spritzer

Large scale meets are indeed useless for any meaningful impressions and only a smaller setting or having something on loan will yield anything of substance. It's also interesting how people are "tricked" at the larger meets with higher volume levels, choice of music etc. Buying used Stax sets does carry risks but if the sets look to be in good condition then they will work perfectly. I've bought enough to know this isn't a perfect rule but it's true enough. I still can't help myself when I see some truly busted up Stax stuff to try and bring it back to life. Let's just say there is a reason why I have a large stock of single drivers... I've done plenty of that but their voicing just irks me a bit. They are just a bit hyper real at times, like a TV with all the post processing turned on.

Happy Birthday Steve!!!

Nothing springs to mind but I'll break out the 009's when I have time.

It's certainly a part of the issue but it also has a lot to do with the voicing of the transducer. I can hear certain issues, such as how the bass on the 009 just stops when you reach certain amplitude and frequency, regardless of the volume level. This is due to the diaphragm material, it's thickness and tension i.e. the voicing of the driver. Damping does play a part here but it is minimal on the modern 'stats as airdamping only does so much. As for the amps, yeah the Cavalli amps, WES, HEV90 and a few others will sound ok at meets but poor in real life. Same reason the HE90 concours every meet they are at...

Happy Birthday!!

To me the SR-Omega accomplished what the HE90 tried to do, throw a huge soundstage without sacrificing pinpoint imaging. I do think it is too bright but most of that is due to the craptacular enclosure as it only creeps in at higher volume levels.

Both are a bit "round" sounding so they should work well.

The amp is a fully rebuilt Stax SRA-10S with the preamp and phono amps removed. It's a pretty neat little amp and is mostly DC coupled except for the output stage which uses small silver mica caps on the output. Plenty of voltage swing and pure Class A power. Now by modern standards it does have some issues such as high imput impedance, way too much crap in the signal path and the output transistors are very much of it's time. Since I have two of them then the plan is to rebuild one to be as close to original as is possible but the other one will be modernized as a headphone amp only. New volume control, 2SC4686A output transistors, all new parts etc. As for the GES, I'm not so sure. It has a lot of caps in the signal path which will alter the sound quite a bit. I do have a version of that circuit ready for testing so I can report on the match once I can get to that. Who knows when that will be since the next few weeks will be murder...

The problems with the R10 are numerous (no parts, crumbling foam which can get into the drivers etc.) but how they are built also makes them very hard to service. The only person even willing to look at them seems to have vanished and taken a R10 with him belonging to one of our members...... On the issue of the 009 being too bright, I have found an amp that makes them 'em work for these ears. It takes the edge off just enough so I can listen to Iron Maiden at silly levels yet not sacrifice the stunning clarity.

Well the ET-1000 is quite good but it was all downhill from then...

Speakers normally use push on connectors for all internal connections so these can become loose. I guess it is time to do some exploratory surgery...

Yup.

I bet...

Too cool!!

No, the TKD's are a bit different. For instance the curve is different and so is the treatment of resistive track.

I'm sure you can get a two gang RK50 for a sane price in the US. I know Woo has have been using them so you could drop them a like. The TKD stepped attenuators are also very, very nice.

Happy Birthday Jeff!!!

Yup, quite brilliant. The good thing about UK tv are the short seasons, less filler.

Can't go wrong with the T-amps. This one looks rather nice....

My take on the WES is that they took the GES, threw in some octal tubes, added some not so clever designs "twists" and called it a day. It's also quite clear from my discussions with WES owners that Woo are at a loss how make the amps work properly. One chap was complaining about poor sound quality so Jack asked him to send the amp in for the "Mk2 upgrade". When the amp arrived they found out the amp already had the upgrade... Then their suggestion was to improve the PSU with some Jensen caps, not something that would tackled the real issue. Some other chap complained about the DACT and asked to have the gain lowered. Then Jack tried to sell him a 1k$ RK50 as the only possible fix. Getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn anything IMO. When you have a pile of parts in front of you not doing what they should, you are pretty much forced to understand the circuit to fix the issue. I'd also recommend to build pretty much anything you can think of, tubes, SS, opamps, preamps, poweramps etc. since all of them have their own traits. I just read over Doug's parafeed article and I highly recommend it.

SR-Omega would be an option too but it's more similar to the Mk1 then not. None that I've found.

That thread is a gigantic clusterfuck and I just love NoNoNoNoNoNo calling me a child when I was just replying to Jude's accusations. Sure, I'm a hothead but If Jude had any clue then he'd ran for the hills when the sociopath (NoNoNoNoNoNo) agrees with him. I guess I don't have any idea how the Exstata sounds since my own version was better from day one (better PSU and higher rail voltages with hand selected, non Fairchild, transistors)...? What many people don't know is that Jude's utter lack of understanding amps and their design caused Single Power to claim a bit more victims back in the day. I posted a thread a full year before I got my ES-1, stating serious concerns about the ES amps based on internal pics and talking with some of the owners. I pointed to all the known issues, single filament supply burning up the tubes, parts way out of spec, improper bias supplies etc. Same day Jude stepped in and removed the thread when Mikhail complained that these were all lies. Mikhail claimed he had done extensive alterations to the SRX circuit and Jude bought it all. I offered to send all my data to impartial designers and have them look at it (Pete and Ti were a couple of names thrown about) but no, change a few resistors and it's a whole new circuit and minor details such as 400V caps seeing 800V isn't a problem so the thread was never allowed back out in the open. I didn't have a ES-1 here to "verify my findings" so things were allowed to continue as if nothing had happened. We all know how that one turned out... My point about the SR-009 is that it's a very impressive transducer, certainly one of the best in the world so if one isn't used to this level of clarity and lack of distortion, your findings will be of utter amazement. Same deal with the HE90, plenty of people have been mesmerized by it and never spotted the obvious flaws. Doesn't really matter what amp you use them with, the HEV90 is certainly no feat of engineering and the early examples are just piss poor IMO. As for HF, I really don't know why I bother to go there any more. Most of the PM's I get I never bother to reply to and most threads are just the same useless crap they were years ago.

Just going by memory the speakers are about 100x100mm and the diaphragm-stator gap should be around 0.65 to 0.7mm.

Yup, bias of +1200V for the PS1 and PS2 series, -1550V for the PS0. Crazy levels but then again these were originally speaker drivers fixed to the plastic frame.

It is, I don't think anybody has heard what they really can do due to crappy enclosure design and crazy power requirements. The latest transformers have a ratio of 1:120 which is five times what Stax were using... Now for the second problem, find a set of Floats that fit my head...