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Do it as an invite only meet then, keeps the size nice & manageable as well.

Did I miss a revision or something, cause it looks even more tacky and stupid than I remember.

The 6H30 has a gain of around 15 and a plate impedance of 1500 ohms. So, let's run the math. Let's pick a Grado with a 32 ohm impedance, for this to present a load that's 3x the Rp of the tube, you'll need to get the impedance up to 4500 ohms, an impedance ratio of 140:1 which requires a turns ratio of 11.9:1 on the transformer. This would give an overall voltage gain of 2dB, which is a fair bit short of the 6dB of gain which is claimed for the IEC output. Which means 1 of 3 possibilities: The transformer doesn't present an impedance of 3x the tube's plate impedance The gain is 2dB, not 6dB Your idea of a low impedance headphone is something with an impedance of around 80 ohms

Play some Fear Factory or Slayer and crank the volume to 11. R10s really hate it when you do that.

This is something which I've noticed with loudspeakers & headphones, one which does everything well won't really have an area where it's great and stands apart from the rest. Conversely, a headphone or speaker which is great in one or two areas generally isn't going to be an even all-round performer. I don't really see this problem with sources & amps, well, at least once you spend enough money on them, but with transducers there's always a trade-off to make, at least to my ears.

One possibility I see is the harmonic distortion graph, it looks like something you'd see on a solidstate amp where the 3rd harmonic is higher than the 2nd. Contrast this with the Senn 650 where the 3rd is lower than the 2nd, and which as far as I can remember, no one has called bright nor fatiguing. And here's a K701, no wonder I didn't like the darn thing.

I have heard the Woo 6 though not the maxed out version, I don't think it's that good of a match for the RS-1, the main issue being the midbass & midrange not being clear & detailed enough, along with too much "tube sound". My guess is the output transformers & power supply isn't up to task as I've heard better results with the same tubes in one of my proof of concept DIY amps. My recommendation for that price range is the Trafomatic Head One which I found to be quite a bit better with my RS-1's. It's quite neutral with a more detailed presentation. I'm not sure what it costs in Europe but it's around $1000 USD over in North America.

I have a few of the same pieces, but most of my records are Deutsche Grammophon and London labels so I very much doubt we have the same records. Chances are the it's a totally different orchestra & conductor as well.

You should try cranking up the bias till the plates glow and see if it sounds better, 6AS7's aren't that expensive. Going back to the OP, one amp that comes to mind is the Trafomatic Head One, but it's a transformer output amp not an OTL like the singlepower. Definitely a nice neutral sound and not the warm mushy sound found in many tube amps.

Actually the amp sees the 20 ohm load in series with the paralleled load of the 2 ohm resistor and the headphone. In the case of Grados this would work out to a bit under 2 ohms in series with 20 ohms. I've built one of these doohickeys with 5W resistors way back in the day, my sources & 'phones weren't that great back then so I didn't really notice much of a difference, if any, between the adaptor output and the headphone output on my receiver.

Someone should hire a lawyer and sue his ass for false advertising.

And they're all sold out of Western Electric 437A's. Bummer.

Elliptical concrete Le Cl

There's actually something better, full choir & military band, in this case the Red Army Choir and Band. There's huge dynamics on some of the tracks combined with a very dense & complex mix. The Song of the Volga Boatman is almost guaranteed to cause severe compresssion & distortion on damn near anything when played at a realistic volume, that is to say "postjack loud". My K340's are hopeless, the RS-1 can get the dynamics but suffers a lot of colourations while my Senn 580 compresses the dynamics with some mild distortion. I need to bug someone with an SR-007 to see if it can handle the abuse. Amazon.com: Russian Favourites: Vasily Agapkin, Boris Aleksandrov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, Anonymous, Russian Anonymous, Matvey Blanter, Lev Konstantinovich Knipper, N. Kool, A. Novikov, Yury Alexandrovich Shaporin, Vasily Pavlovich Solovyov-Sedoy, Don't buy the "best of" CD even though it has some of the same songs as this one, the sound quality on that one is crap. Another recommendation would be "Whites Off Earth Now!!" by the Cowboy Junkies, available on hybrid SACD. I find the recording's a lot more dynamic & immediate than the "Trinity Session" album which everyone raves about, but which I feel is over-rated having heard "Whites" and been to a couple concerts at the church where "Trinity" was recorded. Last one for now would be Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, so far I've heard 3 versions and the one below is the best one. The violins, especially in track 5 are great for showing up colourations & resonances in closed headphones, they go honky and don't sound like violins anymore. Sound quality isn't perfect, but it's more than good enough for demo needs and it's by far the best performance & interpretation of the music. Amazon.com: Dvorak: Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 & Op. 72: Antonin Dvorak, Zdenek Kosler, Slovakia Philharmonic Orchestra: Music

