mirumu

I don't think I've ever seen a headphone on it's own sold for that money although I've heard rumors of the R10 changing hands for about $10K. The closest I actually recall having seen with my own eyes was an Orpheus going for $11K+ a while back but that did include the HEV90 amp too.

If you are willing to apply some EQ you could try using the equal loudness contours as a guide to try and lower the sweet spot to a place where you can live with the lower volume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contours If you try this though do be careful because our brain tends to evaluate how loud something is based on the midrange. If you listen with the volume 3db lower but have to boost the bass 5db to make it sound right then you aren't going to be any better off at all. Taking a break from music and other loud noise for a while is definitely a good thing. Given some time you may find that when you do start listening again that you can actually enjoy it at a lower volume. You would just have to resist any urge to climb back into the higher levels again. I actually did this myself. I'm still amazed but back in the day I could listen to my discman or iPod on almost full volume and still not think it was that loud. A real source and amp that could cleanly go even higher was just plain dangerous. After having such a break for a good few weeks I found my ears adjusted and I could listen at much lower levels. These days I listen at barely even half volume on my iPod. I also found in general that my hearing in general got more perceptive after this, I can only assume my ears had adjusted to protect themselves from the loud volumes I used to listen to.

Yeah, Planescape Torment is on my list to complete one day too. I didn't get very far, I got it at a time when I was lacking spare time for gaming.

I know the reason I mentioned the R10 and K1000 is that they typically seem to be the headphones that people leave electrostatics for if they're going to do so. I have no reason or experience to suspect they're any better than current production headphones otherwise. My experience with truly high end dynamics is largely non-existent really, the ATH-W5000 is probably the best I've had a chance to listen to.

I agree. It seems you either love them or you hate them and finding out in advance of any purchases is the best way to go. Personally I have a very hard time listening to most dynamic headphones these days, they just sound wrong to me and don't think I could go back. Maybe some of the real high end dynamics like the R10s or K1000s would change my mind, I won't know until I try them. In terms of visceral impact electrostatics usually are found wanting. It doesn't necessarily mean there's less bass, often the bass is very present and well defined. It's just that you don't get quite the same feeling of the air hitting your ears, it's just not the same satisfying "thump" that dynamics can provide. That said, the Omega II is in my experience the stat with the most visceral impact but it needs a lot of power from the amp to make it happen. My own Omega II setup is not ideal using a transformer box from a second-rate power amp but the one way this method does deliver is voltage and the visceral impact of my system is great and exceeds any of the mid-range dynamics I've heard. While I have not heard the Blue Hawaii personally, this visceral ability is said to be one of it's best traits. I'm not familiar enough with the SRM-007t to comment on it although it does seem that the KGSS, Blue Hawaii and ES-1 are generally preferred.

Yes, electrostatic drivers have to be driven balanced given the way the technology works. That doesn't mean you have to provide a balanced signal from the source in order to use them, most electrostatic amps have RCA inputs as well, but it is definitely preferable to use balanced connections where you can.

I've always been of the view that if you're brought up moderate alcohol consumption habits then you're less likely to go off the deep end once you reach adulthood. In France for example it's common to give young children watered down wine with meals so they view alcohol as a normal part of life rather than something taboo (and hence, enticing). I don't know about how things work in the US but here in New Zealand many teenagers seem to hang out until the time they can legally start drinking and go from having no alcohol at all to getting completely blind drunk overnight. They seem to see the right to excessive drink as some kind of new freedom they have to partake in and let it cast a shadow on the rest of their life. I'm personally of Scottish descent and enjoy spirits (especially whisky), beer and wine myself but it's always in moderation. It's just not enjoyable any more when it starts causing negative effects on other parts of your life or the life of others.

My early model PS1 has done much the same thing. Oddly though my SNES hasn't.

Oh? I think Carl owns a recabled ESP950 so I might have to scrounge a listen off him sometime. He has a Baby O too, I think I'll ask his opinion on the comparison.

I don't think you could build a complete Orpheus based system for $10K. It might get you the headphones and a KGSS but wouldn't leave any money left for the source. Equally if we changed the headphones and threw in a Singlepower ES-1 we'd probably be blowing the budget again. As far as electrostatics go I'd look at some Omega IIs (some say this has a similar character to the HD650 although I wouldn't know myself) with a Blue Hawaii and some nice cabling which would leave about half the budget left for the source. Alternatively some baby Orpheus headphones and a KGSS would be in the same price ballpark although I've never heard or seen comments on such a pairing.

