aerius

Anyone who has a bunch of shelves stacked with records. CDs I'm pretty indifferent, but the guys with a wall of records, I envy you people, and I want your vinyl.

I think so, but I'm not 100% sure to be honest. In the shop's picture it looks like the stators are painted while in one of my own photos it looks more like a painted grill cover or something of that sort.

There is to me two kinds of neutral; true good neutral which is more or less a straight pass-through, which to me is exemplified by the Grado HP-2 in the headphone world and the Living Voice OBX-R in speakers. Then there's the kind of "neutral" which flattens and sucks the life out of all music and gives it all the same bland boring character, the K701 is a big offender here. Unfortunately I'm hearing way too much of the latter and not much of the former in the audio world. Making everything sound flat and same-ish is not neutral, in fact I'd argue it's just as big of a colouration as say, the RS-1 which puts its own character on everything. I'd actually say that the HD800 isn't any more neutral than the HD650 or 600, all of them will put a distinct sound signature on the music.

I've had some mystery meats which I couldn't identify, I'm not sure I ever really want to know what they actually were. It might've been "long pork" for all I know.

Yes the Operas come with leather front & back, and you can get them in piano gloss black. And the Quads are totally black Are you happy now?

Apparently, I can't read my own handwriting anymore. The Paradigm speaker I auditioned was the Signature S6 version 3, which I'd abbreviated as "Sig3 S6" and somehow mis-read as SE3 S6. I think. I'm still not entirely sure of what I wrote, but fortunately I took pictures, and the speaker is definitely the Signature S6.

That's one of the things I disliked about them when I had them on an extended loan. The soundstage is always big, if I go to a recording which was made in a small garage the soundfield should shrink down accordingly. It doesn't. Yeah the soundstage gets a bit smaller, but it doesn't go all the way down to room sized. Get a copy of "Whites Off Earth Now!!" and "The Trinity Session" by the Cowboy Junkies. Same microphone, same recording engineer, same direct to DAT deck recording. But the first was in a garage while the latter was in a decent sized church, two very different acoustic environments and a heck of big difference in the size of the soundfield. On a good setup there's a big change in the soundstage size & characteristics between the two recordings, on the HD800, not so much. There's a change, but not as much as there should be. "Whites" garage and Church of The Holy Trinity

Before you go Sonus Faber, check out Opera Loudspeakers as well. Similar design, but better sound for the money. I find they're more open and neutral sounding than their Sonus Faber counterparts at a given pricepoint, while still remaining quite musical. MKOM in Toronto has them, take a listen to the Quad ESL-57 too while you're there.

I haven't heard the Senn electrostatics yet so I can't comment on them. Of the rest I'd pick the 650 by a small margin over the 600, and the 800 is way off the back in last place. I found there was a fair bit of sample variation with the 650, maybe it was pad condition, maybe one was a Monday morning special from the factory or something, but the ones which were around "average" had a bit more goodness to them than the 600. It takes all the good parts of a 600 and improves on them a tad without taking any steps backwards. It's not the most involving or fun headphone around, but if I plug them into any vinyl rig they can get down and boogie. The 800 is technically great, wads of detail, measure great, yada yada yada, but artistically and emotionally, it fails and fails hard. It disconnects me from the emotional aspects of the music I'm listening to, my music doesn't move me anymore and I don't feel anything other than boredom. Not my kind of headphone, at all.

Well, since I recently auditioned the SE3 version of the Paradigm S6, I'll go highjack this thread with my impressions. Frontend was a Rotel CD player and Bryston integrated amp, not the fancy tube stuff I normally audition but not too shabby either. The short version is I was not impressed. I don't think I can really blame the frontend since it sounded decent & better with PMC FB1i speakers. The sound is too crisp, I find there's too much emphasis on the attack and leading edge of all snare drum & cymbal hits, it's unnaturally sharp and out of balance with the rest of the instruments. Even on a great recording such as Whites Off Earth Now!! by the Cowboy Junkies the cymbals get to be a bit too much after a few songs, at which point it gets kinda tiring. The midrange seems ok, it doesn't have the full richness which I prefer but there's no obvious colourations, resonances, or wonky stuff. Mass choral works sound fine, as do strings and brass instruments though the latter two tend to get a bit crispy on the higher notes. Acoustic guitar sounds a little weird though, especially when playing chords. They sound like the microphone's too close & placed funny, the pick & string sounds aren't in balance with the sound from the body of the guitar. Bass was ok, except there wasn't enough of it. It was more like electrostatic bass than dynamic bass, it's there but there isn't enough and I don't really feel it. Takes the fun out of blues jams, playing some tracks off It's Time by Jimmy D Lane wasn't much fun. It's a Steve Hoffman mastering job so it should sound freakin' awesome and kill, and on a good system you will get down and boogie. It doesn't groove on the Paradigms, yeah it's nice & detailed and all, but frankly it's more fun & full of feeling and life even in my car's system which is factory stock and nothing to write home about. I could write more, but frankly it's fucking depressing. They K701'd the damn speaker. If you like Beyers, K701s, or the HD800 you can check it out, if you're a Grado person, I can't recommend it.

