spritzer

HE90 "clone" first prototypes up and running as of yesterday: The drivers are all PCB based with 2um mylar diaphragms. They are about 3mm lower in height than stock to accommodate the cable entry and move the connections to the bottom of the drivers. The housing is resin 3D printed but this is the old version which has now been abandoned for a new one that has yet to arrive. Cables are King Sound (as I had some in stock) and allow me to fit it all in the same housing size as the original. The earpads are ones for the T+A Solitaire that are not a great fit but dirt cheap... so work just fine for this role. I've ordered new genuine pads but I'm not sure if Senn have any in stock. Next up is to refine the headband design and start to work on prototyping the metal back shell. Now I just wait on parts as usual... As for the sound, far from finished, even in prototype form but a HE90 with actual bass response... perish the thought!! ;)

Early Lambdas seem to last forever but anything made after 1990 has issues. Some are major, some are minor but still there. The X9000 has all the issues of the 009 and 009S so it's more of the same really.

I haven't found ones I really like, I settled on some pads off Aliexpress that arrived incorrectly so I'm not sure what listing would link to them. They are 105mm and perforated on the inside which isn't ideal but seem to work okey.

I will buy a set but if they sound like the originals... I probably won't like them. The HE90 has always left me cold, despite how many I've tried. The HEV90 doesn't fix them either, it just muddies up the sound... seriously the input cap on those is a very nasty electrolytic cap. How that is high end is beyond me... That being said, I've been slowly working on my own clone of the HE90 for a couple of years now. They will never be sold to anybody, just a very stupid and crazy expensive DIY project to fix the HE90's. I have some NOS headbands for them but I'm currently designing a new headband which has more range (as the stock ones barely fit me) and looks like the original. New drivers too but I've only sent out for the first prototype parts for those.

Of the current day Stax electrostatics that I've opened up, all of them will fail eventually. They are making stupid design decisions which are just a net negative and they should switch back to mylar for the film as the PEEK just doesn't work.

That's a good move. I might see if I can find a broken set somewhere and make my own version that I might actually want to use, as I did with the 009's.

As it turns out, Moondrop are finally releasing the MoonZero soon: https://www.hifihub.com.br/en/product-launches/moondrop-moonzero-445-electrostatic-headphone-takes-on-the-stax-sr-x1 This image courtesy of Fujiya Avic: Looks cool and if they can bring them in for under 500$... that is mighty tempting.

I think it is mostly just greed but yup, 10% on almost everything. The X9000 is up to 770KYen which is just stupid.

I moved the cable chat over to another thread but yeah... this is not great:

I figured it was worth its own thread to look at these aftermarket cables that have popped up. Now I don't really want to be a part of the whole cable mess but with electrostatics it is rather simple... the main component is capacitance. The cable will always add some and it determines how hard the entire system is to drive. So TLDR, more capacitance... everything is worse. The amp has to work much harder to try and push current into the top and bottom end. As a baseline, I tested a spare SR-X1 driver I had here and between the +/- inputs it is right on 40pF. We want to keep this as low as possible to keep the load low. So first off we have this ebay find, staight out of China: I was roughly 130$ shipped for the 2.5M version but I've seen them go for a lot more than that. It has the off the shelf Stax connectors on either end and they are nice enough quality. The wire is the cheapest, thinnest crap possible though. As a comparison the plan was to use a SR-X1/007S/009D cable but I only found a SRE-725 extension cable. Same length at 2.5m but is might be a tiny bit worse as the flat ribbon needs to connect to the Stax socket on the other end with wires will cross a bit doing that. Should be a small one but worth noting. I tested between the L+ and L- (I also compared against the R+ and R- but it should read the same) using a basic Uni-T capacitance meter at 1kHz. Both cables strewn out as long as they go on a wooden floor so minimal impact from that. So first off, here is the Stax SRE-725: That is 0.061nF or 61pF. Not bad and what I'd expect from the Wide PC-OCC cables. Now here we have the ebay cable... That is 0.46nF or 460pF. Yeah... that is not great is it. So as a comparison, the whole system capacitance with the Stax cable is 101pF, with the ebay cable it is 500pF. Yeah... this is utterly terrible and will make the headphones sound terrible. Now a second possible issue is how much voltage can the cable withstand. Again here we are hooked up to the L+ and L- simply because those pins are the easiest to get to with the large clips. This cable passes at 1500V with flying colors, almost 30 seconds and at almost 6 gigaohms so no issues there. I'm guessing this is actually double insulated as there is not a whole lot of wire in there.

These are available for preorder now: https://apos.audio/products/sjy-argos-electrostatic-headphones?utm_campaign=hyperfuse_last_day+%2801KZW4554JVNW58G1HET4TN43W%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=alex_nongdpr_never_subbed_active_180&_kx=cd77Rbf3yu6_OAujM-M4VU1ihuQFsjtyVcb-jl8r-OKxvi62Czezy2yxdLQUUnAj.Ldk8SW&variant=48186260947180 List price is 1800$... yeah no that is a hard pass for me. Just as a point of reference, how bad this has to be for me not to buy one. I'm a degenerate electrostatic headphone collector with pretty much every set ever made in my collection... even weird prototypes which never went anywhere.

It was mostly adjusting the design to different parts and the weird stuff were the PCB caps that Stax decided to use... plus the enlarged the amp chassis for no particular reason. In terms of being better than the 252S... nope.

Yeah, I'm not surprised as they are essentially a pile of caps stacked on top of each other. They are the easy solution but there are ribbon cables out there. I really like the 20AWG silicone rubber one which was rated to 600V but in did far more in testing. The new cable on the EH-1's is excellent, very much like the Wide PC-OCC Stax cable but with smaller conductors. Even the Monolith electrostatics from Monoprice had custom cables on them back in the day. Btw. here is a picture of the ebay Stax braided cable for posterity:

I thought I'd see if any of these cables are out there and what do we have here: Ebay Stax cable I bought one to do some testing on it but who thinks those wires can handle 1kV and are low capacitance...

Damn, never seen that happen. Most of the wires that I come across are just plated aluminum, even the silver wires as they just dual coat with copper and then with silver. It's super easy to check, just cut a bit of insulation off and hit it with a mini blowtorch or a hot lighter. If the wires curl up, that's aluminum. It is clearly a crap cable off aliexpress and there are plenty of ribbon cables available. It's just lazy and bad engineering. With the Hongshu EH-1 out now, this will be a very tough sell. I have no idea of the price but the EH-1 is 650$ with an amp and they are pretty damn good. Also no venting on the drivers there...