Currawong

I refrained from reading all the generic obituaries as they are all bland. The more interesting personal commentaries from, for example, Stephen Wolfram, were more interesting. My favorite is definitely The Onion though.

I knew when he retired as CEO what he was really saying, that it was time to spend the last weeks or months with his family before the end. I didn't want to know it though. Funnily, he reminds me a little of Bruce Lee, whom, when he was down and out, totally re-designed Kung Fu, removing all the bullshit from it just to focus on the essentials. Steve did that with the personal computer, software, the OS, then the music player and finally the phone and tablet. I remember my father, sitting on a chair at the moment he knew it was time to go and that the he was about to leave the house for the last time. It was the only time in my life I saw him cry. I imagine it must have been similarly hard for Steve knowing that he was leaving for the last time. Steve leaving the stage for the last time in March this year.

Spammers will usually pick a random email address to set as the "from" address in a compromised computer. I'd say your wife's account hasn't been compromised, but that of a friend has, resulting in this mess. You can set anything you like as the "from" address in an email, making this scam easy. This is why you often get spam from someone you don't know (but who is a friend or acquaintance of someone you know).

A belated Happy Birthday guys.

I ended up getting a 17" MBP, purely because the iMac wont work properly with 3rd party SSD drives (and my needs are different), but I will add to the chorus of 27" iMac + Air. I'll probably get a TB screen once the TB cases come down to more sane prices, as I want to piss off the 5 drive cases sitting on my desk into one box.

Yup, there was a locked bar holding everyone in place on the seats. The best part was my daughter going completely nuts with delight upon entering the room.

Beck - Sea Change from HDTracks. Another good one for the 009s.

Tyll: I'm saving up for a good mid-life crisis. My daughter loved it. I'll let the pictures explain.

Happy Birthday! Hope you're both having a great day.

Thanks everyone, it's much appreciated. I have and shall be doing a lot of this -- they definitely have been the highlight of 3.5 years of headphone-related mania. I took my daughter out to a Sanrio/Hello Kitty theme park too, which was a lot of fun, mostly for her.

I think that listening volume is overlooked very often, more so than the kind of music being listened to (which will affect the perceived frequency response of the headphones and al that), so this is a very good point IMO. I listen the quietest with the 009s at about 70dB average at last check, even with music that one might otherwise assume would be listened to loud, so this is definitely another factor worth exploring. When I first started reading, I didn't think a point-by-point analysis was going to work, but the way you've done it I think is excellent and gives a very clear picture of what you heard, to me at least.

Something has been bugging me lately, probably because I've been listening with the 009s so much. While notes seem to jump out of nowhere and instruments and voices are just lovely, some of the finest detail in the decay of notes seems to be missing. I wonder if that relates to the impulse response comments Tyll wrote in his latest Innerfidelity piece.

Damn. One of my favourite bands in the past too. A relative of mine knows the band (from when she was living in Athens), so I might have to see if she has heard the news.

Damn. I am enjoying the 009s at about 70 dB now I found out what was freaking out in my rig -- polarity reversal was screwing things up.

The FR graphs between my R1 and R2 were pretty radically different and, even though I didn't have both pairs at the same time, I was constantly comparing them with the 009s, so I feel that, at least with my pairs, I gained considerably getting the R2s. I don't think there is so much of a problem with hype as there is a problem with some people being unable to hold a conversation on a forum about anything simple without turning it to crap in some way.

Make sure you've updated Flash. Adobe now includes a System Preference Pane for it which has auto updates. Why they didn't do this years ago is beyond me, but old versions of Flash are usually the cause of the problem. The other thing you can do is install the Click2Flash extension so that Flash only loads when it is clicked on.

I think that the presence of a suitable Gilmore amp will be critical in deciding whether or not these are disappointing or not.

Best of luck to everyone affected. We get this every year in Japan, thought the last couple of years they've passed somewhat south of me, so I've only been through a super-serious one once. Was enough to shake our re-enforced concrete apartment block significantly, which was a bit scary. It's the heavy rain that can do the serious damage indeed, though I had a friend who went out the next morning to find his carport completely missing without trace.

Happy birthday!

A few good links to stories about Jobs are linked from DaringFireball too.

Boards arrived. Thanks again for the phenomenal hard work you've put in for this.

Thanks for that tip. I was wondering what they were for and if they were related to the presets menu. The S/PDIF input, if used, cuts in and out rapidly during playback.

I just got hold of a ULN-2 sans upgrade and optical ports and I understand why you guys love the sound. Unfortunately the S/PDIF input is flakey so I'm using a Neutrik AES to S/PDIF adaptor, but that is working fine. Apart from the hassle of changing the settings every time I want to, say, switch which input I use, it was a great buy at $700. Hopefully I can make use of the inputs at some stage. While the headphone out doesn't sound so great with LCD-2s (hardly a type of headphones they could have anticipated) with the Stacker the whole rig is glorious if a bit more on the smooth and mellow side of things compared to my rig.

Safari seems to be hogging memory considerably less with the .1 update. In the end though, I ended up selling off my 15" MBP and all my monitors and some other crap and buying a 17" MBP matte-screen 2.3 Ghz model with 8GB of RAM. I figured that since it sits on my desk most of the time I can get away without a monitor yet still take it (somewhat tediously) with me if I travel. I ordered a 480GB OWC SSD and the bits to replace the optical drive with a HD, so with my existing eSATA Expresscard it will be a serious enough beast by the time I'm done that should keep me going for a number of years.

I thought the DA-10 had a slight "metallic" sound using the optical input, so I can't help wondering if that would change using a good USB to S/PDIF converter.