aerius

Unfortunately my friend's in Alberta doing work for the oil & pipelines industry and I don't know when she'll be back in the Toronto area again, I'm guessing Christmas but who knows, I'll definitely let you know if I hear any news. You'll probably want to hear her CD player too, it's an Audio Aero Capitole. I was like "how the hell do you afford that?", then she told me how much they were paying her and I almost shit myself. Damn Waterloo engineers...

As far as I know, there is no commercially available headphone amp which does so you're probably looking at a custom job. The SinglePower Extreme looks quite promising but I haven't heard one yet so I wouldn't know. Biggie's amp uses push-pull EL34's and a transformer output and a friend of mine has an amp that uses push-pull 2A3's, also transformer output. Those two are the best RS-1 amps I've ever heard, they're a few levels above everything else, with the 2A3 amp having the edge. To me it's good, but not great. Dynamics, weight, and control aren't as good as the amps listed above. Slap an output transformer on it and it gets better, but still not as good as a triode wired 12W6 or EL34, which in turn isn't quite as good as a 2A3.

Espressivo Headphone Amplifier, because someone has to build one...

I highly recommend a Pace PRC2000 soldering & rework station. It's only $4500 or so these days, back when I was in the electronics assembly industry they cost something like $10,000. You can solder and rework anything except BGA's with one of those babies. On a more serious note, I find both the Hakko & Weller work about the same in actual use, but the Hakko fits my hand a lot better. The Weller feels kinda awkward and I never felt comfortable with it. I'd be fine with it for most soldering, but not for surface mount parts or other small things.

I didn't really like it, to me it was like Grado made a hi-fi non-Grado-like Grado. It's wood and it looks like a Grado, but it doesn't have the Grado soul & magic.

Of course they all need work with equipment matching, but let's recall the adage of polishing a turd. When the sound is fundamentally flawed, no amount of tweaking and equipment matching is going to fix it. You can shine a turd all you want, but in the end it's still a piece of shit. Nothing you can do to a stock iPod earbud will make it sound like a Shure E4. There's no way to fix the sound of a CD3000, R10, or W100 so that they'll sound good to me short of ripping them apart and rebuilding everything from scratch.

Haven't heard the L3000 yet, but of the rest, they all have terminal flaws except for the K340. R10 - Speed, detail, & soundstage, but not nearly enough bass and weight to the sound. I'd have to reserve it for my violin & acoustic guitar music. Highly specialized & limited, like Quad 57's but even worse. CD3000 - Smiley face EQ, lots of slow yucky bass, crappy mids, and painful treble. It's like a boombox with bass boost. W100 - Brutal midrange colouration & resonance, violins & acoustic guitars are unlistenable. For female vocals only, and looking pretty on a shelf or stand. The K340 will do almost everything well, I don't think there's an area where it's the absolute best, but to me there aren't any glaring flaws either. There might be a bit of a midrange colouration and it may be a little "closed" sounding depending on which version you end up with, and that's about it. But it takes work to tune it right and amp the damn thing.

Yeah, we al know what happens when you get loaded with booze.

Hmmm...how about meeting at the Audio Circle Meet which also happens to be on March 18th?

Yup. That's right.

To be honest I don't know. On my pair the amount of bass can be slightly adjusted by changing the amount of stuffing, there's less bass with no stuffing and more bass with more stuffing, but only up to a certain point, after which it just kills the treble and sucks the life out of music. Never dealt with a bass lite pair myself so I don't know how it would be affected. Personally I think the bass heavy ones have more room to play with, the backs can be taped off to tighten & reduce bass, there's stuffing f& damping mods, and of course wiring mods. There's more things which can be played with while still having decent sound. However, I don't think it has a much potential as the other pairs, for whatever reason it just doesn't have as much detail, openess, and finesse as the bass lite & neutral pairs.

To me the K701 & GCHA are both on the dry & sterile side, and the problems with both would combine to give the issues you're having. The K701 is already a sterile sounding headphone which lacks dynamics & weight, it will not do bass slam unless you turn on the bass boost button on your music player or crank it up to some obscene volume, and even with the full & rich sounding RCA grey glass 6SN7 tubes it still doesn't have midrange life & tone. The GCHA is kinda like a "studio sound" headphone amp, it's "accurate, flat, and neutral" and does the "hi-fi tricks" but it doesn't have the fullness & tone of a good tube amp. Put the two together and you get the worst of both, call it negative synergy or whatever. I'm guessing that of current production 'phones, the Senn 650 would probably be the best match for the amp. It should clean up some of the 650's bloatedness and add some crispness & extension to the treble.