I'm completely sure it's not a bootleg, it was released when she was touring this part of the world around 1994 when Under the Pink was released. Both the regular version of Under the Pink and this version with the extra disc were sold side by side at local music stores and both were from the Warner Australia label. Wikipedia seems to agree too. J-pak is right about those tracks being on her recent "A Piano" release although I don't know if they're the same versions, I'm still waiting for my copy of that set to arrive. One more to add to the torture test is Basement Jaxx's "Right Here's The Spot" from the album Kish Kash. There's a lot of going on in this track with some very short and sharp sounds and the bassline is constantly moving all over the place at high speed. On a poor system the bassline will merge together and at worst the different notes will all sound like a single recurring note. The other quick sounds can also easily get lost in the mix, especially with the distraction from the bassline.

I could not agree more really. Tracks that stress a system are great for exploring new gear. Some of the Smashing Pumpkins tracks I find are great. They are close to low entropy white noise at times making many system flaws more obvious. Tracks like "The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)" or "Love" (from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) are good this way. I think the same can be said of many Nine Inch Nails tracks too although I have no particular favourites for this purpose. The thumping bassline on the title track of Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" is great at thrashing speakers or headphones into submission. There's quite a lot of others close too although I don't recall finding anything with this level of impact. Tori Amos's somewhat rare track "Flying Dutchman" from "More Pink, the B sides" is a great test of dynamic capability and "Sugar" off the same album is a great treble test too with all the highs sounding terrible on systems with significant roll off. Unfortunately this album only seems to have been released in Australia and New Zealand (hence why I own a copy).

I started to use Shiira right after mentioning it in that earlier post and I've been very impressed too. It's got some weird/unusual features but it seems to be very configurable allowing you to make it work more like whatever browser you're used to if you like. And yeah, since it's using webkit it's damn fast.

Oh, I guess the album must be close then? I'm trying to remain cautiously optimistic but part of me just wants to get excited.

I guess Amazon is hoping that an "active listener whose lifestyle demands music on the go" doesn't have time to shop around. Reminds me of a local importer that had the Koss ESP-950 retailing for the equivalent of US$2200 when the typical US retail price is about US$670.

I'm seriously thinking I should do the same. I have some long term plans for building an amp to drive electrostatics in the future. I'm thinking something DHT based like some GM70s, 845s or 805s for the output stage (either OTL or with a low step down ratio output transformer) but haven't really looked into what tubes would pair well with these for earlier stages as of yet. I definitely do need practise building and understanding tube circuits though and this really looks like a nice amp, especially with the nice short signal path and low cost part selection . 37s and ECC40,etc are also much more interesting to me than the typical 6SN7 or 12AX7 designs too.

37s, nice! Very tempting to build one I must say. Nice use of the toroidal too. From the pic you posted on page 1 it looks like you've built it on stripboard? I'd always just dismissed the idea myself thinking it wasn't really that suitable for tube designs given the socket sizes but if that isn't a problem then it would otherwise make prototyping much easier.

I always found that funny too. In response they'd always call cotdt a troll which made it extra amusing given how outspoken they both are. As to Mr. Wells, I'd barely been at head-fi five minutes before he PM'd me trying to sell me "the best" tubes for my Xiang Sheng amp which to me didn't appear to be anything especially amazing. I don't know much about the guy to comment otherwise but he appears to not believe there's such a thing as personal taste given many of his comments.

In my experience Firefox on the Mac has speed issues. I tend to use Safari 99% of the time even though it annoys me in some ways (Like the "Add to iPhoto Library" contextual menu item). I do hear good things about Camino and the more recent Opera builds too. Also Shiira seems very nice and is currently top of my list to try out.