dsavitisk's numbers look right. The Rp and Zout of the tubes & amp would imply a stepdown ratio of around 7.3:1, which gives a gain of 9dB or so (voltage gain being 20log[Vin/Vout]).

I can't say I'm surprised. Cratering tax receipts thanks to the recession along with a reliance on auction rate bonds to bridge prior funding shortfalls is a recipe for getting raped. There's a half dozen states including California & Florida which are going to get killed by massive budget shortfalls within the next year or so. Cali & Kansas already had to suspend tax returns this year when they ran out of money, next year's going to be even more fun.

I couldn't disagree with that more, especially since I've had a few opportunities thanks to one of the local audio guys to compare the direct microphone feed in his recording studio to the 24/192 master and the 16/44 CD. The direct feed & master were fairly close on the studio's monitor setup, but the CD is like trying to compare the resolution of a good DSLR to that of the Gigapixel camera. Not even close. Hi-res would be the equivalent of a good 5x7 or 8x10 large format camera, damn good, but still not as good as 9x18.

I've heard more CD players than I care to count, the main issue I have with many (not all) of the CDP's which emphasize detail retrieval & accuracy is that they aren't. Accurate that is. To use a visual analogy, what they're doing in my opinion is taking a photo and really cranking up the sharpening filter and giving the contrast a good bump. This will make the picture look super-sharp and reveal every little detail, but it's not accurate and isn't a true to life reproduction of the original picture. Edges are unnaturally outlined, colours look wrong, and subtle shadings & tonal changes are gone. It's much the same way in the audio world, push for ultimate detail retrieval and the tonal aspects of the music usually suffer and it ends up sounding dry & unnatural. The best gear can excel in both aspects but it's very rare. Also, obligatory sample of good recording & mastering quality. CJ - Blues sample

Going by the info on this page the price seems fairly reasonable. The case is teflon & stainless steel, it uses a transformer volume control, and the power supply is all oil-filled polypropylene capacitors with lots of chokes. Which probably explains why the units as a whole weighs 60 pounds. I don't think I've seen any reviews of this particular amp, but I recall reading favrourable impressions on the other products when they exhibited at the European Triode Festival a few years back.

Checkout this Craigslist gem listed near the bottom the Tubecad journal... CCDA: constant-current-draw amplifier

Or go with external crossovers, as is done with the Living Voice OBX-R. Build a nice shiny box for the crossover and separate it from the speaker entirely. This gives your more freedom for laying out the boards and it also gets the parts away from the vibration and magnetic fields in the speaker. The downside is you'll need extra sets of speaker cables to hook it up to the amp.

I admit to owning nearly a dozen ABBA records. Not counting my Beethoven & Dvorak box sets, that's the most records I own of any one artist or band.

Checked over all my tax forms and documentation after getting them back from my accountant. Pain in the ass, but it sure beats doing all the work myself.

The TNT Akropolis stands

There's an interesting chart which I can't find at the moment; it's similar to the Fletcher-Munson curves except it graphs the amount of distortion in the human ear (2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th harmonic) with respect to the decibel level. At 80dB or so, the ear itself is producing something like 50-60% THD, with most of it in the 2nd & 3rd, and at 100dB it's something like 80-90% distortion, which your brain then has to filter out somehow. The ear has very little of the higher order harmonics until the sound level is cranked way up. Sidenote, this is probably why tube amps sound louder, the extra 2nd & 3rd order harmonics fools your brain into thinking the sound is a few dB louder than it actually is, the sound doesn't change much if at all since your brain filters it out and compensates for it anyway. Aha! Found it! http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/xentar/1179/theory/seamptheory/SEAmplifiertheory.html Ok, so the distortion wasn't as bad as I remembered, but it's still pretty horrible.