And here in Canada....we got nothing. You bastards stole all our snow.

Nah, I hear the in thing these days is replacing the fuse with a piece of gold wire.

The problem here is "what is a bad measurement?" If the specification which is being measured has little to no correlation with perceived sound quality, then does it matter if the measurement is "good" or "bad"? And that's a problem in audio these days, getting the data we measure to correlate with the sound quality we perceive isn't as straightforward as it may first appear.

What you want is something like this. http://headostate.com/

In a lot of cases retailers can't afford to carry inventory since they don't have the credit & cashflow to support it. So what's going on a lot is they won't place the order with the distributor/manufacturer until they get a customer order which is why we're getting all those backorders. The manufacturers wait till they get a big enough batch of orders to do a production run, and from there it takes about 30-45 days for the retailer to get the product in store and ready for delivery.

It made all my music boring and quite lacking in emotion. Music which should be moving, epic, and emotional do nothing, I might as well be listening to an automated voicemail machine reading back the digits of Pi. That's about how fun it was to listen to a K701.

I don't. The RS-1 still has more resolution and a better soundstage. The HF-2 is more neutral, but if I wanted neutral I'd just get an HP-2 which is even more dead neutral with better resolution and a far better soundstage. Don't get me wrong, the HF-2 is good, but it just doesn't meet my needs.

The Garrard I'm most familiar with is the 401, and that usually takes a fair bit of work to get it going. In most cases you'll need to build a base & plinth for them and get the base drilled & setup for mounting the tonearm. At the same time the mechanicals also need to be looked at, sometimes a bit of oil is all that's needed but at other times it can get a lot more involved. But once everything's done it sounds fucking great and is damn near bulletproof.

Just for fun, see if you can fit an 0C3 glowtube on your latest creation. It doesn't need to do anything for the circuit other than give off a nice purple glow to let you know the high voltage supply is working.

Had a brainfart, that should say adjust the value of the resistor. cetoole's solution is the neater one, it whacks all the problems at once. If you're doing the heater bias, you already have the resistors in place for the LED.

In my case I stuck a 150k resistor in series with the LED and wired the whole thing between B+ and ground. Adjust the value of the LED to get the current and LED brightness you want, and also keep in mind that you might need multiple resistors depending on the B+ voltage in your amp so that you don't exceed the voltage spec on the resistors.

Nice work! Question: have you considered mounting the bias LEDs such that they can be seen through the top panel? It looks like it would be a bit of a pain to do, but it would give a visual indication that input tubes are up & running with the bias current flowing through them. Something similar could also be done for the B+ supply, when all the LEDs light up you know the amp is good to go, and if something doesn't light up you know where to start looking for the problem.

At an affordable pricepoint, the Acoustic Zen Adagios are pretty swank. Photos don't do justice to the shinyness of the finish.

Personally I'd go with Canons since some of them still have optical viewfinders. I often take pictures in lighting conditions where the LCD screen is next to useless because of glare so I need a way to frame the picture and make it work. If you rarely or never run into lighting conditions such as this then any camera from Canon, Olympus, or Panasonic is good to go. Go to a store, handle a bunch of them, and see which one feels most comfortable.

Just for fun, and also for something completely different, see if you can find an Ortofon SPU Classic somewhere at a good price. It's not the most accurate cartridge around, it's not going to pull every last detail off a record, but it's gotta be one of the most fun cartridges around if you want a fat kickin' bass groove for your music. I've heard a couple cartridges in the SPU lineup on an idler drive and direct drive 'table, those systems had the biggest most dynamic bass I've ever heard in any system. You're probably not going to want to use it with all your music, but if I wanted to break out a Bob Marley record for instance, that's the cartridge I want.