Currawong

Here's the head-fi review of the HDAMs vs. opamps, which I was too lazy to link in my last post: Audio-gd discrete op-amps reviewed: OPA-Earth, OPA-Moon, OPA-Sun v.2 - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio His summaries of each generally agree with what I've heard. They need 350 hours of use before the sound settles, if anyone ever tries them.

Apple's HFS+ filesystem is journalled, so if you hard-restart the machine, for example, it will just read the journal to figure out what needs fixing, instead of requiring a filesystem check (fsck). However, I have managed to end up with a screwed up filesystem irrespective, fixed by starting in single user mode and running fsck, which took quite a damn long time. If the file system is screwed up, Mac OS X behaves horribly. For me, it was Firefox randomly deciding that clicking on links would do nothing and similar odd program behaviour. Some other things that commonly fuck up and now to fix them: Corrupt caches: Fixable with Leopard Cache Cleaner (Medium cache clean option on the last tab). Corrupt fonts: If screwed enough, will cause programs to pop up errors. They can be removed from /Library/Fonts or /Users/Yourusername/Library/Fonts depending what and where they were installed. You installed something, and by that I don't mean copied a program you downloaded to your Applications folder, but something with an installer: If the installer was the Apple one, start it up again and press command-i to get a list of files installed. Maybe it installed a plug-in or something that is causing whatever to screw up.

The same cable is $5/foot. I've put off doing it, as I don't really want to spend that on cable that's going to look like shit in a year after it has oxidised, and I have Stax which I prefer for quite a bit of music anyway. I stand corrected. I recalled the first part, not the "significant upgrade" comment. I regret that the only chance I had to hear R-10s was neither with a fantastic source or amp, and not for long enough with enough music to form an opinion either.

Search for "HDAM" or "Audio-gd HDAM" to see the threads on the other site. The people who have tried them, including myself, have had good results. The Burson HDAM is the Audio-gd Earth. The only downside to them is, they are a hell of a lot bigger than an opamp, so you need to rig up an extension lead to connect them in some cases. There's a lot of mention of them in the Zero DAC thread on the other site (which you can't search for as "zero" is too common a term). There's also a thread where someone tested them against a bunch of opamps, which is interesting. I've put them in the Zero, a LD MKV and in a box being developed by Audio-gd we asked for to replace the Zero after it started blowing up people's headphones and the like. In all cases, the upgrade from OPA627s, LT1364, LM4562 and whatever it was in the MKV that I've forgotten, was significant.

I think if I were in the market for an "audiophile" usb cable, I'd have a good enough DAC that it re-clocks the digital data, so I wouldn't need one in the first place.

He never said that. He said he sold his R-10s. I don't believe the mids are quite as recessed as people claim, unless you've just come from something like K701s.

Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications -> Utilities) and see if anything is chewing up CPU or memory. You need to change the menu at the top of the window to "Show all processes" first though. Then you can click on the column headings to change the sorting. I have iStat Menus installed so i can see always if something is using up a lot of memory or CPU. Having a very full hard disk will also slow things down though.

Reading between the lines, I imagine what's happened is his wife has cracked a shit and told him not to send gear out which hasn't been paid for. However, consider how frequently he bullshits about sending gear to customers, it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination that he has bullshitted to her about what's going on with customers (ie: blaming them). So what happens is: People send money and get nothing. People send more money and get bullshit but no amp. People refuse to send money without getting their amp. Wife finds out (or rather, gets told BS about why he has no money) and cracks a big one, saying this is BS and not to send amps without getting money. Nobody gets anything and they are now possibly broke until someone else gets suckered into sending him more money. Next stage: A mob goes around to his house, or a PI, or someone sues him or something else awful.

Van Den Hul The Orchid 1m RCA from the 'gon. I have XLRs on order, but I need RCA at the moment.

Reading those emails from Mikhail, they raise so many red flags with me it's not funny. If I was receiving BS from someone I was buying gear from like that, I'd be wanting him checked out for bad gambling or drug habits, I kid you not. Moving people around the queue, asking extra money, changing agreements about payment...no no and no. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200, go directly to Jail. One of my best friends, who ran a second-hand computer business, turned out to be a smack addict (naivety is great until someone points out what everyone else figured out ages ago). He was so all over the place with running the business that the motivations behind his random desperate needs for selling off computers quickly to get cash suddenly made painful sense, hence my comment above. On moderation: I run a forum 1/3rd the size of Head-fi, and it's bloody hard to moderate consistently and not let personal biases enter into it.

This reads to me like someone is making a nice profit from their forum, and doesn't want to disturb their nice first place on Google for just about any headphone-related search.

The MD5000s still have the crazy EQ of the pre-modded phones, with excessive bass. I guess it's a taste thing though. I took the plunge and bought the mulga cups, as they reign in the treble and bass somewhat to give a more sane presentation. I'm not going to pay $500+ for a recable from him though, I'll DIY it myself for a couple of hundred less. You could argue that I'm insane for paying for the cups, but I like the result and the Denon "sound". Correspondingly, almost every other headphone I've used sounds boring to me, especially ATs, but Stax excepted. As for paying insane amounts for headphones, I only have to say: Edition 9.

A radically different presentation can be alluring generally, or a huge turn-off, depending.

Damn, and the Steve-notes were watchable. Totally made you want to buy whatever he released at its most loaded possible. First the environment, then the economy, and now Apple are all falling apart.

Stax SR5NB with a SRD-X (I think) modified by Fitz.

Forgive me this year, for I sinned by buying not one, but TWO flavors of the month on head-fi.