spritzer

I just looked at all my pics of SRA-14S amps and sorry, no detailed internal pics. It did how ever confirm my believe that your particular amp is a prototype as it lacks all the ususal markings found on all Stax amps such as the full company name, input voltage and Made in Japan.

Bugs me too, don't know why...

I do hope they release it soon as I wouldn't mind a set too.

Great news but are they going to make this any time soon? The small sub-sat speaker still hasn't reached production status...

Happy new year everybody!! About 30 minutes left to go here and the sky is already lit up and will stay so until well past 1am.

I think he sold his set.

Way too cool!!!

Happy Birthday!!!

Agreed, brilliant series.

Even I have that SACD and I'm nothing more then a casual fan.

Shhhh Marc, it's all magic!!!

Happy birthday!!! I made you some honorary baguettes but then I sold them all...

I have about 1200 CD's, 300 LP's and had a bunch of DVD's but I gave them all away just before Christmas. There is also a lot of music on my home server.

Happy Birthday!!!

Hell yeah!!!

Are the stators painted black on the ESL57? Almost all black paints have carbon in them which isn't a very good idea with high voltages. Even the guy which runs Quads Unlimited made that error though...

The difference between a SR-404 and the LE is so big that I'm sure tweaked drivers come into play. The LNS drivers are all but identical to the SR-404 yet they sound nothing like each other.

Pffft... I do think that a large potion of the HE60's out there aren't running at 100%, at least that has been my experience with the sets that have come through here. That includes the two "recently serviced" units which were clearly not done right by Sennheiser. Damn I want to buy a HE60 now...

The 4070 enclosure is brilliant but so is the whole headphone design. Managing the backwave without resorting to diminish the true dipole action of the drivers is something to be very proud of for Stax.

Nope, had a new-ish SR-404 here and it sounds just like the older units i.e. badly. I seriously doubt that the difference is down to the earpads since I changed them out on my SR-SC1 back in the day.

HE60 > HD600 > HE90 > HD800. The HE60 has to be properly refurbished and driven by a Blue Hawaii then it's easily the best model Senn has ever made. The HD600 may not be as refined as the He90 but they annoy me less and I could live with them day to day, something which can't be said about the He90. The HD800 is a fine headphone but nothing special. The HD650 I can't stand so it doesn't belong on the list.

I'm not buying the cryo crap but the SR-SC1 sounds a lot like the SR-404LE from memory. The drivers assembled a bit differently perhaps?

It could be a new version of the 252 as the 353 should be close to being released. The old amp was certainly just a rebadge with a new PSU but I don't know if they actually did anything with the amp circuit.

No, no she can just keep it as a bonus...

EAC to rip the disks in FLAC and you need nothing special besides that. For a Windows PC use Foobar to play it back and I'm sure the Ayre comes with some form of ASIO output to bypass the Kmixer built into Windows (it resamples everything to 48kHz and does other nasty things). HDD's are all way too fast to ever become a bottleneck and if anybody can hear difference then I'd like some of those drugs they are on. You can naturally use iTunes as well with ALAC but I never use it. Audiophile USB cables are a bigger scam then digital cables as next to none of them adhere to the strict USB standard. With the Ayre in particular you are feeding the dac an asynchronous data stream so the cable should not matter here just as the cables inside the computer won't matter. I'm sure that there are differences but are they from interference/dropped bits or just the sound being moar better? One thing you should consider later on is a NAS solution with some form of RAID for data security. HDD's don't really like the rather violent movements found on ships so show absorbers would be a good idea.