aerius

Of course the review makes sense, everything Jude says is final and it'll be soaked up by the mindless masses and spread as the truth and the final word to everyone else. That's from a marketing standpoint of course. In terms of actual useful information, I didn't see any, it was just an excuse to post pretty pictures.

Thankfully the 595 sounds nothing like the 590, other than the fact that they share 2 numbers and Senn made both of them they don't have much in common, thank god. The 590 is among the worst I've heard, the 595 is definitely one of the better Senns. I also agree with 5687, though Senns aren't my thing these days I'd still take the 595 over the K701 and DT880, the 701 is better in a technical sense but to me it's too dead sounding and bland, while the 880 is painfully bright and harsh. Comparing it to the 650 is hard, problem is I've now heard 4 or 5 650's and they were all distinctly different sounding, so the problem is which one do I compare it to? One had boomy overpowering bass while another was sterile and dead, the others were somewhere in between, all were well used, very odd. If I were to broadly generalize based on a median 650, I'd say the 595 has a bit more life & sparkle in the treble and a tad less bass. Overall presentation is a bit more forward, about a couple rows or so in a concert hall, not the back row to front row move of say, 580's to flat pad Grados. It's a little more lively & fun sounding, but there's a slight loss of detail resolution compared to the 650, not something I'd worry about though as it's small enough that I wouldn't really care. Compared to the K501, well, that's a tough call. The 501 has the magic AKG midrange of old like the K1000 & K340 along with the large soundstage. However, there's the lack of bass problem, grooving along to Bob Marley probably ain't gonna happen. So it basically comes down to music preferences, if it sounds good on your K1000's, it'll likely sound good on the 501's as well, likely better than the 595, if you need heavy bass drive, it's going to be lacking with the 501 and the 595 is the better bet. Now, with all that said, and this is IMO of course, I find it somewhat curious that you're getting a 595. Yes it sounds different than a 650, but it's still distinctly a Senn sound. You have the K1000 which gives great AKG sound and the 650 which is signature Senn sound, personally I'd be looking for something a bit more different, like Grados for instance.

There's always the Tyll method, which he demonstrated with hilarious results on a pair of Senn 280's...

And I wasn't invited? I don't love you anymore!

Wow, that guy's a complete tool.

Your mom.

This question came to me while I was taking a dump this morning, and contemplating the finer points of taking a piss...

Well, let's just say you could be waiting for quite some time. As of last week when Peter McAlister was the guest speaker at the inaugral meeting of the Toronto Audiocircle group, he was over 60 orders behind.

Standard disclaimer, I heard his amp when it was so fresh it wasn't even funny, as in single digit hours on it. Sounds great with Senn 580's and K340's, but it had issues with Grados. Bass wasn't quite there and there was some colouration/thinness in the upper bass/lower midrange. Not that great of a match, wouldn't recommend it with RS-1's.

The K701's didn't exist yet when I heard Biggie's amp in a similar state of moddedness to the one I linked. I did check it out with the Senn 580's and it was one of the best 580 amps I've heard. It had the power to fill in the midrange on the 580's along with the bass, lots of detail, soundstage and all that other stuff, so I imagine it would be similar with the K701's which in my experience have similar amp requirements. Bonus, it's also a speaker amp so you can drive speakers with it as well as the K1000 if you ever get that. Issues. The amp can be modded such that it's optimized for Grados, and it'll crush every single amp I've ever heard with Grados. Unfortunately this leaves it without enough gain & dynamics to drive high impedance or insensitive headphones such as the 580 or K701.

Actually I have a much better idea... http://www.audiooasis.com/images/products/old/intamp_tube/AudioUpgrades_ASL1003.jpg That one's going for the bargain price of $1295, and comes with sweet NOS input tubes. All that needs to be done is to add a headphone jack. Same amp that Biggie has, except this one's not tweaked and modded quite as much. Even if it's only 70% as good as Biggie's tweaked out version, it'll still crush every single amp I've heard if you're driving the RS-1.

Ya think? The Raptor is $1200 or so. The B-52 which is basically 2 Raptors is going for the special low price of $4500. Gotta love that math.

You should get a PS-1 Pro, it'll definitely help with the bass issues.

If someone was fucking my shit, I'd have him commited to a mental ward.

Silly Americans, Turkey Day was last month...

Whoops, forgot the OTL part. I was thinking transformer output since that has been done, but even then the transformers weighed 40 pounds or something ridiculous like that.

I swear to god he's taking writing lessons from Welly Wu and dretardwells.

Buy 2 or more PS3's. Sell them for a massive profit on ebay and then decide what you want later.

