spritzer

My rant wasn't targeted at you Frank but rather the people out there who are selling amps and do know fuck all about electrostatics (Ray, Rudi, Woo and Cavalli). That said, a primer to go into the details is needed but Kevin and I are swamped beyond belief. I've yet to finalize a basic guide to electrostatics for Tyll and I started it in July. Way too many things to do and no time... The simple fact is that electrostatics do soak up a fair bit of power and Stax even had to find a way to cool the SR-009 stators as them heating up is naturally a very, very bad thing. Notice the hole in the center of the drivers, that's for cooling them. With the 007 this isn't a problem since they are sitting on the FR4 substrate.

Colin would be correct since the only thing you can look for at these levels are the amps simply not being able to perform adequately. Sure, in direct A-B comparisons you can pickup small differences but these have much more to do with distortion etc. Stax are also lowering the gain of the amps from the looks of it. There is certainly no need for the 60dB these days and lowering it can only yield better performance. These specs aren't something any manufacturer would post. Just see how many speaker manufacturers flat out lie about the most basic specs and they would never post the exact impedance plots for their speakers. That's why we need places like Hi-Fi News who do measure this. Same thing applies to the headphones as one would have to measure each of the sets.

Well my resistors are now in Dhaka but I think it would be a good idea to replace all of the battery units. Sadly there is a lot ignorance when it comes to other regions. For instance a PM I got over there complaining about my bias boards having gone up in price with time. It's not like the USD has lost value or anything like that...

Allied Electronics used to do this all the time though they just sent my packages to Israel. I mean IL and IS are pretty much the same thing... right?

I see dbel has taken the Cavalli course on electrostatics: "I know fuck all about the subject".

I want one as well... It will. The stock bias is 540V with a 10M ballast resistor. Anything else that that will alter the measurements in unforeseen ways.

Well, I just found out what is holding up my resistors... they are in Dubai... Somebody at Mouser made a slight error as to where I am in the world.

Bloody Fedex... hurry up with those resistors!!!!

It's truly astounding just what little people understand even about the very basics. Larry is comparing based on memory with no regard taken as to the specs of the source, gain of the amp and judging how powerful an amp is based on how loud it plays. I'm sure most will see just how stupid this is. While we do use voltage swing as some arbitrary benchmark for amps it is all but worthless in reality. It says nothing about what's going on in the amp at these voltages (i.e. how it handles the load), it's just the rail voltages (or single rail where that applies like the GES/WES plus many others) minus the natural losses that incur. If this was the sole benchmark then the KGSSHV would rule them all with the +/-500V rails or roughly 1900VP-P. It does but there is much more to it then just that. One of the roots of the KGSSHV design came from an email Kevin sent me some years ago listing transistors he found that would allow the normal KGSS to run at much higher voltages, certainly +/-450V if not higher. That led to a discussion of what is really needed to drive these transducers and the demanding load they present. The main "selling point" of the KGSSHV is that it fixes how the third stage is handled (adds a CCS where the old one uses resistors) which was the main weakness of the old design. The new PSU is also a very worthwhile addition but the extra voltage swing isn't really needed IMO. It does certainly no harm and it moves the normal listening range even further from the limits of the amp. The gain is still the same so to make this amp clip you have to feed it a lot of voltage and say goodbye to any headphones connected to it since they won't survive these voltages. Years ago Kevin asked me what I wanted to see in new designs and my reply was something like this: "More voltage would be nice but above all else we need more power" More power brings better load tolerance so the amp is less of a factor. This is the same direction Stax have been going in for the last 40 years. The SS amps they had 37 years ago used a single rail voltage with resistors for the load and output caps. In 1982 the SRM-1 Mk2 arrives with dual HV rails so it could be fully DC coupled but the resistors are still there. Later they are also replaced and the latest amps all feature improvements to the other stages, same as the KGSSHV. Indeed. Your sig is very fitting now...

...and the polarity of the drivers fixed?

Slowly coming together...

Power and volume aren't the same thing and any layman that thinks that is as ignorant as you are. You also seen to have no grasp what gain is and think that an amp with higher gain is somehow more powerful. You also have no idea what clipping is and how it presents. Seriously, go read a fucking book!

This man speaks the truth!! The 007A and Mk2 are heading for the chopping block but I'll probably be buried with my Mk1's...

Mafia approved to say the least, Deepak.

Why are you dissing my wonderful collection of polka and 70's German porn music tracks? You are such a snob... We can at least agree that my 007's are a bit special given my OCD need to set them up properly. How on earth can you still not understand what power means?? Volume is voltage, nothing more than that and the tiny Stax amps will drive any of these sets to earsplitting levels.

There are quite a few that prefer the 007... I really need to find one of those for next to nothing. The empty tube socket was just too funny...

That's probably wrong since +/-400V should give more voltage swing then that. The Exstata V2 (KG edition) certainly does.

We really need to get started on those clones...

The pins are a bit of a pain to solder to, especially if you like to have two sockets so the adapter boards make things easier. I drew up one a long time ago but never had any made which might be time to do now...

Happy Birthday!!!

Using the new drivers is certainly doable but you need a special rig to glue them together in and you also have to completely open them up to get the glue onto the parts. This exposes them to dust so one wrong move and the drivers are fubar. I've seen speculation about retrofitting the new driver cages into a Sigma chassis but somebody proposing that has never worked on a Sigma frame. There is no room inside it and the normal drivers barely fit. I used a 303 as a donor set because I had one sitting in Japan and aesthetically it's the best fit to a normal bias Sigma with the gray cable. Since John asked me about the sound, well it is a very good Sigma but with the 007 and 009 here it's in tough company. The midrange is glorious as ever but in other area it is rather colored though never in a bad way. I do think this is the best Sigma I've ever had though and it does look damn good after all the work I put into them (even painting part of the chassis). Here it is with some of its younger siblings...

Holy hell those LCD-3 earpads are thick... How does the volume control work on those Woo beasts? One pot per chassis?

If I were you I'd stop making assumptions since you are clearly just talking out of your ass.

We do use some it in the bakery now for making confectioneries. Nothing survives in that much alcohol...

I think Sennheiser are intentionally holding back based on the stuff I hear from the distributor here. For instance, where is the black HD800 that was supposed to be released by now? I spent an hour with one at CJ'10 and hated it. Now I'm not a fan of 6SN7/300b amps in general but this was just bad in every way. I couldn't believe how bad the Beyer T1 was until I moved onto the Woo6 and heard it was mostly the amp that made then sound that way. As for the monoblock beasts... yeah, I can't wait to see internal pics of that to see how they are going to get 3 different amps to function off the same tube sockets.