spritzer

Well I can always upgrade later on (the dacs just plug into the motherboard) but paying an obscene amount of money for some slightly better resistors is just not a good move in my book. Plus, that money has been allocated elsewhere... for expensive resistors for use in new amp designs.

Look at the ground plane, it is a bad joke.

I'll test it then just to me sure...

While this has been in the works for a while now I just sent the payment today for a MSB Platinum DACIII with volume control, 32bit/384kHz USB input plus all the latest firmware upgrades. Not cheap by any means but hopefully a end stop for me when it comes to sources.

I really don't see why people are so excited about this amp since it offers nothing new in terms of performance and the PCB design and layout is piss poor to say the least. Add to that a "designer" who is far from stable, thinks he knows something others don't and it isn't promising....

Ahh ok, clearly not idiot proof enough for me...

Yup, I just checked and the bridge for the +/-15V supply is indeed reversed. Just flip it over and you will be fine (- where + is marked).

Nice to see you here on the dark side Rūdolfs. Well we could remove them but I doubt Stuart would be happy... He has an RS-1 which is supposed to be better so I'll "ask him" to loan it to me as well.

I vote for throwing a gallon of petrol over the lot and lite it on fire. Slee makes RSA seem well designed by comparison...

The UK service guys have been pretty responsive and helpful in the past so it is well worth it to contact them. I would stay away from pretty much all of the cable guys since they have zero soldering skill. Soldering these cables is no joke as you are soldering directly to a high precision driver and excessive heat, flux castoff etc. will destroy the drivers. There is a reason why I use a soldering station with very high temperature stability...

It's right next to the (ineffective)strain relief on the cups.

Stax have been laying down the law as of late so sourcing parts is getting more and more difficult. If you can get a replacement cable then the swap is easy enough but the common rules about working up close and personal with electrostatic drivers have to followed to the letter.

50Hz sounds plausible to me but I have no equipment to measure this stuff and Stax would never release any info on this. As for the voltages, are you referring to just normal levels (70db is what most people seem to be running at) or something much higher like 100db?

I'll do that later on but these should be all but identical to the 404's. The cable is a much better fit to the gray housing though so I think they look a bit nicer. I'm a bit OCD so these are just a little bit special... There are no nasty double sided adhesives used to attache the drivers to the housing, it is all done with polyurethane. I even used it when I attached the metal grill to the other side of the driver (when moving Lambda drivers over to a Sigma chassis they have to be taken apart and the metal grill moved to the other side). Same deal on the SR-Lambda I made from the leftovers....

The older Stax Lambdas also have woven dust shields on the back (which is what Sennheiser copied) but these were only effective back when there was a damping layer to seal out the dust. The Lambda Sigs were badly affected by this. The LNS (and all later models) feature PVC sheets on both sides of the drivers.

I highly recommend you add plastic sheets on either side of the HE60 drivers to keep the dust out. While no 'stat driver likes dust the HE60 can go a bit nuts...

Screw the playback equipment, how about using an amp that is even somewhat neutral? The Sigmas can sound truly odd at times but that midrange is to die for. Reading something on HF? You must be mad... While the data we have are just small pieces of a much larger picture we can extrapolate from it and get somewhat plausible results. There is also a way to calculate the force but my brain is just too fried to even contemplate thinking about it...

It's been an interesting last couple of hours comparing the SR-009 to the SR-Sigma/303 I finished today. The Sigmas may be highly colored but they still manage to sound better then most headphones ever made. If there were any large scale excursions then the distortion would be much higher. To me the 4070 is a bit of a compromise and certainly hasn't got any extra detail over a good Lambda and far less than any of the Omegas. The working parts are stock SR-404 but with the 4070 Stax did the same trick as with the SR-X Mk3, cancel out part of the bass by bleeding it away which opens up the upper frequencies. They certainly are a monitor headphones in every sense of the word but still suffer from the same issues as all Lambdas by having the driver just hanging off a piece of aluminum by some not so great double sided adhesive...

If the diaphragm was loose-ish then I could see this to be true but once we factor in just how tightly stretched the Omega diaphragms are and the relatively weak force at hand here then any large scale excursion becomes improbable IMHO. Best way to determine this would be via distortion analysis because once you get any large scale excursion in a push-pull driver then the distortion rises quickly.

Happy Birthday Gents!!!!

This one has about 10 years on me so yeah, it is rather old. New soldering station landed today so I'm back in business and as it turns out, the pre and phone stages are nothing like the schematic and service manual. This is truly a very early unit...

Given that the diaphragm doesn't move at all (it just vibrates) then I doubt any run it will add to the impact.

Nice!!!

I unfortunately shipped out the last one a while ago.

It is indeed a huge factor and often overlooked. Even with superbly recorded stuff (SACD rip of Aja) they get quite a bit edgy once the volume is pushed much past 70dB.