No, I'm not joking, my Senns had more bass than the K81DJ. Then again every AKG I've heard other than the K240 and my K340 are somewhat lacking in bass, so it's just the AKG sound. That still doesn't explain why my Senns & Grados needed about the same volume setting, as both were being driven single ended. Anyways, how's the amp coming along? It was getting pretty good at the end of the meet, how much better is it now?

You know what would be really funny? If someone built a headphone amp using a GM100 tube. I wonder if KG is secretly working on the plans for one...

So what you're arguing is that since actual impressions are so subject to guesswork anyway, it then follows that it doesn't matter if you pile up further guesswork on top of that by speculating about gear which you haven't heard. Furthermore, since the reader is an idiot anyway (on Head-fi this is probably true of 99.99% of them), they ain't gonna read nor listen so you might as well just say whatever the fuck you feel like saying. On one level I'm inclined to agree with you, Head-fi is full of worthless shits anyway so why bother? On the other hand, we all have ethical obligations to live up to, and this includes disseminating clear truthful information and opinions instead of spreading conjecture. If one truly cares about the hobby and its future, then one is morally obliged to post clear truthful facts & opinions based on actual experience, and clearly label all guesswork and speculations as such, and with the proper disclaimers & caveats.

Ah yes, the standard Republitard ravings. It's so full of shit it makes my head hurt. Let's have a quick rundown of the Republitard "accomplishments" of the past 6 years. -Tax cuts for rich assholes and corporations -Trillions of dollars of new debt, and the largest deficits in history -Starting a war on false pretenses and completely fucking over Iraq -Stirring up more hatred and terrorism against America than ever before -Blowing more money on the military than at any point during the Cold War -Fucking up Afghanistan and then making other countries fix it -Ridiculous kickbacks to oil, energy and pharmaceutical companies, John D. Rockefeller would laugh himself silly if he were still alive to see how much influence oil companies have these days. -Fucking over science & education -Katrina, New Orleans, do I really need to say more? Seriously, they've done nothing but fuck up the country along with the rest of the world while padding their pockets and those of their cronies. There's nothing good I can say about them other than that they haven't started a nuclear war yet.

I say you should get the capacitors painted in bling shiny gold. Or you could go the low key approach and paint them gloss black to match the rest of the amp. BTW, pentodes are 27GB5's, which are single pentodes, and the top cap is for the 200V or whatever the plate voltage is.

It was way off, I'd say it was at least a good 5-10dB louder on the left side. I wish I'd brought some tubes to try out to determine whether it's a tube problem or an amp problem. 6H30 and either 6CG7 or 6FQ7. Filament power supply was a generic switchmode unit run into a basic regulator of some sort, B+ appeared to be a simple regulated supply. Further thoughts. The orange-brown Ultrasone wasn't to my tastes. While it was reasonably smooth & even, it doesn't have the detail level of the K340 and worst of all there's a huge gaping hole in the centre of the soundstage. It desperately needs cross-feed. AKG K81 was a pleasant surprise. Not nearly enough bass for me but otherwise it was quite nice. Tried the K701 again and I still don't like it. I'd still rather get an iGrado.

The short version. The various Chinese tube amps need a way to set the channel balance, every single one had horrible channel imbalances which fucked over the soundstaging & imaging. I don't know if it's crappy QC or bad tubes, but it wasn't pretty. It drove me nuts and I couldn't listen to them much, so no real impressions on them. Philodox's new amp is great with high impedance ?phones, but I suspect it was current starving the Grados. Normally I need to turn the volume way down when going from Senns to Grados, but with his amp I had to keep the volume knob at nearly the same setting. The amp was brand new so I hesitate to make any definitive comments on it, it started out rather bright & sibilant at the beginning of the meet but at the end it had filled in & smoothed out significantly. The RSA Hornet sucked. I tried it with my Senn 580 and it had a very compressed soundstage which has very little depth. It couldn't put sounds outside the head, the dynamics sucked, it reminds me of bad MP3's played through my computer soundcard. I'd rather listen to cassettes out of my 10 year old Sony Walkman, at least that doesn't sound digital and it's probably less coloured as well. The Aikido amp is surprisingly good, it drives everything with ease and it effectively has no sound, very transparent. I didn't have my K340 with me so I did all the listening with Senn 580's and Grado HF-1's. I don't think it has quite as much detail as the McAlister amp or my own, but that could be source as well since the latter two were driven out of nicer CD players. The band at the bar...well...let's just say they probably came pretty close to having tomatoes thrown at them.