spritzer

Looks brilliant!! ...so when can I order one?

I don't have a soft spot for what was a compromise from the start. The chassis they ended up with was not what they wanted to do as the tubes were supposed to be in chimneys to take away a lot of the heat but it was probably too expensive. The stuff on the input tubes are shields to try and keep crap out of them. They used nice caps but no audiophile BS.

It's a feature that it can cook eggs on the top panel... Kinda funny when the only option in Iceland is to take off the top panel and have a fan close by to cool it.

I sold it back in 2010 as it makes no sense to keep it. It doesn't sound as good as people think it does and the hum bothered me a lot. Well that and it was doomed to fail so I just recapped it and moved it on.

Done and some nostalgia as it's been a decade since this was going on...

If those resistors blow, there has to be a short in the output stage. See the schematic:

I will be getting a set as well. The L700's have potential but this is modern Stax so fuckup is a 50/50 tossup...

I'd start there but it might be a good idea to go even lower.

That does look like a nice solution for a detachable cable but they did say somewhere it was the first time... ehhh no... SR-Omega...

Well you need to look at the system as a whole and HE90's at pro bias is a really, really bad idea. Ideally you should go even lower down than 500V as the D/S gap in them is so small. Well that and uneven stators but that's a known issue. So with the HEV90, the max voltage swing is just about 1100Vppss on a good day so they can get away with that. Now plug this into a Carbon or a T2 and... well... that's not a good idea really. It is so easy for the amps to overdrive the headphones so I'd personally scale down the bias even further.

I never messed with the earpads on the ECR-500 as it was really before all that started....

60-70$ or so. Not bad for the quality you get.

You can also just use the extension cable that came in the box. Also the angled earpads were a custom order from Vesper Audio. Fong carries the normal flat pads but it is easy enough to order the custom ones from Belarus.

I prefer the newer 007 pads and they last a lot longer than the old ones.

Cheap and Stax parts don't go together. The issue is more "can I even get that?"

Why on earth would I do that? I don't think I even own anything that uses opamps unless you are counting servo's.

Cap tolerance is often in pF for low value caps or precision ones but there are none here. The pinout is standard for a dual opamp and the cap is 118nf measured between V+ and V-. That's all the "magic" here. Edit: Yeah no resistors or anything like that. I also like the "custom pins" they tout as they are just the normal sockets turned upside down...

I don't think anything is going to fail but things to look out for, noise in the headphones with nothing playing, bad connection where the cable meets the earcups as that is a known failure spot on the early Mk1's and the condition of the earpads and the headpads as the earpads wear out and on the really early Mk1's the headpad disintegrates. As for the amp, take the top off and look at the silver getters on the tubes, if they aren't nice and silver I'd swap out the tubes and if one is milky white...you need new tubes. I would also blow all the dust out of the amp as it can short out the amp but that's about it.

....so I bought one of these. They popped up on Massdrop while I was talking to Kevin who immediately called BS on this. My curiosity peaked, I had to get one. Here is the product page: https://www.bursonaudio.com/products/supreme-sound-opamp-v5i/ BS meter is tingling so I waited for it to arrive: Nice enough box and here are the internals: I forgot to take a picture of the top but it looks exactly as it did on the page. Here is the bottom though: The potting compound is pretty soft so here is what I found: So... the only thing in there is an opamp with the top markings sanded off and one small cap. There is nothing on the bottom, just this. We have no idea what opamp that is but it would be pretty simple to dissolve the resin and look at the die. I very much doubt this is some custom one off unit, why would they sand off the top if it was some custom device? Also, why is that cap there? I mean this is a dual opamp so two channels and two power rails...why one cap? This reminds me of the Single Power tube adapters, they had parts for just one section of the dual triodes...why I just don't know.

I'm running mine right now off a Carbon so no issues.

Hifi+ and Absolute sound, same company and the same level of utter garbage. I buy them from time to time just to laugh at all the inaccurate shit they print. They don't check anything so they might as well be the PR agents for the manufacturers.

Yes, I think that was the first one. I can't find the schematic with a quick search but it should be here somewhere. Then we had the SRM-1 Mk2 first version in 1982 but in reality, most of that improvement had already been done to the later SRM-1 amps. It's fun to open those up... you never know what you are going to find.

Well it is a Hifiplus review so not even useful as toilet paper...

Other than laughing at his badly made crap for years, nope. I was the first one to take the original Jade apart and reveal the crap it was but that hardly counts as it was over a decade ago. Funny enough, the cable used on the original Jade is superior to the one they use now, gotta love "progress".

You can't look at the bias in a vacuum as it's the max potential of the entire system. Here, there is a certain range but it always depends on the drive voltages. If they go to high, you will arc the system. You can tell in the extreme cases but not really. Maybe with an electron microscope or something like that...