breaking or just make them look odd in some cabinet.

Bloody gnomes!!!

Stax serial numbers mean absolutely nothing so you can't use them as any guide. That said, some retailers might have stock sitting for years before it is sold. Balanced and single ended should sound exactly the same and no...the wires are not at fault... Did you completely clone the - input off the + one?

Nothing yet.

I'll fly in and out via NYC and I should have one night by myself so I'm up for some shenanigans...

I'll be visiting Kevin at the end of March so I'll try them out and see if I them better than the Wiha stuff.

They are US only and nothing like that here.

Excellent!!

20V of drift is nothing to worry about.

I normally use the Wiha 36050 stippers but they do wear out after a while with the 24# teflon stuff. The Wiha 24672 is supposed to be better but I need the bloody PTFE cartridge for it...

The EP-5 is indeed the massive hybrid with a horrid coiled cable and 5 wires inside it. I was going to take the easy route and not bother to ohm them out and figure out what they were doing with all of them. The PEP-79's were excellent. I have the PEP-71's here with the massive wood grain adapter and the plan is to someday do a bunch of youtube videos about these. Plus the Stanton Isophase (very, very odd those), PWB's and a whole lot of weirdness I've been collecting.

I'll throw something together eventually as I need a balanced DAC for my test setup. What is the USB input of choice these days? Still XMOS what ever?

One thing cropped into my head, didn't you once have a Suprex EP-5, Justin? I bought one but it lacks the TRS plug and the multitude of wires has made me go all "mehh" so I didn't reterminate.

Can I blame you too for the 150$ Wiha wire stripper I bought which really doesn't like PTFE wires? I need a new cartridge for those... It will sure be fun to compare it to the MSB. They sent me message asking for my email address so they can send me the drivers so that is a good sign. The Soekris modules are also sitting here but I have no idea what to do with them.

Anybody remember how angry he got at CJ'10 when Justin lent Tyll some of his headphones to test?

Yeah I bought one... blame Kevin as he's such a bad influence on me. It's shipped but I have no idea when it will arrive...

The real problem with these is that they have to be messed with. My ECR600 had a nasty channel imbalance which never went away and that cable... yeah... it has to go as it is dangerous.

I saw a set of two with an energizer going for 1300$... that is beyond insane.

I might do a version of this circuit with SS CCS just to make it a lot less complicated.

Have you seen the asking prices of ET1000 sets these days? People are nuts...

Find a cheap set of SR-507's...

Computers also have so many internal SMPS that feeding it all from a linear one is just silly.