mirumu

I can't say I've ever experienced buzzing when amping my E500s (virtually identical to the SE530). They are very efficient drivers though so if there's any noise in the line then you will hear it. I have a Xiang Sheng tube preamp which appears to have a very low noise floor with most headphones, but when used with the E500s there's a clear audible hum. When connected directly to a source too and with the volume right down some sound very noisy through these headphones. The only amp I have that has a completely silent noise floor with these IEMs is my Xin Supermacro IV. I do think an amp improves the E500s compared to the internal headphone amp of most sources I've tried, but it seems to be a "last 5%" kind of improvement. It's probably not worth spending the money unless your source's amp is really bad but has a clean line out, or these are your only headphones. With a good amp you get a bit more body to the midrange, some better bass impact, slightly improved extension and a bit more resolution. My E500s sound best driven by tube amps but it's too easy to raise the volume too high with such an amp and with a tube amp the rig isn't portable anyway making IEMs a little redundant.

Well the 4070, O2, HE60 and HE90 are all much more expensive so I'm guessing aren't options. If you're wanting to better a 404+006 combo buying new then from my knowledge that really only leaves the Airbox SR-SC1 in the ballpark which is a modded SR-404. Still on my list of stats to hear despite Carl owning a pair. Other options may be vintage stats or or perhaps KOSS stats but I don't know enough to provide helpful suggestions regarding those.

Let's see...here's a few of my favourites. Probably a bit light on older releases primarily because they've slipped out of my short term memory. Sunn 0))) - Black One. I see deepak already mentioned this one too. It's completely astounding how dark and deep this album is. Sometimes I'm just not in the mood, other times it's totally mind blowing in ways other albums can't comprehend. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat. I love Jenny (even if this album cover doesn't do her justice) and would marry her if I could. I'm sure if Angels exist they sound like her. There's quite a lot of country influence here which isn't normally my thing but here it just gels for me. The only downside for me is the cover of the Travelling Wilburys "Handle Me with Care" which just doesn't capture the original magic (but what could?). Radiohead - Amnesiac. I can't quite explain my liking for this one, it just slightly has the edge on Kid-A for me. It speaks to me on some level I can't comprehend. Cansei De Ser Sexy - CSS. This is just damn cool and fun. It's mastered like crap, is full of stupid beeps and cheesiness but I still love it. Must be played loud. Pink Floyd - Animals. Definitely Floyd at their best IMHO. Always been one of my favs and I've never grown tired of it. Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse. Visceral and bombastic, noisy and detuned. A very accessible album but at the same time pure Sonic Youth. Shiina Ringo - Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana. A complex and diverse album with a large number of instruments from this experimental Japanese musician. This album is always interesting to listen to and there's always something new creeping out of the mix on every play. Unfortunately it's poorly mastered. Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle. Heavily electronic new wave songs with a real driving rhythm and flowing basslines. No wonder it's been sampled so much by other artists. The Knife - Silent Shout. I didn't want to post a list this long but I just couldn't skip this album. To me this Swedish brother and sister duo managed to create an absolute masterpiece with this one. Synth heavy but still dynamic and emotional. I find myself compelled to put this CD on every now and again and always come away pleased.

Some iPods are louder than others. I used to listen to an old 4G iPod with my E5s at 85-90% which looking back was completely crazy. I realised that would be a quick path to hearing loss so I went cold turkey for a while and then tried to re-accustom myself to lower volumes. With this I managed to get used to having it at around 40-50% volume. I've since switched to the 6G iPod but that needs to be at about 75% volume to reach the same level as the 4G at 50%. Today though I'm quicker to drop the volume down if I think it's a bit loud.

Yes, there's certainly nothing wrong with Annette Olson's vocals. She probably isn't as technically as good as Tarja's, her voice seems more that of a soubrette soprano, but I liked it. Some Nightwish fans are being a bit harsh on her I think. For me I just didn't find the album really stood out in any way. It is possible it will grow on me though as it took a while for me to really appreciate and enjoy "Once" as well.

I have to admit I was a victim of that. They solder the fuse to the board too which makes fixing it that little bit of extra effort. Glad to hear you're enjoying the baby Stax, they're a lot of fun and a great deal for the price.

I thought Nightwish's Dark Passion Play could have been better. Not exactly disappointing, it was still good, but I'd rate Epica's The Divine Conspiracy which came out around the same time higher. I'd suggest Lacuna Coil's Karmacode too although it seems it was just a 2006 album I was late discovering. I've certainly not heard a lot of metal this year but I think I'll be checking out those mentioned in this thread.

I saw down the bottom of that page they say they used it with some 45s as a driver stage for some 845s or 211s. Sounds like a nice idea.

I was going to write a description of the SR-001/003 but about halfway through writing it up I realised I was just rewriting milkpowder's comments in different words so I scrapped it. Needless to say I agree. The SR-001/003 are great for what they are, and are arguably one of the better buys for the money in a number of regards. They do not share many traits with their larger brethren though other than the tonal similarities to the O2. Due to this they aren't really a good starting point if you want to get a feel for stats.

Heh, being in New Zealand is pretty bad too. Last Stax I saw going locally were a pair of Gammas with a NZ$3000 reserve. That's about US$2300 or 1100 pounds. Ouch.

