aerius

You need to get one of these. Yes, it really does sound good.

Clearly high-end. This is the good stuff.

People who say "this amp fucking sucks donkey balls" at meets, tend not to get invited to future meets, unless that person is a celebrity or something. Considering that people here have had expensive furniture ruined by his amps among other things, plus a fair number of us actually understand circuit design, we have reason to dislike Ray's products. RSA is basically the Bose of headphone amps.

If you don't know the answer to this question, I suggest putting down your headphones and I don't know, going out and listening to some live music so that you know what music sounds like.

Oh bullshit. Here, let me help you out by quoting your entire post, in context. So how would you like to explain the bolded parts in your own post? Let me guess, "that's not what I meant, what I really meant was..."

That's just sad. Daily backups are probably a bit too much to expect, but you'd think they do a backup every couple weeks or so. Over a year without proper backups is literally something out of a Dilbert comic.

Let's try this again. Commercial or DIY? Commercial or DIY? Commercial or DIY? Commercial or DIY?

Tyll burned him good, I can't remember exactly what he said, but everyone was laughing at jagwire afterwards.

Maybe you'd like to tell me which one of these is DIY and which one is a high-end commercial product.

It's exactly the same, but completely different.

Grawk hates EVERYBODY. He's an equal opportunities hater.

I wouldn't. I'd build the tube amp I'm using. But you need a surplus shop from which to scrounge parts, else the cost goes up astronomically.

According to this page you only have a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying.

Thrice nailed it. The problem is this, the K340 needs a good balanced amp. Good, balanced, and $300 budget don't belong in the same sentence, you get to pick 2 out of the 3. A $300 balanced amp with a K340 is a waste of your money, and that's what we're telling you. But feel to knock yourself out and do it anyway, just don't come crying to us when it sounds like ass.

Nope. You'll need to check and mark the wires yourself so you know what goes where.

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/ Excerpt: Thoughts? Comments?

Yeah, I own a freakin' Denon from the early to mid 90's, my amp is a bunch of parts on a perfboard, my cables were from the surplus store, but at least I have an RS-1!

I thought I had successfully repressed all memories of that twerp. Unfortunately, I'm mistaken.

$3000 for the Apache? You gotta be shitting me. I guess Ray's really going for the cost of materials times 10 model of retail pricing. Fucking ridiculous.

The problem is lots of people on Head-fi confuse bling gear and high post counts with actual experience. For many of these people, a Grado 325 or RS-1 with a Raptor and Benchmark DAC1 is the best thing they've ever heard, they don't have experience with anything better. If you mention "Cary 300SEI" on Head-fi, most people on Head-fi will go "holy shit 300B this is the best amp ever!!!!11", while people with actual experience will go "meh...". Very few people on Head-fi have actually heard the truly great stuff, and even fewer of them post there since they've grown sick of the toxic atmosphere.

To paraphrase the late Dr. Gizmo, you tried to drive a Porsche 911 off-road and then wondered why it doesn't handle properly.

Looks to be in the ballpark of $1-1.5k depending on the parts used and how fancy you get with the case. I could be a bit on the low side since I haven't priced out capacitors lately.

And hope that its lovely French craftsmanship lets you put it back together...

It's an excellent phono amp, you should definitely get one. Or maybe you can get their pre-amp...

For a Grado amp, the Moon Audio Luna is the best off the shelf amp I've heard, beats my amp, beats the 2 Singlepowers I've heard (PPX3 Slam & MPX3 with 6BL7's), and Biggie's custom job is the only one I know of which is on the same level with Grados without going to a custom directly heated triode build. I posted some impressions in this thread.