morphsci

You need to decide if you really need to go balanced at your desk. If so then you can't really beat the price (commercially) of the Headroom desktop balanced. I actually use the desktop portable (SE) in my home office and am quite happy. If you really need (desire) the preamp outputs then I would go with the Headamp GS-X. IMO it is the best deal in a full sized and full-featured SS balanced amp and it is dead-on neutral, so you get to hear everything upstream. As far as speakers go, active monitors are the best bet for space and cost savings and they compete well with passive speakers on SQ. One thing to do is to make sure you isolate them from the desktop. If you do not want to go the Headroom speaker stand route (which BTW work very well and are cool as hell) try looking at THESE .

I can certainly recommend the GS-X as a great and very flexible balanced amp. At $2195 however it pretty much eats-up your whole budget and you will need some room for it. As far as the speakers my suggestion is that if you like the sound of the Audiengine A2's you should try a pair of A5's. Pretty inexpensive but very good sounding, especially if you can decouple them from your desk.

Well they do not have to be that bad but ... Most of the dreck "available for download on the internet" is that bad. If the expectation is that the music should be free and quality doesn't matter then just download a CDP.

Hippity Hoppity Birfday

If you are not going to play anything better than downloaded MP3's (Almost always low bitrate) then you are wasting your money. They sound like shit so all you're going to end up with is better sounding shit.

This Looks Good

Forgot to add that I also bought two paddles This is our first family canoe but I doubt it will be our last. Almost pulled the trigger on an old town but this one just seemed perfect for our needs.

I have only heard the Zana at meets but I too have heard it with a good number of phones and it always sounds good. It also made my K340's sound the best I have heard from an SE amp. No bass control issues there as far as I could tell. Usually you are making excuses for amps you hear at meets due to the noise, yada, yada, yada. Not the Zana. If it was a balanced amp, I would have purchased one as soon as I returned home from the last meet.

RIP JG, you will be missed.

Happy Birthday and thanks for being older than me

As far as I know also

FTFY

That is correct but my ES-1 had a problem at Chiunifi last November. You can see above however that the problem was not actually with the ES-1.

The esound wouldn't work off of the regenerated outlets either so it and the GS-X were on the non-regenerated outlets which worked just fine and never had to be repaired. I decided to quit fiddling with my shit and enjoy the meet before I could try the ES-1 on the non-regenerated outlets.

The problem there was a bad PS Audio P500 (since fixed by PS Audio). Once I got it home and plugged it into an ultimate outlet it worked fine. Nate's observation about certain tubes, or more to the point in my case, certain tube combinations, causing biasing problems, i.e. bias drift that can cause seriously premature tube senesence is spot on. This is definitely a point of concern for me. Other than that my ES-1 has been working fine. But realistically it has had relatively light duty for the last six months and I do have concerns as to its long term reliability.

2 - 2"x10"x8', 2 - 2"x4"x10', 1 - 2"x6"x8' (all treated) and 4 SS 1/2"x4" Bolts,nuts and fender washers.

I've always loved Vandy's. I wouldn't go with anything smaller than the 2 series. If it wasn't for the WAF factor I would probably own the Vandersteen 5.

Because it acts as a red herring and diverts attention away from where it properly belongs. Besides, if there wasn't anything else to what he meant he could have certainly made it a more general marketplace pressure scenario. RSA was not just a random choice. Absolutely and without a doubt.

The Vista system is a laptop that I use as a desktop replacement at home. It only gets rebooted when I take it on the road. I have never needed to reboot it just because of memory leaks. That is absolutely not the case with any of the other 3 XP systems at home or my XP workstation at work. But I don't need to constantly dick around with it either and can instead use it for what I need or want it to do

I totally agree with this. The suggestion that RSA is even partially responsible for this is pretty ludicrous and IMO suggests another agenda altogether. Stifling "fanboys" will increase the signal-to-noise ratio at head-fi, but will have little effect on this type of problem in the future. Mikhail's problems are mostly of his own making. I also somewhat agree with this in that many Singlepower customers, including myself, did not speak out nearly strong enough about the potential problems. That being said, it is not that difficult to find lots of posts on head-fi (including some of my own) that detailed most, if not all of these problems going back at least 2 years. You can also find plenty of posts that say that they enjoy the Singlepower sound but will not be buying anything new in the future and caution others at the same time. When I decided to buy my ES-1 there were plenty of posts about long wait times but I do not recall seeing anything about shipping deceit, switched items or non-existent upgrades. Those seem to be newer problems and to me indicates a severely deteriorating situation that does require the actions Aaron has taken on head-fi (Kudos to Aaron for doing this). As others have said, I hope Singlepower can get out of the massive chasm they have dug for themselves, but the probability seems very low at this point. Especially given the fact that the reason many people go the Singlepower route is precisely because they do want something custom. Al-in-all a sad situation.

For me Vista has been more stable and seems to "leak" memory less than XP so rebooting is not necessary as often.

Took our son to the local pool so we could watch the lifeguard air-guitar to Journey

Exactly. Some people need to read (or reread) "The Man Who Would Be King".

I agree, with computers that already have Vista installed, 32 bit Vista is actually better (IMO) than 32 bit XP. 64 Bit Vista still has more incompatibility issues compared with 32 bit Vista.