Icarium

If it wasn't for the heat and the terrible water!

Wow hungrych that is terrible. Hopefully he makes good on it bleah :/

Hrm weird I've touched both second stage/driver tubes before. Not like for long periods of times just accidentally brushed across them reaching for various things. They didn't feel like they burned me unlike when I've touched my SDS tubes in operation. No idea. I've touched my Yamamoto amps tubes before in operation but its a hybrid amp I think if that makes a difference. Maybe when I touched the ES-1 tubes it was for a realllyyyyy brief amount of time, too brief to register the pain unlike when the SDS tubes burned the shit out of me. P.S. That's right, socal is whack I forgot.

Yeah I was annoyed at the buyer because he didn't let me know that it had arrived or say a single word to me after a week of arrival (I checked the tracking thing) so I wrote him up and asked him about the condition also wondering if he was going to help out with paying for shipping which ended up costing 3x more than i had anticipated and he had said that after receiving it he'd consider throwing in a bit more to compensate. When he finally replied, said he had been in the midst of handling remodeling, he said it sounded a rung better than anything he'd heard (Good), but when he took it out of the packing (Was well packed I supervised it at a Fedex/Kinkos many boxes were sacrificed to create form fitted support essentially double box + more support/lots of bubble wrapped used) a big ass screw fell off of it and when he opened it up the transformer it was holding down was sliding around a bit and there was a pcb board missing a screw and was vaguely adhered to the chassis with some sort of silicon glue. I was like uhhhh... jesus. He didn't offer to throw in anything for shipping ;p I didn't complain ;p

Yeah I dunno. I remember asking Mikhail about just purchasing a Maestro chassis by itself for a DIY project I'm commissioning... and he said that it had some tech (I forget the name, maybe he just meant really precise machining no idea) where basically once the screws are screwed into it, it would behave as a single solid mass and would have better vibration characteristics. I don't know if that's voodoo or BS, but it sounded pretty cool and like there was some thought into the chassis build/screw selection... but not 2000 dollars cool so I had to pass on that particular chassis ;p

Whatever they are they are way more secure than my Rudistor amp's screws which were ALWAYS coming loose as was the 1/4th inch out's hex socket thing.

Pfft we live in California! What if I lived in.. god forbid Florida or somewhere tropical I can't afford to be sweating into my headphones if I ever need to sell them! Though yeah I'd imagine air conditioning could potentially encroach unfavorably on listening environment :/ True audiophiles would never use such a thing.

Oh locked made it sound a lot more sinister. Yeah I haven't opened up my amps before but after hearing the condition my Rudistor was in from my buyer when he opened it up.... maybe I should start. I've looked inside Neil's amp and Voltron's amp when Mikhail was in the process of repairing them and they both tidy as far as I could gather, though I am not a DIYer, with all the identifiable items... black gates/audio note caps (Handsome looking caps). I've kinda been telling myself that the issues that his amps ship with sometimes are related to the slightly more fragile nature of point to point + shipping... but maybe really well done point to point is as sturdy as pcb based stuff... I have no idea.

How are his chassis locked? Is there a proprietary tool/key needed to open them? I've heard it mentioned before and I'm not doubting it, but I'm curious bout the method.

I have an ES-1 and the chassis isn't hot anywhere. The Power section feels cool at worst the audio section feels warm but definitely not hot as I could rest my hand on it indefinitely. The tubes are also touchable and not painful hot though warmer than the audio section. It would only warm my room if I had the bedroom door closed but even on a Californian summer day as long as I left the bedroom door open it would not be appreciably hotter than any other room on the top floor of my house. The stories I've heard about the past Blue Hawaiis is that they were the hottest amps ever eclipsing the dynamight which was already in the too hot to touch for a significant amount of time territory. I heard the air around the tubes was very very hot as well. The hottest amp I had touched to date has been the Zana Deux which was much less hot than either the dynamight or the blue hawaii (Or so I was told). Now the new Blue Hawaii sounds like it has much better chassis cooling, but basically what I was asking was whether or not the new version will dissipate the same amount of heat as the old one over all. My concept of what improved heatsinks provide is that it will better diffuse the heat into the air more efficiently which will allow the chassis/internals to be cooler yea? But if it still generates as much heat period as the old version, then it would be hard for me personally to live with such an amp in a place with hot clime unless you run the air conditioning like mad.

I've had pretty good luck with phone calls 85-90 percent success rate (Only missed him like 2-4 times in 25-30 calls). But I also haven't put a real non-tube order yet (Though I own 3 of his amps... well 2 now bye electrostatic rig ).

