spritzer

I'd never, ever touch the diaphragm with my bare fingers. Nothing good can come of that. The tape can leave residue which can arc the drivers. You need something that is sticky but takes next to no force to remove.

Here.

Stax always charge way too much for the drivers. Not as bad as Sennheiser but still...

If you want to sell them then feel free to drop me a line. I'd rather open up a set known to be bad rather than open up my pristine one.

Open up the driver and clean it? That's all there is to do plus possibly patch up a hole in the dust diaphragm.

Those should be fine.

Good point, those have to be 1/2W.

That is excellent work!!

By using a shielded transformer and placing it as far away from the "signal path" as is possible this becomes far less of an issue. It's also not like you don't have roughly 6A of AC riding through that umbilical cord with the DC voltages just to keep the tubes lit. Much better to place the power supply close to the amp boards and keep the heater stuff away from everything else.

This is the problem with the SRM-Xh, there are at least three different versions out there and that's not counting the SRM-Xs....

Nope, no Xh schematics but I have a dead one around here somewhere...

The internal should be superior but there are way too many variables to consider.

But... but... that would kill the magic!!! Can't have that...

We could steal borrow equipment at the show and rip it apart in front of everybody...

It will eat the 007t for dinner when I'm done with it. This is a far better amp. Not one of these, no but some of the Singlehour stuff came close.

Here is what it looked like new: Three umbilicals as Mikhail never used anything but those bloody Speakon connectors. The screen was a voltmeter which floated and thus didn't work. I'll probably have the MA logo laser etched into some acrylic and light it from the side. Ohh and Kevin thought this was funny... That used to my IEC chassis punch. I was only using it to mark the right size for me to cut the IEC but it really didn't like that. I managed to snap a 1/2" hardened steel bolt and have the bearing implode by hand.

Just rectifying the heaters won't do and will cause a lot of problems. You need to regulate it and doing so while it floats at -350V is problematic.

Did you tightly twist the heater wiring all the way from the transformer to the board? That is the most likely source of hum... You can also try swapping the wires and see if that helps.

That paddle will go on my wall. The stock amplifier never worked correctly and had a permanent offset of -110V so I'll build the fixed ES-X instead. For this I need a +/-400V PSU's, a second -430VDC supply for the output tube bias and then a +12VDC supply for the front end heaters. I found a good deal on some 12SL7's so it makes sense to use them instead of new production 6SL7's. The chassis already has four large 50K resistors attached so I'll use them instead of adding a CCS. The crazy shit is half the fun. Some things in there just didn't make any sense, such as the inputs. He had XLR's wired as one would but the RCA's were simply connected to the XLR + and nothing done about the - leg. How that was supposed to work is beyond me...

I thought it would be fun to document the insane amount of work it will take to turn the Single Power ES-2 into something useful. Now Kevin had done quite a bit of work for me such as fitted new teflon tube sockets and teflon Stax sockets but that still leaves a lot of shit to do. Here is what it looked like when I got it: The wooden front for the amp section was cracked so Kevin threw it out. The weight of just the empty chassis was pushing 24kg so my first decision was to ditch the PSU and do it internally. First up do the back panel: Here is the reason why I don't add RCA's to my amps... Now for the front panel. Mikhail had plenty of very useless holes there for various functions that never worked. This makes things tricky but the front needs to have four 50K pots to adjust the offset of each output tube, two 5K pots with two test points for each to adjust the front end balance. One quad pot as well as a rotary power switch to hide some of those extra holes... Now comes the fun part of cramming power supplies into the chassis...

Indeed it is. I'm not too keen on external PSU's if I can skip them.

No way to move that resistor, just look at how cramped the PCB is. The boards keep getting smaller but the circuits more complicated. The stereo KGSSHV board takes this to the n-th level.

Happy Birthday Dinny!!!

This is Stax after all, their serial numbers don't make any sense. Some of the first 007Mk2's sold in Europe had a SZ3 serial number.... back in 2007. I think they might do this shit on purpose...