justin

Cases are expensive but they make or break a product. Most expensive cases I have had were for the Aristaeus which cost me $900 for the set, more if I had to pay someone to do the drawings.

I wonder if they had a fountain pen war on that forum It all started when someone posted pictures of the inside of a Conrad-Shiffler-Stewartsharp pen

The only reason the TDA chips became popular is because it is so easy to build a DAC with them, if you can build a cmoy you can almost build a TDA154X DAC.

old DACs are the new tubes!

It's good to know the quad Alps RK27 exists. It's not in the Alps datasheet

I know Tyll has always said 5% of his sales come from Head-Fi. But for the "Head-Fi manufacturers" like myself and many others, most of our sales come from Head-Fi. And it's extremely difficult to keep the spotlight on a product on Head-Fi for more than the first few months. From my experience, if my amps are being mentioned somewhere on Page 1 of the amp forum, they'll sell. If not, they won't sell. There doesn't seem to be much in the middle. Maybe this is just the nature of doing business on an internet forum. I think this is what is driving a lot of constant revisions and new models, not manufacturer greed.

It's been a while, but i finally got around to taking photos of the AE-2 and putting up a new page on it: http://www.headamp.com/portable_amps/ae2/index.htm I'm not much of a photographer and I wasn't able to get any photos that show the laser engraving on the silver amp -- it's easily visible under normal house lighting. I'm open to suggestions on how to improve that

I've had this happen a few times before, only with "new" tubes and somewhere in the first hour of their use, but after that no problems. You could possibly avoid this by extensively burning in all tubes with a dummy load on the amp. When I mentioned this to KG, he said Atmasphere had the same problem and just burned in all the tubes for 100 hours at full current before use

Polypropylene capacitors of that value are huge, and very expensive. Solen makes a 220uF 400V, it's $50 at partsconnexion...it's about the size of a coke can

You can also use it when making pasta

I haven't had a good opportunity yet to take photos of the AE-2, but here is the circuit board. I took these photos a while ago, when I was waiting for the enclosures.

There is about 2000 feet of wire inside each Aristaeus transformer, I would not want to wind that myself

Right now I'm shipping the backorders, and all of them will be sent out by next week. Then, I'll take some pictures and put out some more information.

Do you think I should make a Louis Vuitton edition?

More info to come this weekend...

I haven't, but I would definitely trust the Pass stuff.

Nah....make the Pass Labs Ono! http://www.passdiy.com/gallery/alephono-p5.htm Or start with the Pearl Phono http://www.passdiy.com/projects/pearlono1.htm

I'm going to be raffling off a Porsche 911

I got offered a job at JoAnn Fabrics thanks to that packaging...really

Tyll, Congrats on the great looking new amp! I have a feeling my GS-X will be happy to have a new friend in the world.

There are ways to approximate it but without the right equipment it will be difficult. What are the tubes and what is the circuit topology? I was just saying that based on output impedance alone, I don't think you will have a problem with 40 ohms and Grados. Plenty of people use their Grados with high output impedance amps and while this is going to change the sound nobody really reports on any "problems" with it. I'm not aware of any commercially sold OTL headphone amp with a Zo less than 40. Here is the Atmasphere MA-1 MkIII. http://www.atma-sphere.com/products/ma1.html It took 14 6AS7 output tubes per channel to get the output impedance down to 2.3 ohms. They are dual triodes so that's 28 triodes. As a cathode follower 1/2 6AS7, a popular configuration in a headphone amp, will have an output impedance of about 100 ohms. The output impedance will cut in half each time the tubes are doubled. So, I'm coming up with about 3.5 ohm output impedance for 14 tubes. They probably have some negative feedback that is bringing it down a bit more. I'm sure there is someone who can correct this if I'm wrong.

I doubt it. 40 ohms is a low output impedance for an OTL tube amp. Most of the amps I have seen have a real output impedance between 100 and 300 ohms. Almost nobody gives out the real specs.

I have seen a lot of this on the amplification forums... Person A says Amp 1 better than Amp 2 Person B says Amp 3 better than Amp 1 Person C says he heard that Amp 3 is better than Amp 1 and Amp 2 Person D says Amp 3 is the best thing out there And so on... I have also seen meet impressions where someone will sit down at a setup with a source they aren't familiar with, an amp they aren't familiar with, unknown music, sometimes even headphones that they aren't familiar with, spend 2-5 minutes and then write up a paragraph on the amp itself (which then gets used by someone else later in the flawed deductive process above). I've even seen people walk across the room between 2 different setups, with different music on, and then write a comparison between the 2 amps in the setups in the meet impressions thread.

I hope I can keep the price at 1.8k. Something about the GS-X is very appealing in the Japanese market, and I was approached by two distributors specifically for that amp, one of them asking to place an order for 10 units. I had to turn them down because I would have had to sell each amp for the cost of parts, and done all of the labor for free.

That's ok, it wouldn't have made a difference if something else was in the box, so no offense taken.