I can't comment those brands or prices directly given most of those aren't available down here in the southern hemisphere but if possible I'd stick with a well known brand's "value" line rather than go for something made by a little known company. The reason I say this is that most computer instability problems I see are RAM related. I've even been stung myself by cheap Kingmax and Legend RAM that doesn't actually meet it's rated specs. There's a small flash-RAM chip on every DIMM of RAM called the SPD which holds the timing information for the memory. On many of the cheaper DIMMs this SPD chip is incorrectly programmed, usually with very optimistic timings (Why it's done, I have no idea). Big brands tend to have more correct SPD programming and you can be more certain that the RAM is actually capable of the rated speed. i.e. OCZ DDR2-533 will probably work at well over 533Mhz speeds whereas Kingmax DDR2-533 may only be 100% stable at DDR2-400. Personally I've been buying Corsair value RAM lately myself, it's reasonably cheap but very reliable. OCZ and Crucial are great but usually very expensive. Twinmos and Samsung seem okay although my experience with them is limited. Kingston is good RAM but here they have a policy that if the RAM is not compatible with your PC they will not give you a refund. As far as I know that's a worldwide policy and puts me off buying from them.

That's true, having it contiguous is a good idea although defragging may move it to less optimal places at a later date (although still contiguous of course). Unfortunately the best sizes to use tends to change over time when the VM implementation changes. Generally speaking if you really want to optimise swap you put it on a separate partition like you say and preferably make it on the inner sectors of the disc which are fastest. No surprise that most Linux installs want to do things this way by default. It's also best to have it on a drive that you don't use, preferably on a different IDE/SATA channel. That way it's not competing for bandwidth with other files accesses on the disc. The amount of swap required isn't as important as it used to be though given growing memory sizes. I'm actually starting to see machines set up without any swap (I'm a sys admin in my day job). Best way to go if you have the RAM to burn but it's certainly not the case for everyone. Heh, fair enough. Getting the kernel source can actually be a pain at times these days. If I recall correct Ubuntu doesn't have kernel source as a package, just the stub version for compiling drivers. Last time I had to build a kernel it at work on an Ubuntu box I had to get the bz archive from kernel.org and do it all manually. Such a pain!

Increasing swap won't speed anything up though if he's actually using a lot of memory, the disc is much, much slower than real RAM. The general rule I've found seems to be that if you're using more RAM+swap than one and a half times the physical RAM everything just really starts to crawl. Well that's on Windows anyway, Linux and MacOS X memory management is rather different and more swap can often be a big help, especially on Linux. But yes, like you say a fresh OS on a new HD can often make a big difference. Yeah, Linux is very fast on even a modest computer and is ideal for email, web browsing, etc. I'm surprised your widescreen display doesn't work with Linux. If it's just configuration I'm sure it could be made to work but I certainly wouldn't blame you for not wanting to mess around with the X11 configuration. I've lost many hours over the years tinkering with those things.

I can't tell for sure but is that 633Mhz RAM actually compatible with your computer? Most 1.1Ghz computers would used either PC-133 RAM or DDR RAM (usually 400Mhz or less). Most 633Mhz RAM is DDR2 RAM and will not work unless you have a recent motherboard which I'd say is unlikely if you have a 1.1Ghz processor. DDR2 won't even plug into an older motherboard. As to whether or not more RAM would help your PC's problems, you really need to investigate as to where the bottleneck is. The most simple way would be to bring up Task Manager (I'm assuming you're running Windows) and watch the CPU usage and memory usage graphs while you try using the computer as you would normally until you run into the speed issues. If the RAM usage goes substantially above 512MB (Say above 600MB or more) then more RAM would noticeably help. If you aren't even using 512MB then more RAM won't help at all. If the CPU usage sits on 100% then you really need a faster CPU (probably simplest to get a new computer). If neither graph goes that high and yet the computer is still slow then the culprit lies elsewhere. It could be Windows itself or a slow hard drive and/or graphics card. In this situation I'd probably advise looking at a newer PC since the money you might spend resolving these problems won't gain you much performance for a 1.1Ghz machine anyway. Hope this helps.

He got banned for that? lol. Didn't seem that bad to me but perhaps it's just that I'm much more used to forums with little moderation.

I don't listen to the radio ever but it's hard to avoid hearing what's popular be it on TV or just going about daily life. Currently "On Call" by Kings of Leon is my most hated track. Have to agree with those mentioning Beatles and Eagles tracks too. I also hate a number of tracks from Moby's "Play" album, especially "Why does my heart feel so bad?" and "Porcelain".