mirumu

I own the 404s and largely agree with your assessment of them. I enjoy them okay but they sound rather artificial given their traits in combination. Giving them the woody treatment is on the long term plan. I also have spent some time with the 4070 and really they sound very different to the 404s despite sharing the same drivers. Spritizer is right in saying the "monitor" tag is justified. They don't share the upper midrange emphasis and their tonality is excellent in the upper bass and midrange. They aren't Omega 2s (The O2 bass and headstage is far superior IMHO), but they're still a big step up from the 404 in my book.

Oh? I hadn't seen that one around. Local retailers would probably double that price, but importing would work out quite reasonable I expect. Think I'll have to check it out.

At least if MS make a cheaper external BD-ROM drive it should be usable with a PC like their HD-DVD drive is. Still, I'd rather have a burner.

Just a word of warning, supposedly the 40GB PS3 doesn't support SACD. The older models and the 80GB one do.

In a practical sense those are Windows problems and my Windows computer is a games-only box so is not really on the internet. All my real work happens on Macs. Besides, given how annoying some Windows security software like Zonealarm or Norton is who needs worms, viruses or trojans anyway?

Ah okay, I didn't realize those were the same drivers. Gammas and Alphas seem harder to find than SR-X Mk3s so I can't see I'd try such a thing any time soon. You mentioned it sounds really good so I have to wonder what the difference are from the original driver.

How'd you manage that? I assume other drivers wouldn't fit in there so I'm guessing you increased the spacing between the diaphragm and the stators? Maybe I should pick up a second SR-X Mk3 for experimentation. Oh, and welcome krmathis. Good to see you here. Personally I'm only really posting here these days although it's not that I'm avoiding HF or anything. Just finding I don't have time to sort through everything going on over there. I should probably just bookmark the Stax thread since that's about the only one I ever read.

I've been tempted to do that a few times but then my tendency to want to do things properly tells me if I do that I'll never finish it off. I'm trying to use the eventual auditory bliss I'll get from it as a motivation to do the work. Of course that means if after all that it sounds terrible then I'll probably feel like this.

Haha, nice! In my case I think I've spent enough money transporting large lumps of iron and copper across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans for the time being. My problem is not the building but actually getting all the parts together in one place. Considering there's only a handful of them needed in a transformer box I really shouldn't be taking as long as I have.

Here you go. It's DIY only. http://www.audiodesignguide.com/my/stax_transf.html I've been working on something similar myself with custom made transformers but as of yet I haven't sent any signals through those babies.

I'd buy that amp. It might involve selling a kidney, but somehow it would be mine.

I haven't heard different versions of enough CDs I own to comment on audio quality, but the Japanese releases do tend to come with additional bonuses like extra tracks. For that reason alone I tend to favor them.

I agree. HD-DVD has some flashy features, but personally I'll never use most of them. A Blu-ray disc designed for Profile 2.0 (there are none out today) will still let you play the main feature on a profile 1.0 player and that's all that matters to me really. The only slight problem with existing standalone players is that some are slow. Discs take a while to start playing and menus are slow to respond. The PS3 just responds better and loads faster. The only real feature coming in new players soon that I feel is worth waiting for is DTS Master Audio support.

I'm still spending half my time in Tiger. 10.5.2 does look like it will fix my Wireless kernel panics though at which point I'll be Leopard full time.

Most of the existing standalone Blu-ray players are using poorly designed off-the-shelf ASICs for their functionality. These chips are easy to work with from a design point-of-view but they perform poorly compared to the software based PC-like HD-DVD players and the PS3. I'm not expecting this problem to exist in the upcoming profile 1.1 or 2.0 players; Blu-ray works best with multiple processor cores doing the decoding and better ASICs will be on the way anyway.

Do you think HD-DVD has even the slightest chance of becoming a perceived competitor once again let alone actually winning the format war? I honestly thought maybe Paramount might have made a difference when they went HD-DVD exclusive last year, but even the Transformers release wasn't able to win a sales week against Blu-ray. I really think this war has been over for months now. I own players for both myself so don't especially care either way, but HD-DVD looks awfully dead to me. Toshiba, Universal and Paramount just seem reluctant to bury the corpse as of yet.

