Pirx

Omron relays you are talking about are small ones designed for small signals, small voltages, small currents. They are there for many reasons but protection delicate electrostatic drivers from overloading ...

I was hopping that you could find that one "mistake" from factory that we could replicate in our 009s ...

Did you open them for inspection and compare them with your old 009?

Are you going to mod that pair of 009, trying to "resolve" the issue with sound that you are so sensitive? That would be interesting, I was also wondering what can be done to flatten frequency response of this headphones.

Really nice job. I would love to have such skills How do you measure headphones?

I had X9k over the week at home - my wife and kids decided it is not better than 009 and 007 mk1. The lack of impact and energy in bass region was the problem for them, not imaging. Personaly I liked them, but didn't feel like this is my cup of tea. In my opinion they are very different to 009, are little closer to my Omega with 007Mk1 drivers. Would be nice to have them in collection and try them with different amplifiers, but after all I abandoned that idea.

For example what CRBN's does better? I have no chance to even look at one pair of CRBN, but I want to be well prepared when it happen

That is really sad true - they are doing little progress or even backward lately but prices always go significant higher

Your link to the image doesn't work 😞 Can you just paste it here, please?

Thin membrane is not everything in electrostatic world. So I would love to hear them before making any judgment. Good news they didn't try to develop their own plug's standard and used well known Stax style. It would be also nice if their new headphones would kick Stax to start developing something better and new more quickly before I die .....

Could you share more pics and a little bigger (that last is terrible small) ?

Thanks a lot for your efforts Todd !!!

I understand that it was new but was it version from the new production with small case and two different cables, or the older one that was sitting somewhere on the shelf?

My mistake, there are no output capacitors, but series resistors should be placed with output that is coming from those big red resistors. For each channel two resistors are needed, just like on this example schematic, where I marked them. If you are not familiar with electronics it should be easy to do for any DIY guy around you.

For security reasons I see missing series c.a 5 kΩ resistors with output capacitors.