Hrm even with the new heatsinks the Blue Hawaii is still going to heavily warm up a room right? As the heat dissipates into the air?

For upgrades if you stay on him then it should be better (Maybe 2-3 months worst case maybe less). It depends on how work load. He just got several highly customzied amps (Voltron's/Neilvg's/a few others) out the door so his life should be a little bit easier now, but of course he may have already accepted more orders (Though hopefully he finally decides to take less custom orders at a time).

Yeah I mean I'm skeptical of that too... but I really don't find any flaws with the sound. But 20k Reimyo? that seems pushing it. I still stand by my stance that no matter how good the dac is. dac + cd player > dac + computer and depending on the cd player it could be superior to dac + computer.... Still if any company out of those I've heard could do it it might be Wavelength.

Yeah the inputs are fairly limited I'm not totally sure why but I think he has some sort of hardcore proprietary processing on the usb that makes it sound the best. Can always look on the used market. There's a used cosecant version 1 for 2150 or so on audiogon last time I looked. I hear version 2 is significantly better though.

I strongly recommend a Wavelength Audio dac... the Cosecant is 3500 and a badass dac for sure. I have the Cosine which is the non usb version that is now discontinued and supposedly vastly inferior to the Cosecant though it retailed at the same price years ago. It's a tubed NOS single ended dac but it has solidly destroyed all DACs in the 1k region including a few I've heard in the 1.5k region. I got it for 800 used but it usually lists for 1200-1400. The downside is that all his dacs are single ended. Upside is that they all sound very good except for maybe the Brick. There is a significant quality jump in each of his lines too its not just like same sound signature but a bit more refined... JP#'s is getting new Cosecant v2 later this week I'll probably check it out. He offers generally offers at least two options with his DACs... copper/silver wound transformers. Always go with next model up before you go with the silver transformer option. I used to be a big proponent of Empirical audio but after hearing both products and reading various posts I now consider Gordon Rankin of Wavelength to be a superior engineer and to design superior products. What's wavelength stuff sound like? My amp is extremely organic and detailed (And I've been known to place detail over warmth/musicality but this dac does both) and unlike my last tubed dac the soundstage is very wide. There's not a whole lot of WoW factor but if you listen more and more the sound has amazing depth and very consistent and solid resolution. I constantly analyze the sound when I listen and I cannot find any flaws or areas I would improve. I guess if I have any complaints it might be that I'd like a bit more instrumental separation... but I've popped in a different tube and that's improved some what at a loss of impact and tone so I may go back to my Valvo ECC86.

It really sucks on my ES-1 I cannot get the granularity that I like and there's a HUGE jump between steps 3/4.

Yeah it's not all about the chip itself, obviously implementation plays a huge role as well ;p Sooo its tough to say if the differences you are hearing are all due to the change in bits.

Yeah Neil selling his headphile HE60 (Though I am skeptical of headphile mods in general) for $999 was an amazingly generous move to make.

Yeah they say teflon v-caps which is what he uses is on par with the audionote silver. Eh I have peace of mind though ;p You should talk Mikhail into hooking up some Tamura iron ;p

Yeah the HEV70 is a shitty amp that isn't really worth consideration. KGSS DX would definitely be your most affordable upgrade that or the Woo but i suspect the KGSS DX will be better even though it didn't impress me with the O2. As for surface. Sennheiser has guaranteed everyone that I've takled to that they have a strong supply of pats for the HE60/HE90 to last for a good long time. They aren't like Sony with their support of their discontinued headphones. Sony is the absolute worst.

Yeah I dunno about the difference between v-caps and audionote.. though I have audionote in my SDS myself. They sound great. But how much better? I don't know. As long as you are going at up to v-cap in interstage and upgradnig the transformer to the 250 dollar level sounds like you have your bases covered as I think those are two of the more if not most important upgrade areas. Did you consider the used balanced supra that dwglghlgh or whatever is selling on head-fi? It's pretty upgraded and if he is willign to let it go for 3k which is what he paid roughly (I don't know if any of the upgrades were after him buying it) then it might be a great deal.

DHL is some hardcore weaksauce.

the 45 step single power stepped attenuator is perfect for me. Almost too granular. The 24 step is worthless though.

Yeah that's fine. The DAC design is pretty cool to and asebastian is going to probably at least swap out the opamp output stage for either a pass labs designed discrete output stage or mod it to use a superior opamp that Filburt recmomended. Either way though I'll probably mostly use the tubed output stage. I still have high hopes for this sucker.. I think whether or not the chips are normal TDA1541s or double crown it mayyy sound pretty similar but the design is pretty badass.