spritzer

Nothing is cheap in Iceland...nothing at all. It is one of those artificial materials, Dekton or something like that. Most of the cost is installation and cutting it all. I've been baking professionally since I was a child so not an interest, more what I was born into. I can't do it anymore though due to my bum knee so I've been focusing on other things more recently.

It's mostly me pushing for this as it is the second to last piece of the house renovation. It's silly expensive though... the stone countertops are in the 10k$ range...

All of the Stax speakers are insensitive (the F-81 was something like 73db) so you need a lot of voltage swing to drive them. I've never used those but I do have the kit here which uses the same drivers. Nope...I'm out. I haven't even gotten the Voce yet as I don't want to waste more money on something mediocre. Plus I'm spending wayyyyyyyyyy tooo much on having a new custom kitchen built.

Very interesting indeed. I wonder how this relates to other parts of the world who might use different methods.

With only a handful of exceptions (koss ESP, 6,7,9 and 10 mainly) the bias pins are tied together at the back of the amplifier socket so that wouldn't matter. I might have the ET1000 pinout somewhere but it's been years since I had one here. I'll have a look...

We should soooo sue them for using that name.

The issue with the ESP950 though is the damping. The design is very much still stuck in the 80's so all the damping has to be removed for them to sound the way they should.

That's a metric crapload of blue LED's...

I will certainly post my impressions.

Indeed, there are a lot of fake OPA445's out there as it is an expensive part.

The stock pads are terrible in every way. That nasty thin vinyl shit so horrible... These are probably an improvement in terms of comfort but the main issue is isolation. So electrostatics have one fundamental need, the baffle needs to be as large as you can make it. With speakers this is hard to do but one great example would be the custom made room the founder of SME made. The room was split in half with a wall in the middle and several Quad ESL's fixed to that wall. The back wave was free to enter the back half of the room but could not bounce back and cause cancellations on the other end. The performance of that system must have been sublime... Now with headphones, we have a simpler solution...sealed walls on the earpads. That way the sound coming from the front of the drivers has no way of affecting the backwave and vice versa. Now as to why Koss did this, no doubt that anybody working there now had no hand in a 30 year old design so perhaps they just don't know any better. Massdrop could also have a hand in this but it doesn't really matter, it is a stupid idea to do this. My solution, just get a set of the Vesper pads or those cheapo pleather ones off ebay.

Well I bought one but then again...I have issues. The cloth earpads, yeah dust is an issue but isolation is more of a problem. You need an infinite baffle with electrostatics and these can't do that.

...and on today in stupid, Massdrop ESP950: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/68938 With cloth earpads!!!??? So what the fuck?

They are rare and that increases Stax prices to silly levels. That said, not much known about them as my set is very different from the one on Y!. Mine came from the UK and have the PWB baffle (as he was the distributor back then) which was also used on his own sets. The drivers are pretty much the same as the SR-3 or late SR-1 but hard to tell if there are any real changes between them.

Well we knew that... I have one with the box and everything.

Ok, it is official...shit has gone crazy!! https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/u220740177 So that's the super rare SR-2 which Stax never officially made...for 4k$. There was an epic bidding war right up to the last second. I felt I overpaid for my set when I paid 250$ for it...

Indeed but we can always find new angles...

No that isn't true. The GG is actually much older than the T2DIY but it was never drawn up until after I finished the first Carbon boards. The actual design is much, much older. Stax even did a version of that basic design for one of the T2 prototypes so early 90's.

It works but is a far departure from regular Stax designs. Better than the King Sound shitbox but the bar is really low there.

I wouldn't. The new China Stax amps are not what one would call well built or use proper parts in my book.

The Stax amps are perfectly fine.

Might even be cheaper.

The Stax stuff is perfectly safe but Woo just don't give a fuck. They have been pulling crap like this for years but when you are a major sponsor of certain sites... you can have negative stuff removed. Even their mega-buck amps are like this.

If this is just some off the shelf crap flyback unit then there might be no markings at all. They are 100% incompatible with this role and probably why the L300's died. Now Woo might be rolling their own bias supply and potting it but that makes no sense to me at these voltages. I did look through my collection of WEE picks and other units which caused problems have similar units in them. No ballast resistors either but that's something which Woo doesn't give a shit about (and damages headphones). I wouldn't continue to use this thing but do check under the can next to the power input and see what's in there.

The bias supply is that gray box towards the front but what's in there...I'm not sure. Sure looks like an off the shelf flyback transformer for CRT displays which they have used in the past and are 100% unsuitable for this role. Can you take a picture of any marks on that box?