morphsci

Well I do not really consider myself part of the Stax mafia but the HE-90 is simply colored the wrong way for my tastes and the HE-60 is simply colored less. Both are clearly inferior to the Omega. Hmmm, that is interesting. I was going to send my pair in to Sennheiser when I get my HEV-70 back. I may have to come up with a plan B now.

Yep. An Omega and an Omega II Mk. I. Overall, the Omega is my favorite Stat, though I always worry about its construction. Technically, the Omega II is better but I just like the sound of the Omega better for most of the music I listen to.

HE60 > HD800 > HE90; I've heard them all but only own the HE60. I think the HD650 and HD600 are different enough from the others to not be part of the rating. I prefer the HD650 to the HD600, but only by a little. Owned them both, only own the HD650 now.

And of those, the ones below 1500 absolutely kick-ass-and-take-names.

Just seems kind of pointless to have to diddle around with the order you chain them in when you have other open ports.

But what is the point loading down a single firewire port when you have open USB ports? Speed should not be an issue if you are using it only to store audio.

Recabling direct to each driver will make a much larger difference in the sound than the serial number will make. I also agree with the comparison of the K701 and K340 especially regarding the midrange.

Yep, hence the careful use of the weasel-word "seems" by me

Interesting, I wonder if it is the ALAC decoder in iTunes. Using ALAC in windows I seem to notice a difference between J. River MediaCenter vs. iTunes. I think I need to do a little test ...

My suggestion for using dbpoweramp is definitely for someone at the beginning doing their ripping. Accurate-Rip definitely speeds up bit-perfect ripping and dbpoweramp uses multiple cores so that also speeds things up. When you noticed a difference between AIFF and ALAC was that using only itunes or itunes with Amarra?

^^^Probably a better and simpler way to go to keep everything within OSX. Which ever way you go I still suggest using an external drive as ripping can be hard on the drive mechanism. When I decided to rip my collection I ended up trashing an internal drive on my laptop. Not fun to replace so I then went to an external drive, if it fails, it is easier to replace.

If you want to start from scratch I would also recommend the MAC Mini as your music server. Start with itunes and rip your music into either ALAC (apple lossless) or AIFF (Essentially an uncompressed WAV file). ALAC saves on space and now Amarra Mini and full can play nice with ALAC. I would suggest sticking with itunes to begin with and then add in the Amarra software later as your comfort level increases. If it was me I would also buy a nice external optical drive for your laptop and use dbpoweramp for the ripping (Windows only). It is a great program, extremely easy, and if you have multiple cores, very fast also. It works great with getting metadata for the rips and uses accurate-rip to speed up bit-perfect copying. The downside to this is you need to be comfortable moving data between OSX and Windows. I have not found a CD ripper of comparable quality and ease-of-use on the OSX side.

Just finished getting destroyed by a five-year old in Wii fencing.

Very cool.

Why don't you use a proper amp and then get back to me, MKBY

From Santa:

He was turned down for the role and that appears to be the reason most often cited. as far as them being on the jury

My favorite is that O. J. Simpson was turned down for the lead role in Terminator because the executives did not think he made a believable killer.

I don't know, if I had to choose between being reborn as Will Smith or Keanu Reeves, I would definitely pick Will Smith.

Good point, I stand corrected.

Pfft, it's an Apple, it will come with a free unicorn.

Well I hope you are planning to bring these to Canjam, sir.

Epic WIN!