spritzer

I really need to do something with these...

Why are you trying to shill this trash?

Yeah, that's my recommendation as well. A SRM-1 Mk2, SRM-3, SRM-313 all walk over this thing. Sure the older ones need some new electrolytics at this point but it's a much better sounding system. L300's are also not as good as the x07 series was but quick mod, remove the stupid screen inside the earpads, remove the earpads and take out the 4 screws. Swap the back panels between left and right and fix them back into place so they are reversed from where they were before. Helps clear up the imaging of them.

I know but same shit driver design and amplifier. What are the odds this isn't shit as well?

I have a couple of the Sonoma Model 1 sets so I've been looking into making an amp for them. They are pretty much worthless at this point so can be picked up cheap but yeah, single ended and the driver design is all kinds of stupid. The bias is 1350V and the amp runs on a single 450V rail so the bias is doing most of the work here. The bias is actually on the drive signal with the AC signal super imposed on it through a 2000V cap. Why did they do this? It was supposed to be cheap but sold for 5K$... yeah. They are also very non linear so the internal DSP is doing a lot of work. I did listen to the Bravura in NYC and what a fucking turd. The drivers are close to identical so all of the same issues as the older Sonoma. You can hear it's a tailored sound from the DSP as they try to fix the mess the drivers are making. None of this makes any sense...

What is that supposed to achieve?

He's fucking retarded and more of a shill than Jude... which says quite a bit. I feel really sorry for anybody who watches garbage like this and thinks he's getting anything else than a sales pitch.

I was just sent this and I had to share it: Now we all know Z reviews is trash but this is just pure shilling.

Good to have you back. The L500Mk2 is the most neutral of the new Stax but imaging is still wrong for me so I'd recommend a used SR-207. They are used quite a bit in studios.

Nope, they are just very different technology so even if you had two separate amps in the same box, there would be issues.

This thing really tops out "how stupid can we make something" and given that the iesl barely worked... I'm not hopeful this is any better given the iFi stuff is just terrible.

Yup that makes sense. The 507 pads were very much a move back to the original pad design for the Lambda as can be seen on the prototype pictures. I don't know why they are smaller than all the other pads though.

The thing is, the 303 and 404 pads are made from the same material and that also applies to the LNC and LNS pads. Stax did change the material between the versions as well... the Lambda Nova pads do turn rather nasty. I've seen a NOS unit though and the material is close to being identical. The 307 and 407 pads were changed though, very different construction method and different materials. Any pads with the cloth inserts are those pads. Now if you have dark brown pads with harder pleather, perhaps Lambda Signature pads? I know they were fitted to Nova Signatures that came in for pads falling apart back in the day. They last for a long time too.

Could be a factor but where did you get Nova Signature pads which haven't decomposed by now?

Yup and here we have the extra issue of a crap amp driving the transformers so yeah... it's not good.

"Easily worth the 7500$ price tag"... ehhh sure 🙄 It's great that the big players are entering the market but these prices are just silly.

So they didn't actually measure under real world situations? What the fuck... that is just pure fraud. We are at the distortion wars again as in the 1970's. Fancy transistor amps with vanishingly low distortion sure sound much better than that old yucky tube stuff... Yeah people knew this was a bad idea then but a new generation clearly has learnt nothing.

Try export.farnell.com that should work

So you have no experience of the item we are talking about but own something completely different and you like that... ok... You do realize how stupid that it is, right? It would be comparable to defending the Stax X9000 staunchly as you bought a SR-007 in 1999.

You just don't get the point, this is the worst product money can buy so how is this a gateway drug? Anybody who listens to it will think it is pure trash and electrostatics by extension if they don't know any better. Topping is a doing a great disservice to the electrostatic community by releasing this utter turd. Why couldn't they have put a proper power amp in there so it would have a hope in hell of driving the headphones? Fuck it, charge 600$ for it but make it at least serviceable. I'm not expecting the Chinese to put in any safety at all... that's just not in their culture, but at least make it sound better than the garbage Hifiman, Woo and King Sound were peddling. One thing I wanted to say and it is kinda odd, I believe the Stax socket on the EHA-5 is a genuine Stax article. It's not the classic Sato Japan made unit, but the new made in China as first found on the D10 and D50. The finish is identical and so are the pins. I know these sockets are available on the Chinese market but Edifer might be supplying these as an OEM. Now the real travesty here though is that the Stax SRM-252S appears to be finally out of production. It was a wonder that is stuck it out for so long, all through hole in a world cheap SMD assembly.

Nope, I might get a second hand unit at some point but I don't want to do any business with that garbage company.

That wouldn't be a problem to do but they measure far better as the Topping is about as bad as it comes. The Woo 3ES is probably worse in this regard given its vanishingly low power output and Class C operation but yeah, this is bottom of the barrel stuff.

We do know the entire amp topology and those relays are to switch signals, nothing else. You can accuse me of hating Chinese products but yet I buy everything I can from China to test out... weird that... I have every electrostatic amp or headphones I can get from China. It can't be that you are just a retarded Topping fanboy, is it? Have you tried this thing or even measured it? I just wonder what anybody at Topping was thinking about when designing this thing, how was a roughly 1W+1W amp supposed to drive electrostatics? I mean they could have put in a simple Class D unit (while not ideal) with far more power and get a better result. You only need to understand the basics with regards to electrostatics to know you just need more power for them to behave. Now that is far more interesting though I'll have to call into question any specs they publish... or even think they can reach. The parts are available to make a fully discrete amp with excellent specs, hell it is possible to make it all SMD if you can figure out the heatsinking issues. Also reading ASR's evaluation of R2R dacs just hurts my brain. There is so much stupidity there it is simply painful...

That doesn't make any sense, why would protection on the low voltage side matter? How can the low voltage side know of a short or anything like that on the other side of the transformer short of a basic overload? There is nothing that connects the two, except the transformer. There are no large relays on the amplifier side to turn off the output in the event of something bad happening so I very much doubt there is any protection at all. Certainly not on the main, large PCB. Another factor are the large impedance swings of electrostatics which will mimic a dead short at times. The build quality is terrible, it's better than the Monoprice or Drop Cavalli units but yeah, these will not last for long. The main thing though is this sounds absolutely horrid. I had a SRM-1 Mk2 and a SRM-252S I needed to test yesterday so I connected them all together to the same source and matched the output voltage of them. The difference in sound quality is rather stark, even driving a set of SR-207's (so very light load) the Stax units walk all over it. The EHA-5 sounds just like the squarewave, it is under immense strain so very bright and broken sound.

ASR is the Scientology of audio... it has Science in the name but that's about it. For me it is just the polar opposite of SBAF, same drivel though and makes Head-fi look good.