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'.

I suspect that it might still get quite a bit better than Opus and you definitely should try an Esoteric, EMM or dCS DAC - you're already pretty much there pricewise.

Can't see anything from the post history, unless you are one of those seriously deluded people who believe that some form of IP protection applies to a circuit diagram such as that (or the earlier Rudistor thread).

And what exactly (other than spelling) makes the OP an asshat?

I have a dCS / KGSS / SR-007 setup and recently got an SR-X Mk2 which I use together with SRM-313 in the office (soundcard as source). While SR-007 is dramatically more capable technically, I must say that in terms of enjoyment and the certain type of sound afforded by electrostatics, SR-X is virtually on par (at least for rock / synthpop). Going the other way, your disappointment doesn't surprise me one bit. With better amplification, you should get more 'liveliness' out of SR-007, free from the technical limitations of SR-X.

Indeed I always wonder about the ridiculous 20kg, 10mm thick machined cases on audiophile equipment while they use (in some cases) computer transports etc, or pay little attention to internal vibration damping. "Being built like a tank" seems orthogonal to reliability (and in fact real tanks are a lot less reliable than cars).

Can't say about ESP950, but SR-007A is probably still the best production electrostatic - I haven't compared them directly, but from memory it would beat 4070 for most music if you don't need isolation.

Indeed, chinese OEM designed garbage sold under a name that sounds respectable to the russian consumer. This 'brand' is either made up or actually existed decades ago and was bought for a few pennies.

Thanks a lot! But now that I've received my pair I'm hesitant to mod them because it is actually an SR-X Mk2 rather than Mk3, which was advertised, and near perfect cosmetically as well. Sound is also surprisingly smooth and pleasant (if somewhat midrange centric), even out of an onboard soundcard through an SRM-313 in my office set-up - I easily prefer them to SR-003 Is it correct that these use the same driver as SR-3 but in a more rigid metal housing? One more question, would SR-Sigma earpads from audiocubes fit on a Lambda - they are the cheapest and as far as I can gather Stax has 'rationalized' the earpad types for discontinued models.

Given the stream of consciousness style, one has to seriously doubt authors' critical ability.

Is Romy the guy with the utterly incoherent writing style that's been banned from most audio forums? Probably best not to ask him anything.