TMoney

Luckily I have Horio close-by with about 200ish Classical SACDs to borrow from. Particularly looking forward to hearing MTT's Mahler cycle on SACD. I've heard the RB layer, but the SACD should be something special.

I'm a big rock/blues guy, so without further ado (In no particular order): Basement Tapes - Dylan What's Going On - Marvin Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Rumors - Fleetwood Mac Pet Sounds - Beach Boys Paranoid - Black Sabbath JT - James Taylor Surfer Rosa - Pixies Live at Regal - BB King Ella and Louis Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd Exile on Main - Stones Beggars Banquet - Stones Days of Future Passed - Moody Blues Cosmo's Factory - Creedence Folk Singer - Muddy Waters It Serve You Right to Suffer - John Lee Hooker Let it Bleed - Stones Tubular Bells - Mike Oldfield Shaft - Isaac Hayes Donovan: Storyteller Blood on the Tracks - Dylan Layla - Derek and the Dominoes Here's Little Richard Ommadawn - Mike Oldfield Sitcky Fingers - Stones Quadrophoneria - Who Sunday at Village Vanguard - Bill Evans Blow by Blow - Jeff Beck

All over. Most were used, some newer Mofi ones from amazon, a few from japan, etc.

I just ordered about 30 SACDs to try out on the Oppo. I can't wait.

Happy Birthday! Get your buddies together and go do table service at one of those SoHo clubs!

Funny you should ask. Just got the email in my inbox that orders are up. I went ahead and bought one. $1,300 including CA sales tax. This thing better be good.

After deciding not to wait for the new iMacs, my office just plunked down for four loaded Mac-Minis and four new Thunderbolt displays to run them with. Should be a nice upgrade over the 2007 24" iMacs we are replacing. The new iMacs do look nice, but aesthetically I like the look of the Mini + Thunderbolt display a lot better. I've just never been a fan of the 3-4" metal under-hang below the iMac display. EDIT: Kind of disappointed with the Apple volume/business discounts. We only ended up getting 5% off. Apparently bigger discounts don't start kicking in until the $30k mark.

The speakers are actually a dual driver setup. There is a large 10" or so woofer in the base of those towers firing downwards towards the ground that you can't see from the front. Pass had a Firstwatt SIT-2 running the upper drivers and a Firstwatt F6 running the lower woofers obviously fed from the Oppo. I wish I had asked him about the rig. He also had a scope setup to show that the amps were operating at less than one watt. In any case, like I said before, if its good enough for Nelson its good enough for me.

I noticed that Nelson Pass was using the Oppo as a source/pre to run his room full of First Watt gear at burning amp today in sf. If Pass signs off on it thats good enough for me.

I'll be getting one once they are available. Any of you 103 buyers score a better deal than the MSRP? If so, I'd be curious.

^ This While the rMBP style computers are the future, the future aint ready for primetime just yet. The 15" rMBP drops frames like a demon even scrolling on everyday webpages in safari and that thing has pretty darn powerful dGPU. Using only the integrated intel 4000 GPU doesn't seem like a great idea. The next revision or two of these retina laptops should have GPUs perform considerably better than the current gen with Intel's Haswell and improvements from nvidia and amd coming down the pipe. I think I'll wait for rev. 2.

It's fairly obvious why they refreshed the retina iPad and I don't think it has a whole lot to do with the new connector. Think of what else launches on Friday, the same day that 4gen and mini iPad preorders begin. I doubt Apple's choice of a date was a coincidence. I also am skeptical that there is much pent-up demand for a faster retina-Pad. More likely, they don't want the retina-pad getting trounced in the upcoming comparisons in the surface reviews. Probably the most dissapointing Apple launch day I can remember, and this coming form an retina-pad and iPhone 5 owner so it's not like I don't drink the kool-aid.

Thanks, Ric. Nice find. See you Saturday at Andrew's?

I've got a set (2x amp and 2x PSU) that I'm probably not going to get around to building anytime soon. If you can't get a hold of Lil'Knight in the next week or two let me know.

Nothing like the slow-mo cuts, bombastic music and a little John Facenda narration. For me, it was the great clips of the 1970's John Madden Raiders set to that amazing pirate theme.

I don't think I'd ever have become a football fan if it wasn't for the beautiful work Steve and his father Ed did over at NFL Films. RIP, Steve. http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-videos/0ap2000000063280/Remembering-Steve-Sabol

Happy Birthday, John.

Its 100VA. With all the talk about transformer issues going around recently I'm just not sure how far I want to push things given that the amp is currently functioning perfectly.

In boosting the current up to 10mA, how much more power draw is that going to equate to? Something in the vicinity of 20% more? I think it'd probably be ok to push my SumR trafo that far, but if it ends up being in the vicinity of 50% or more I'm not sure I want to risk it.

For all of us WoT players having trouble hitting the high tier tanks: http://wotarmory.com

After a little more than a week wearing the Amperiors on my (walking) commute every day I'm liking them a lot for a portable. I'm not noticing any problems with the cable. If you really don't like the cable though, Tyll posted about how easy it was to replace the HD-25/Aperior Cable in either the HD-25 or Amperior review videos. Pretty nifty. Also it nice to see that they listened to his criticism and remedied the cable termination issue. See the below quote from his Amerior review. This issue was fixed with a much smaller cable termination on all of the cables that ship with the Amperior.

So John, any progress with "juicing" the HV? Like you, I've got a ton of thermal headroom on my HV's heatsinks, but I'm worrying about how far I can/should push my PSU and transformer given the problems Live and Blu recently had. I've also got a SumR 100VA powering the 500V PSU and I'm wondering whether or not they can take the extra stress. I was hoping to see if I could get up to about 10mA, but now I'm wondering if its worth the risk.

I didn't think to check, but there might have been an open pair on display at the Apple store. If you have an Apple store nearby maybe call ahead and ask? Maybe they can pull one out for you?

Picked up the Amerior today. It's a keeper. As an unabashed Senn lover it fits the bill for a portable headphone. The only headphones I have to compare it against are the Staxen (which beat it easily) and the Shure 535s (which I prefer the Amperior to). I'm not as high on the 535s as others, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I also cannot get over the comfort issues with IEMs, even with the comply tips. Guess I'm just not an IEM guy. FWIW the Amerior seems to be an Apple store exclusive or something. Thats where I got mine. No where else seems to have them in stock.

Time to break out HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon" for a little tribute.