dvse

This picture seems relevant to this thread. On a close examination there is something distinctly unsettling about it.

I used to feel good about reading difficult fiction, but grad school maths textbooks are a whole different world of pain... Three pages per hour? That's a good going.

No argument from me - I think here it's well recognised that low bias is the way to go outside of Lambda Sig and SR-007 (and perhaps Gamma/SR-X Pro)...

It's funny how the whole "SR-404 + SRM-313 is the best intro Stax set up" has been the accepted wisdom on head-fi for quite a while 5 or so years ago... I had the same combo as well! Now SRM-313 is not a bad amp as such and I use it happily now with an SR-X, but when you put it together with SR-404 and "state of the art" digital like DAC1, it makes for a remarkably ear grating experience... In retrospect that was probably one of the worst systems I could assemble.

The driver is more or less perfectly symmetrical, so I would seriously doubt there is any "correct" orientation (but you probably still don't want the strain relief parallel to the ground).

When I had a 007t that allowed to switch between sources easily, picking up differences in cables was pretty much impossible when someone else was doing the switching even though it seemed clear before. For myself, I no longer comment on cable differences without at least a single blind test.

You should also try bending the arc to get the right level of pressure - for me it helped to improve comfort quite a bit.

I think one would need a lot of points in cyber-affinity to work out the last one.. ; p

Indeed there is nothing new, it's the most basic way to get the HRTF and has probably been done by early 90s. I had a brief look at more recent literature and people are trying to do stuff like building a 3d model of the ear and then simulating sound propagation (admittedly with with mixed success), interpolating HRTFs based on comparing new listener's ear shape to those previously measured etc. The need for such calibration with a high quality surround system makes the appeal somewhat limited (unless of course you can get yours done ). This would be great as a VLC plugin though.

Checking out the patent has got me thinking about ways to make this usable as a piece of PC software. The biggest obstacle would be getting personalised HRTF measurements. One way around it would be to construct some sort of parametrised HRTF from existing measurements (some research groups seem to have datasets available). A simple approach would be to assume that HRTFs lie on a smooth manifold and create a 2D embedding using an algorithm like isomap. Can then let the user to move a couple of sliders to get the best effect for some test sounds. This can be repeated for different virtual source locations. To those who have some experience with DSP, does the above sound reasonable?

This is indeed a great development for headphone listening, the idea has been round for quite some time but was never really commercialized. Of course, the physical set up is entirely unnecessary - it can all be done in software once you have a head tracker. What would be really interesting (and dramatically increase market appeal) is to find a way to calibrate the system without an external reference.

This might have something to do with (otherwise non-functional) crystallock circuitry being switched off in the wide mode and affecting output volume. If I recall, it was speculated at diyhifi that Lavry disabled the crystallock in response to the frequent static problems in the early production units. His subsequent removal of any mention of synchronous reclocking from the manual goes a long way to confirm this.

Should've picked up a pair when I had a chance. Now stuck with somewhat underwhelming Adam monitors.

FAIL.

Good to see I'm not the only one who thought this of Asr's nearly random overlong 'reviews'.