alcofribas

What a maniac

Thanks a lot sonics. Guess my idea of the Wayback Machine was something more like the Waywayback Machine.

Achtung! Stax just updated their website and the history page in English with all the discontinued products is gone! I realized that when for no good reason I reloaded that page. Now it's gone! It was really extremely useful for those who like to look at classifieds. If someone here has it right now on their browser print it NOW. It would be nice to also have all the little pics and users manuals that were linked, but just that particular page was already a treasure trove of useful information.

What about a new take on the Sigma, for the aural claustrophobes among us?

Is it really Stax that should be the focus of all that wrath? -- Switching from a multi-tap transformer to a simple one decreases production costs while Krell's microcontroller hack almost certainly increases them. -- If Stax didn't want to bow down to the importer mafia, what could they do? Some boutique constructors like Origin Live can be successful by mostly selling from their website. Stax may be small but they're not boutique, they're part of a conglomerate, and they already have commitments all over the world. Is there another possibility for them? Please enlighten me, those of you who know more about the business. In France importers of HiFi are greedy pigs, as they are for so many other countries. In the particular case of Stax, the German importer seems to be even greedier, if you can believe. If you happen to be in France but live near Belgium or Luxembourg or Germany, buy your foreign gear there.

OK, so Z101 is not just a surge protector and we Europeans get slightly higher quality bias. I suspected that the 1N400X would be just fine, thanks for pre-empting my question. And a voltage doubler/tripler etc. is not rocket science at all. It's particle physics! You can look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockcroft–Walton_generator for nice pics and suggestions for high-end energizer designers.

It might be that they have to have an AC transformer if they want to be able to ship internationally. In Germany the standards for power outlets/plugs allow you to swap the hot and the neutral, the ground being symmetrical. Unlike France where you can't do this (but the EEC specs are such that the most standard type of plug in our part of the world works for both countries). So there are German amplifiers whose user's manual tells you to try both sides and choose the one that sounds best. And from my experience there is a difference sometimes. Germany not being a third world country, they have to have quite stringent safety regulations for appliances, to take account of this symmetry. Really gotta open that box.

Thanks a lot Arthrimus. Now's my chance to figure out how a voltage doubler works. Unless I'm completely out of it, your circuit is meant for 117V, right? Pondering over this circuit reminded me that the WEE has a voltage conversion switch... and something clicked in my head. What, do they have a transformer to handle AC in there? And it looks like it... talk about overdesign. At least this gives some kind of protection, same kind as razors in bathrooms. Maybe the cans are not well protected, but at least their users are. That's something.

Thanks for the tip, but this posts seems to be specifically about the SRD-7... does anyone have the circuit diagram? I know what the bias supply looks like in recent Stax (active) energizers, but first and foremost I'd like to know how biasing is done in a WEE. I know that according to Birgir it's a voltage tripler, without any protection whatsoever. Once I know this (I hope someone traced the circuit before, else I'll do it myself) I have to decide wether to tamper with the existing setup, or change the biasing board, as Birgir did at least one. I said my sigmas are Birgir-modified, and in this particular case he put SR-303 drivers in there, so they are pro-bias. I know he has several Sigma-404s under the belt.

Greetings, headcases, this is my first post. I've gone through this whole STAX thread with mounting alarm. First I learned that Woo WEEs were badly designed and had the potential to destroy cans. And then that it seems that it had actually happened several times! There are not many engineering projects that are simpler than designing a transformer/biasing box for electrostatic headphones. How could somebody get this so wrong? This doesn't raise my esteem for the average designer of boutique HiFi gear. So what's to be done? My first idea was to insert 4.7Meg resistors in series with the bias output, but maybe this is not sufficient. Later in the thread Birgir talked about putting his own biasing board. Did somebody ever trace the schematics for the WEE? Have there been variations during production? Has anybody written up the procedure to make them safe? I'm a speaker guy with a budget, and not a heavy heaphone user, and a KGSS or whatever is out of the question for now. The WEE seemed an excellent choice for me, since I own two high quality speaker amps, and an SRM-323 (mine's a 323II FWIW) won't drive my Birgir-modified Sigmas properly. I hit on the Sigmas five years ago after I Googled "headphones for people who don't like headphones" and really that's what they are and I love them. I haven't opened the WEE yet but it's disconnected now...