I do by-and-large agree with what you're saying but that's a different perspective again. I think many of us end up in that position when buying equipment we cannot audition. I'm personally very keen to buy some low bias Lambdas even without hearing them beforehand purely based on what others have said, but I'm not about to comment on their overall ability until they're sitting on my head. I wasn't suggesting for a moment slwiser shouldn't think such thoughts, just that posting them here doesn't really serve much purpose and may mislead people. Whether you trust slwiser's ears or not, you can't trust someone's opinion on something they haven't heard.

I also have both and in my opinion the PS3 is a better games console/media player whereas the 360 currently has a better games library. Personally I wanted Blu-ray and SACD playback too so the PS3 was an easy purchase.

The problem is that making an evaluation of something you haven't heard based purely on someone else's comparison to something you have is a very, very inaccurate way of making judgements. You can of course believe what you want and you may be right in your thinking, but these evaluations are often incorrect or meaningless so a post like that can end up just being misleading to others. It's not even that your comment was that bad but it's the start of a slippery slope. It's a small step from there to statements like "I've never heard it but everyone knows the RSA Hornet is the best amp ever" turning up. At least when your comparison is based on real listening we can say it is your genuine opinion on the matter for better or worse.

Very interesting. I can only assume the HA5000 makes a world of difference to the W5000 then. Last last year I got the opportunity to compare the W5000 and HE60 back to back for a few hours (neither on ideal amplification but I tried what we had around). I liked both although the W5000 wasn't even close to the HE60 to me in any regard except the level of the bass. In my experience to date I'd rank the SR-404 somewhere in the middle of the two sharing the speed of the HE60 but with more bass and a midrange similarity to the W5000.

I wasn't aware UT3 was out. Think I'll need to add it to the games to buy/play queue.

I disagree, moving parts always seem to be the ones with the highest failure rates. Logic board failures are more on the rare side. Funnily enough the optical drive in my Macbook Pro was playing up lately although playing a laser lens cleaner disc in there seemed to be all it needed to sort it out.

Yeah, it seems I was getting the SRM-Xh auction confused with the SRD-X one.

Yes, the 252 and SRD-7 Mk2 are good in different ways. My aim is definitely to build a system that is less of a compromise. Costs have been ensuring that I will not be there any time soon unfortunately. Oh, okay. So they're more similar than I realised. I saw one going on a certain auction site earlier. The 230V Bias is what puts me off.

My amp is nothing fancy, some local brand, Digitech, although I don't recall the model (I'm not currently at home to check). You're no doubt correct in suggesting that might be a factor but the SRD-7 Mk2 is definitely adding some grain of it's own that I can't detect from the amp on it's own. Hopefully soon I'll be able to confirm once my DIY transformer box is complete. I'm not sure how similar the SRM-252 and SRM-313 actually are though, their circuit boards certainly looked rather different. I had thought there wasn't much in common between the two although I may very well be mistaken.

I had a hosting company promise they'd do regular backups only to find they didn't when their RAID array failed. Thankfully I didn't trust them and had my own backup anyway. Needless to say I am not a customer of that company any more. Funnily enough as I write this I'm in the middle of writing backup scripts for a work server.

I'm pretty sure the SRM-252 is more detailed than the SRD-7 Mk2 I own as well, it just doesn't provide the same output power. The 252 is a very nice piece of kit for the money. It even drives the SR-404s surprisingly well.

I honestly can't say, I've never used audioscrobbler. iScrobbler just adds a new menu in the main menu bar and automatically synchronizes whenever I eject my iPod. If it didn't flash it's icon when it updated I'd hardly know it's there doing it's job. I like software like that.

I upgraded to Leopard recently and the iScrobbler plugin I had installed has kept working fine.

I've got one of the early Xin Supermacro-IV amps. I was quite underwhelmed with it originally. It sounded a lot like solid-state trying to emulate tubes but without even coming close to capturing what is special about a genuinely good tube amp. I also found combined with my E500s it made them sound even more rolled off in the treble than before. Overall clarity was acceptable but the bass was muddy and insipid despite being full sounding. It sounded like there was some power suck-out on the heavy bass notes too. Xin had said the original batch had issues and offered the fixes for free so once his workload eased up a bit I sent mine back to have them applied. When it returned from it's journey I found improvements in both bass definition and clarity, but the overall character it originally had remained as did the treble roll-off. It was at this point I started rolling opamps. I'd picked up various additional opamps and buffers to try including many recommended by Xin and others on his forum. In my opinion most combinations made the amp sound worse but I persevered. I ended up settling on some OPA-627s on the main channels with an AD8620 on the 3rd and 4th channel. I doubled up on all the buffers which appeared to improve the overall power and helped a lot with impact although at the expense of battery life. In this configuration the E500s retain their normal levels of treble roll off, but it's not being artificially exaggerated by the amp anymore. Thankfully it also no longer sounds like solid-state with an identity crisis. I still think it's far from ideal. It's lacking extension, and right across the frequency spectrum it still sounds a little more diffused than I'd like. It is though a lot more pleasant to listen to than it was and is fine for portable use or at work.

Yes, pretty much. I tend not to comment on Sennheiser dynamics purely because I know I haven't heard their best. I don't doubt for a moment they're a big step up. My problem has always been that I've had friends who say things like "If you want good headphones just get some Sennheisers" or "Anyone with taste knows Sennheisers are the best". They then proceed to force their HD201s or HD555s, etc on me and are not impressed when I try to tactfully say they sound like the sonic equivalent of dog turds. Seems to me cheap Sennheisers in New Zealand are like Bose in the US. I know Carl has experienced much the same since we tend to have friends in the same circles. I couldn't possibly dislike Sennheiser though after hearing the HE60s.