I don't know how much effect tuberolling will affect its sound, but it can be tuberolled. For instance if you want nice warm sound with more low end, stick an RCA grey glass 12SN7 on the input, and if you want to rock out to metal swap it for a GE 12SN7GTA. You can also use 6BL7's instead of 6BX7's which should also give a warmer sound. As for cost, if you want to do it for cheap and build it on a plank of wood, I'd estimate it can be done for about $150-$170. I'd think $250 give or take would make for a decent spec with an enclosure. Looser101 would be the one to talk to on costs since he's actually built one, if you can't reach him here hit him up on head-fi or bug philodox for his contact info.

Sometimes, I miss the blindingly obvious. Ok, we all know the K340 needs a really powerful amp, preferably, a tube amp. There was one sitting under my nose all this time. Now, this does require sourcing parts and soldering it all together, but all the parts are readily available. Behold, the Aikido Headphone Amp, and yes you can stick high power tubes like 6BX7's and 6AS7's into it, and run nice cheap 12SN7 tubes at the same time. I've heard the version using 6CG7's and 6H30's, it drove my Senn 580 and Phil's K340 with no trouble at all. It was meet conditions, but I'd say it's quite close to my own tube amp, which is to say damn good. If you're comfortable with a soldering iron or know someone who is, build the Aikido, I'd take it over a Darkvoice any day. More details & assembly instructions can be found over at the TubeCAD website.

Well, if you're handy with a soldering iron or know someone who is, there's a relatively easy fix. Stick a 12V transformer in it or mount a jack for an external adaptor and have it run 12SN7's. Snip the filament wires on the 6SN7 and solder new wires going to the new transformer or jack. Needless to say this voids the warranty so you better make sure the stock amp works first.

Judging from your impressions so far, I'm reasonable certain that the pair you just got is the bass lite version, while the NOS pair is the "neutral" one. The bass heavy version which I have is seriously rolled off in the treble and a lot slower and mushier sounding (when stock) so I'm quite certain it's not the one you have. Still nice, but christ is it ever a pain in the ass to tweak, it still shares the K340 family sound but it doesn't have as much potential goodness when it comes to modding. Now you just got to get one more and you'll have the whole K340 family.

On a completely related topic, who among you would sleep with Bjork?

http://www.proxybrowsing.com/ Unless of course your work has blocked that site...

Your mom is a non-sequitur.

Sounds like you got the stock version of the one philodox has, I think that's the best one out there. Also, since you're getting a 2nd pair, will there be any plans to mod one of them?

In my system it barely matters, if I had to take a guess it's like the last 1-2% or so, chances are I wouldn't notice it 95% of the time. Why? I don't know, maybe my gear just doesn't care about cables. Strangely enough power cord changes are pretty darn obvious, but that's getting off topic.

Since I don't have to mail-order it, my personal favourites are magnet wire and Cat6 network cable. Sometimes I'll also use RG-6 TV cable, I strip off the outer coating and shield and use only the inner wire along with its thick foamy insulator.

Pretty nice capacitors which I don't think are made anymore, said to the be 2nd best after Teflon. Available only in small values under 1uF as far as I know, mostly in the pF & nF range. Generally found in phono stages & pre-amps.

There was another company other than Solen which made large value film caps, can't remember the name though since it's been a few years. My personal cheapskate solution is to use motor run capacitors which can be found on ebay as well as industrial supply and airconditioning places. The one downside is they're bigger than the Solen caps, a 75uF cap is about the size of a Coke can. As for Blackgates, they might be better than a standard electrolytic cap, but in terms of performance they ain't anywhere close to a film cap. We're talking orders of magnitude, not little dinky percentages here. Electrolytics are evil, kill them wherever you can.

Your genitals. You don't want all that radiation, RFI, EMI, and all that other stuff frying your most valuable of valuable parts do you?