I expect HD-DVD may claw back a little in terms of standalone player sales over week 3 of January given Toshiba's large price drops, but that's going to be a short term boost if any and may not even last into week 4. I doubt HD-DVD is going to exceed Blu-ray in stand alone player sales ever again like it did much of 2007. In terms of disc sales I'd be amazed to see HD-DVD break 25% at this point. There's rumors going around of an upcoming PS3 price drop to $299, and if that happens I think that with any future graphs we'll be struggling to spot the red line.

It's been a while since I really played him but I'm pretty sure in the more recent games he still some good close range kicks and a headbutt. He seemed to be one of the main characters in SC3 and featured in quite a few of the ending cinematics so he's definitely not just a Nightmare "palette swap" anymore like he seemed to become for SC1.

As far as I recall Siegfried has always been available through the entire series although I think in some games he may have been a locked character by default. In play style though he has tended to be reasonably close to Nightmare in the recent games although there are still some differences in his move lists. He's never been quite as fast as he originally was, but he does have some deceptively quick moves. Personally I liked Soul Blade a lot and the soundtrack was excellent. I mostly play Xianghua, Seong Mina and Cervantes, but with SC3 I've been playing Setsuka, Talim and Tira a bit more heavily mainly because they're all quite varied to play.

I can't say I've noticed a feeling like that even with Pro-bias Stax. I wonder what the chance is of it being the small hair around your ears perhaps reacting to the static charge?

The problem is that whether there's bugs in the gameplay or not the gaming media will give it 90% or 9/10 just like the last two which were heavily flawed games and people will buy it by the truckload. If I'm honest that's really all I'm expecting from SC4. I'm sure I'll enjoy it just like the last game. If they do actually fix the gameplay though it might actually be fun to play multiplayer more heavily. Completely agree with you about Setsuka too. She can be challenging to play but I always enjoy it.

That is correct. I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy one of those drives. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/

A few comments... We put many substances under the term "drug" but are they all equally problematic or are their affects sufficiently similar? If certain drugs are dangerous in certain situations (i.e. driving, using firearms, etc) then should they be banned in all situations across the board? Alcohol has similar effects to certain drugs and yet in modern times at least is treated somewhat differently. Some medicines have similar effects, and some are even based around the very same substances that are illegal when consumed as a "drug". The black and white situations are easier to follow and theorize about, but we live in a world filled with shades of gray. It also has to be asked whether or not making something illegal really does protect against the bad effects? Does it introduce additional problems and are these more or less harmful to society or are they any easier to solve? Chemotherapy may cure cancer but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any better off after the treatment. Sacrificing freedom is a dangerous thing and in my opinion should never be taken lightly. <cliche>In a world where freedom is outlawed only outlaws will be free.</cliche>

I'd second that grawk. I stuff around with computers all day at work be it off the shelf Compaq junk, handbuilt PCs or old Unix servers plus various network & storage devices. On the software side it includes supported Windows installs, supported Linux/Unix installs as well as completely unsupported Linux installs where I end up building custom deb packages or RPMs just to make stuff do what we need. Supporting Oracle products alone can be a nightmare. I do what I can to advocate the purchase of reliable, capable and well supported hardware/software but in my company at least cost often wins out. When I get home I just don't want to care about any of this. I want something that just works. I'm not saying Apple gear always works or is the most reliable stuff you can buy, but I find that overall the high integration level between their products results in less overall pain on my part and less time wasted. Usually I can turn the devices on, forget about the tech and just spend the time doing what I want to do. To me that's worth the price difference and even a little loss in flexibility. I do have a hand built Windows/Linux PC around too, but since it's a secondary computer and only really used for gaming it doesn't cause much grief.

Reminds me of a conversation I had once on Head-fi. Someone was talking about how electrostatic drivers are similar to capacitors and mentioned that air was a less than ideal dielectric. They then advocated using a perfect vacuum instead.