Kung

I guess the loose wires are used to make low capacitance cables at the lowest cost. I have measured hfm electrostatic headphone cables with a diy Wheatstone bridge. At a test frequency of 7.8khz, the capacitance between the wires (L+ to bias and L+ to L-) is in the range of 22-30pF per meter, while modern stax cables (such as 007 cables) are in the range of 18-38pF per meter. They are all lower than the capacitance of normal 20AWG silicone flat cables (in the range of 28~62pF per meter, vintage stax headphone cables are also in this range).

It's strange that the electrostatic headphone driver is difficult to break unless the conductive coating completely fails.😱

Magnetic earpads are indeed a great idea. After some simple tests, only four 2.5mm diameter n50 magnets are strong enough to hold the earpads.

I heard some news from canjam shanghai and some people who listened it in store is that mini-shang has a greatly improvement in bass and timbre compared to OG jade2, but there is no more comparison with other stax/dca/audeze except hifiman estats, and we all know even shangri la jr/sr are hard to say it's good in this regard😅. Considering that people in Asia are more accepting of bass light headphones, I am more curious about the experience in Europe and the US.

brilliant🤩

from the picture above, the driver of X1 seems to be slightly larger than that of sr-x. I remember that sr-x has a 51mm diaphragm, while X1 may have 60mm or so ？

Whoa~thats news

great job, only here in the world can see such wonderful reviews of electrostatic amp

damn, 2400x the gain, that must be loud enough to explode... there are audiophiles who judge the power of the amplifier by the position of the potentiometer knob, i guess ray samuels should have a good knowledge of this.

Don't know if it's true, the rumor from the dealer of rudistor in Shanghai said that the designer passed away a few years ago🙄, and they still have some unsold rudi amps in stock...

Still haven't heard viva stx, however, stx seems to be marketed as an amplifier that perfectly matches the x9000 in china. btw~The actual selling price is about $10000 not $32k, those products are always sold well below their list price.

From warwick official website, I think their aperio has a high voltage bias (1800Vdc) driver, which is much higher than the 1350Vdc of their lower models. it means that the output voltage of the amplifier no longer needs to be as high as the traditional electrostatic system, therefore does not require too much power and heat dissipation. In addition, for the built-in amplifier of HE1, I guess it may be the cool-mosfet version with reduced gain of the hev70 vas since Sennheiser applied for a patent(DE4329991A1) similar to the design of the HE1 in 1993. I heard HE1 once at the exhibition, and I also think that the potentiometer should be set to the position of about 2-3 o’clock to get loud enough, indicating the input sensitivity voltage can be a bit high based on the two-stage amplifier's gain setting being too low...🤷‍♂️

I predict that some people will say that true endgame headphones are all musical instruments... oh~ i see yamaha's marketing is indeed working hard in this direction though...🤷‍♂️

Yep, ASR's evaluation is just based entirely on measurements... My source told me that topping has also designed a discrete component version of electrostatic amp to drive estats directly, ap show that its specs far exceed any known electrostatic amps, and it will be on the market sometime in the future. . .🤷‍♂️

Ray samuels the old friend of stax mafia just released a new amplifier B-21, the electrostatic part claimed 1800Vpp voltage swing with 200mA continuous current output performance just shocked me. . . Reminds me of the horribly weak output performance of the A10 he designed before, this new amp is also questionable...