So a new electrostatic seems to be incoming:

https://apos.audio/products/sjy-argos-electrostatic-headphones?utm_campaign=hyperfuse_last_day%20%2801KZW4554JVNW58G1HET4TN43W%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=alex_nongdpr_never_subbed_active_180&_kx=cd77Rbf3yu6_OAujM-M4VU1ihuQFsjtyVcb-jl8r-OKxvi62Czezy2yxdLQUUnAj.Ldk8SW

I've been keeping an eye on them for a while, no idea what that company is but hey, more the merrier and all that. I just saw the new updated page for these and it is just what the fuck, are they retarded? First off, "fully vented drivers" being spun as something that is positive. Hello, what is the number one rule of planar design? Something about an infinite baffle? No? Anybody here have any fucking clue what they are doing? No? Let's spin our engineering ineptitude as a positive

Room to breathe: Vented driver design

The vented driver design relieves pressure on the transducer, helping it move more freely and consistently for a faster, more open, and effortless presentation.

Yes, that is what the drivers need, room to breathe. A common problem with all planar drivers is that they are just being suffocated. What a novel idea and people making planars for 70+ years have clearly all been wrong. Seriously, who thinks the actual reason is that the drivers are horribly unstable so the extra pressure from a sealed baffle would knock them out of balance. So instead of fixing that, let's just employ marketing wank.

Then we have the cable... what the actual fuck. Just look at this thing:

Anybody who makes a braided cable for electrostatics needs to be taken out back and beaten repeatedly with a copy of the Art of Electronics. The whole point of the fucking cable is to minimize capacitance... not add to it!! Now this looks like the cheap crappy headphone cables coming out of China so I very much doubt it's high voltage credentials. I also love the Y split on a commercial set of headphones... a piece of clear heatshrink.

It's also 1.5meters in length, probably to cut down on the pile of extra capacitance this turd adds to the load. Then you can get a proper extension cable and have the headphones reach anything as these are hardly portable.

There was a guy on another thread who recently bought some cable from China, and randomly found that a magnet stuck to it.

It was iron wire with a thin copper coat.

And what a stoopid idea of them using braided cable, and ridiculously short. High capacitance (usually around 50 to 100pF/m, or even more) and very low inductance (sub uH/m). Oh and use the hardback version of Art of Electronics

1.5m would add at least 75 - 150pF!!!

Damn, never seen that happen. Most of the wires that I come across are just plated aluminum, even the silver wires as they just dual coat with copper and then with silver. It's super easy to check, just cut a bit of insulation off and hit it with a mini blowtorch or a hot lighter. If the wires curl up, that's aluminum.

It is clearly a crap cable off aliexpress and there are plenty of ribbon cables available. It's just lazy and bad engineering.

With the Hongshu EH-1 out now, this will be a very tough sell. I have no idea of the price but the EH-1 is 650$ with an amp and they are pretty damn good. Also no venting on the drivers there...

I thought I'd see if any of these cables are out there and what do we have here:

Ebay Stax cable

I bought one to do some testing on it but who thinks those wires can handle 1kV and are low capacitance...

I’ve bought some braided cables on Taobao，even the best among them has a capacitance per unit length roughly double that of the parallel-style cables used from Stax

Yeah, I'm not surprised as they are essentially a pile of caps stacked on top of each other. They are the easy solution but there are ribbon cables out there. I really like the 20AWG silicone rubber one which was rated to 600V but in did far more in testing.

The new cable on the EH-1's is excellent, very much like the Wide PC-OCC Stax cable but with smaller conductors. Even the Monolith electrostatics from Monoprice had custom cables on them back in the day.

Btw. here is a picture of the ebay Stax braided cable for posterity: