deepak

I need my tubes!!!onetoo Plus I have a wicked nice source already, I doubt the one in the DHA3000 could compare.

The Noise Duality looks good, but probably way more than I'm willing to pay. I suppose I should have specified that I'm looking for something that is high performance and good value for the dollar as well. Very low output impedance was something I was gunning for as I can hear the output impedance mismatch with Grado headphones and some tube amps. More realistically maybe something employing a single 300B or 2A3 design might be more in my budget. But then again I have no idea how much good iron would cost to go along with that. The amp doesn't need to be ridiculously powerful or anything. Anyway I wasn't planning on getting one of these super amps in the near future, I think I'm going to get the Lo-spressivo as soon as time permits.

I've pretty much settled on the L3000 as the headphones for me (other than the K1000) and I'd like to look into comissioning a high end custom built tube amp for them. The L3000 specs from their website: Type Closed-back dynamic Driver Diameter 53 mm Magnet Neodymium Case Cherry blossoms wood, CONNOLLY leather Frequency Response 5 - 45,000Hz Maximum Input Power 2,000mW Output Sound Level 104 dB/mW Impedance 48 Ω Weight 380 g Cable 3.0 m Connector ?6.3 mm phone plug Accessories Furnished BOX So I'm probably looking for schematics that are available that I could have someone build the amp based on. Does not need to have a preamp. Headphone amp only. I don't want to let a budget hold it back so I'll leave it open for the time being. I like a pretty linear sound but I'm definitely a tube guy. Thanks everyone.

You completely missed grawk's point huh. Is it possible for you to post without the ADD tangents?

t.rose you can make fun of this forum all you want, but at the end of the day we're a tight nit community and most members will probably go out of their way to help out one another.

Truly ominous day it seems. 9/15 (unless that FS forums stuff was just shenanigans)

Thanks guys

That looks like a gorgeous phono-stage. Before giving up on it I'd drop in 3 current production JJ tubes and see if it makes it less noisy; they should be $10 each at tubedepot. If 7DJ8 tubes can be used as a substitute the Tesla 7DJ8s ran a bit quieter than the Tesla 6DJ8s in my amp.

Me? Probably not, my vacations I'm planning Greece, Thailand and Banff.

Good ice cream Fast cars Good music/hifi Quality lamb, rice, Indian food Livable/big houses American football Apartments suck *grumble*

I think I really need to hear your amp, I'm with Icarium, they're just not that impressive to me (for how much praise they get), IMO they're comparable to Sennheisers classic line or Grado/Alessandro upper prestige series. I did love the K340 with electronic music, but they were just too genre specific.

Sounds like you're working at Initech

Yup I know where you're coming from. A passive pre should in theory add or remove nothing to the sound, but that's not always how it goes \ (and the convenience of having a remote with a DAC/preamp combo is something I'd have to have with speakers). I might actually get a traditional preamp if neither DAC allows me to input a signal from my phono-stage if I do decide to keep the vinyl setup.

The speaker rig is going to be pretty high end so I'd rather not have any preamp in the signal path. Loop out of a headphone amp is an option, but I'd prefer to have my source/preamp in 1 to go straight to the speaker amps. Prima DAC SE and DCC2 SE are high on my list of sources I'd want to hear with the speakers.

(for anyone that still cares) Unfortunately I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to listen to my system recently but I thought I would add an update as I did spend a lot of time with my setup during the summer. The M192 continues to impress me and remains one of the best sources I've heard. The more I listened it the more I got used to its sound and the less it started to "wow" me. Instead the opposite happened where I started recognizing subtle things in music that I haven't heard before- not necessarily details because I don't think this is the most detailed DAC out there. Like I mentioned in the previous posts the dynamics and holographic nature of the soundstage makes complex music much more layered and real. In live jazz pieces that I've heard countless times the recordings started to make more sense and an idea of real space started to become much more focused and clear. Since creating this thread my main headphone changed from the Grado HP-2 to the Audio Technica L3000 (in my was more resolving and detailed after a month of side by side comparisons), and even with the L3000's in between Grado/Sennheiser soundstage venue size started to take a small shape of its own. And just like my profile states, I prefer gear that has natural tone and timbre, and the M192 does nothing short of amazing me in these two areas. I believe I mentioned these two particular instruments in the past, but I'm very familiar with the violin, acoustic guitar and sitar and all sound very real on well recorded material. The only downside to growing so attached to a piece of gear is that if I were to upgrade now I would really need a source that could act as a preamp as well for my speaker setup. So it seems my next source upgrade won't be to replace my M192, instead it will be to start a speaker setup that can be kept separate from the headphones.

You do have a McAlister amp? [me=jpak]keeds, i keeds[/me]

I compared the DAC1 side by side with the DA10, preferred the DA10. I later compared the DA10 side by side with the M192, and the M192 was better by a looong shot, I sold the DA10 in a week. It was definitely a very big source upgrade. I would only upgrade the Northstar if I really needed a source with a built in preamp, which I might if my K1000/Avantgardes get a nice pair of monoblocks. But more than likely the lowly headphone setup will stay seperate from the speakers.

It is nice DAC, high five

Yeah they were all iBooks, right when 10.1 or 10.2 came out. I should have mentioned that. All their T42s held up fine. I've read of very little failure with the Intel Macs, and my next laptop will more than likely be a Macbook.

So rant over In your situation I'd buy a Dell with the extended warranty. Get some stackable coupons and you could probably shave a couple/few hundred dollars off the price since it looks like you're looking for a pretty high end laptop. If it's not entirely obvious Dell rapes you on things like ram, so I would get the minimum and upgrade it yourself. I've done this with all my laptops- just run memtest86 on the sticks for a few hours to make sure they're stable. And if hardrive upgrades are costly, I would look into something that is at least 7200 rpm, your computer is only as fast as the hardrive.

This is pretty much true of any manufacturer. I had a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop for 3 years. Finally in the end of its third year the LCD finally started to not turn on all the time. I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything wrong with the LCD, and it was probably only a bad connection; the thing was dusty as hell. But after 3 years I was due for an upgrade and didn't care to open it up to clean it out. Other than that it was fine. This laptop saw a lot of heavy travel use. I carried it with me everywhere, every day for 2 years straight when I had classes in the city campus. My sister bought a Dell laptop in August '06 for $450 after coupons, a pretty nice machine at the time. Pentium M 1.7 GHz, 512 mb ram, 60 gb hardrive, 15" widescreen (I think SXGA+). And it too has been perfect. She dropped it one time and it now has a crack in the case near the keyboard but it's still stable. My dad got a free Dell laptop through a pharm company, I can't even recall how old it is. It uses a Celeron processor and it's still fine, my mom uses it every now and then for internet and email. As for Apple laptops I got one my first year of med school (part of my tuition ) and it was a piece of crap. One motherboard failure and then the CD-drive gave out. All of my friends except for one (who never used his) saw one problem or another within 2 years, and most of them bought IBM T42s. As for IBM/Lenovo they're the standard laptop given to all interns/residents/fellows/attendings at Dartmouth Hitchcock and I can't recall anyone having problems with them. And most people treat them like shit, I carried mine around on rounds, in my hand, so I wasn't exactly treating it very delicately. My dad has one of the newer Lenovo laptops with the higher power battery (8 or 9 cell?) and it's amazing, he probably gets 8 hours out of it with the screen dimmed.

K1000 + Arcturus = win!

House party edition stepper. I like.

If you like that NOS sound then it might just. Me, not such a fan.

Icarium I have a CD transport that is only 1 of 2 in this planet Earth. Yours for eleventy billion yen.