aerius

You could always sell one of your kidneys. I've heard that some places will also pay you for a partial liver donation, and unlike your kidney, your liver will grow back after they cut a chunk off it.

In your case the K340 is the woman you married.

My GF's sister read about 20-30 pages before giving up in disgust and returning the book to the library.

As many Head-fiers know, digital is digital and bits is bits, and every CD player and DAC sounds the same anyway as long as it's not broken. Therefore the comparison was totally fair.

To me the HP-2 and PS-1 are very different, other than being metal, hideously expensive, made by Grado, and having a similar soundstage and high level of detail & resolution, there's not too much in common. I think the best way is to use an analogy. The HP-2 is a sexy hot chick, but she's a perfectionist temperamental bitch and if you accidentally do one tiny thing wrong she flips out, calls you stupid, gives you the cold shoulder and refuses to sleep with you. The PS-1 is a sexy cute chick, you can goof with her and make fart jokes and she'll laugh with you and give you a great time in bed.

BUT IT PLUGS INTO IPOD!!!

Because it's small and it's cute, and HOLY SHIT IT PLUGS INTO AN IPOD!!!!!

Or when you're searching the 'net for schematics of the gear before you even buy it. "No, I do not want yet another 300B amp using a 6SL7 input with a 6SN7 cathode follower!"

I've run into a few more since the meet, I still haven't heard a properly working one and frankly I'm not holding my breath.

I wouldn't touch either one of them, the build quality and QC on those cheap Chinese amps is pure utter shit, as of now I've run across more than a dozen of them at meets and so forth, there's maybe 3 or 4 which worked properly. The rest had crapped out pots, linear instead of log pots, massive hum, massive channel imbalances, and a bunch of other problems. The working ones, well, frankly I wasn't impressed by the sound at all, just the usual mushy bloated tubey crap. To me they're pretty much worthless unless you want to gut the entire amp and use the case to build your own project.

I need the fine control of a standard pot, or failing that a stepped attenuator with somewhere between 70-100+ steps. Unfortunately, SA's with that many steps are rather large and ludicrously expensive.

I'd still urge you to try the Living Voice Avatar, to me anyway they're a lot closer to Quads than anything else. Though they have a warmer tonal balance, the one thing they both share is an incredible clariity and freedom from colouration, especially in the midrange. Going from the Avatars to most other speakers and you notice all the colourations & distortions which you never really noticed before, I was pretty shocked at how unclear most speakers sound.

Go vinyl and ditch the DAC!

Ok, this is bad. I've been listening to ABBA records for the last 2 hours. I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that I have well over 2 hours worth of ABBA records or the fact that I'm on an ABBA listening binge.

I bought an 872A MV rectifier from the local surplus shop a couple months ago just because. I can't even fire it up to see the pretty glow but it was just so cool I had to have one.

Personally I prefer TV damper diodes such as the 12D4 or the 6CM3 if you need more power. I'd go with mercury & other gas vapour rectifiers only if I needed massive amounts of current which likely ain't gonna happen in a headphone amp. A couple 6CM3's will power both channels of a typical 300B SET amp, unless your amp uses more power than that or you just like the pretty glow, I don't see a reason to use gas vapour rectifiers.

The sad part is this is what Head-fi has come down to for some time now.

Don't drop it. If it breaks you have an instant hazardous waste zone.

Well, given that I haven't found any reviewers in magazines and on the web who I share opinions with, it's not surprising that I'm disagreeing with pretty much all of them. And of course a lot of people disagree with my opinions. The mags all say the Dynaudio Audience 72SE is a great speaker, I think it's among the worst sounding pieces of shit I've ever heard, go figure. With that said the Adagio is undoubtedly a good speaker for its price, I'd take it over a B&W, Dynaudio, Sonus Faber or any other mainstream speaker anywhere close to its price range. However, it's nowhere close to the perfection which reviewers claim, it's not the 2nd coming of Christ or the be all end all of $4-8k speakers. I don't have to nit-pick it to find issues (ie. it could use another 2Hz of bass extension) like I have to with the Living Voice Avatar or OBX-R. Still, having heard both the Quad 57 & 63, I feel the Adagio is going to be a letdown, then again, almost everything is.

A pictorial tour of a dildo factory. I've always wondered how they made those rubber penises.

Both versions. The frequency response (new version) is a bit flatter in that the bass is a bit fuller, but the other problems still remain. The midrange hardness was especially annoying on piano since certain notes and chords containing those notes have a distinctly different tone and jump out in a bad way. The closest description I can think of is this; imagine a piano piece that's played on a Steinway grand, everything's cool until you suddenly hear a couple notes and chords that sound like a generic Yamaha piano, it just doesn't go with the rest. That's what the Adagios do to piano. It's a very narrow range of wonkiness though, you might spend quite some time listening to piano pieces before the magic notes & chords get hit, I got lucky and heard them on my first session.

I've listend to the Adagios recently again and I don't think they'd be a good speaker coming off the Quads. The midrange hardness and bass issues which I noted in my impressions when they first came out are still there after lengthy break-in and use, they never went away. Compared to the Quads, the Zen's coherency throughout its frequency range is probably going to be a bit disappointing. The bass just doesn't keep up with the rest of it. Personal choice for me would be the Opera Callas Sp, if you're not careful you can confuse them with a set of Quads. Quads are bit clearer & faster while the Operas have a bit more warmth & weight. Or if you can find a pair on the used market at a decent price, the Living Voice Avatars is likely your ticket. Basically a Quad with a slightly warmer balance and more dynamics & bass.

You mean the amp experts on Head-fi are lying to me? Those bastards, they ought to be sodomized with a cattle prod.

Remember, all you need to do is add a bunch of 2nd harmonic distortion to any solidstate amp and it'll sound just like a tube amp.

If I were to take a guess, I'd say it has something to do with the tubes and the amp design. It's possible that one of the tubes was slightly wonky and did something stupid when it was warming up, which then did bad things to the amp and fried the RS-1 driver. This is why I plug in my sacrificial headphones when I'm firing up new tubes for the first time on my amp, you never know where the tubes have been and what they'll do. Alternatively, build a protection circuit of some kind for the amp to keep it from doing wonky shit. Moving a couple posts back: 1) This is a bad thing, you're making & breaking ground contacts & loops which can result in big thumps, hums, and pops which may damage the headphone. 2) Depends on the amp design. Some amps really don't like this, others don't care.