aerius

Balanced outputs, but single-ended inputs, and without a big re-wiring job on the front end it can't accept balanced inputs. And it uses a 4-pin XLR on the output so I don't think it's going to help on your K340. Plus it's still mounted on a pine board (literally) so it's not going anywhere.

That's the one, though I do need to come up with a new name for it one day. That is, if I can put my soldering iron down and stop tweaking it.

They're in the 2nd Hamilton meet thread somewhere, but as I'm banned from head-fi at the moment I can't exactly access them.

I believe this is one of those things where if one understands, no explanation is needed, and if one doesn't understand, no explanation is possible. All I know it started around when the Cincinnati meet thread and my Bada thread went insane. Actually I do know the meaning of the pretzel, but if I told you I'd have to kill you...with a pretzel.

Well, my amp definitely wins the "it's not a bomb!" award... Right now I'm thinking about building an amp based on the first 2 stages of The Karna, but substituting 26's for the ECC99 so I have directly heated triodes for the entire amp. Would also need a new output transformer as well and a few other things, but that's in the far future unless I win the lottery or somehow come across an obscene amount of money.

Mine is now. Significant improvement, well worth it, though I do not have a balanced source yet to complete the chain. So far the only headphones I've heard balanced are my Senn 580, a friend's 650, and my own K340. Of those the 650 & K340 improve the most while the 580 only has modest gains, which could probably be equaled by upgrading to a better single-ended amp.

What my parents did when I was a crawler was to sandwich the wallunit and some tables when I was up and about, and then pull them out into the proper listening position once I was safely asleep. In the "safe" position they were still fine for background music so my parents could still enjoy some tunes during the day, but they definitely sounded a lot better when slid out into the room.