morphsci

I guess we will have to agree to disagree there. When listening in the nearfield I would rank speaker decoupling and speaker positioning (including height) ahead of room acoustics. That is exactly why I bought the headroom stands even though they cost about 50% more than my speakers. They are extremely rigid and the rubber gasket effectively decouples the speakers from the desktop. The height and angle adjustment makes them super easy to dial in. When people have commented on my desktop setup, the only thing they have ever mentioned are the stands. For far field listening, I agree 107.654%

I got purple because it's the color of royalty.

Win Win Win Just picked up a copy on educ. discount.

OK WTF is a wootoff?

They are all available on vinyl, so that may be an option. Having said that I do not recall that III and IV were recorded that hot. I'll have to go back and listen to them as its been a while.

Well I hope I did not come off as implying they are giant killers. They compete well on price since you have to factor in the price of a power amplifier (or amplifiers). They compete well on SQ with higher but comparably priced speaker amp combinations. They also do very well for nearfield listening which is what I assume for a desktop rig unless you have one big ass desk

Ah, that explains a lot. I wouldn't count on it. It depends a lot on where you go and who you want to work with in graduate school. I personally weight the verbal more than the analytical since IMO it's easier to teach the latter than the former at that stage.

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.