spritzer

I seem to remember there being a lip on these but I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I've taken apart SR-80's... No but it's not a gem either, it uses HV opamps and some really nasty parts as well. This compared to the Shure KSE1500 amp which is really, really nice.

Sure looks like it and let's just bask in the glory of the M-03...

It looks really flimsy to me and now that Massdrop is selling the ESP950, it is a much cheaper alternative. I also wonder if that thing is really an amp or just a passive adapter. Easy enough to build tiny transformers with high ratio so you can use it with normal headphone amps but without pretty much any pictures...hard to tell.

It is a very different animal to design something with whatever parts we want or making something in the hundreds or thousands with a reliable supply of parts. That being said, Stax does do a lot of stupid shit and they seem to be getting worse. Bad decisions galore and with the new stuff made in China, assembly has gone down the drain.

Fucking hell... I'll buy one. How bad can it be...famous last words.. Funny how they can do a proper 6 core flat ribbon cable at this price but Hifiman can't do it on a 50k$ product...

At its core, yes. They are running at much lower power with those tiny TO220 heatsinks and to be honest...pretty bad output transistors. KSC5502's with Cob of 20pf. Long gone are the days of 2.2pf... Stax also just fucks with the circuits for some reason. I once did a board for the 323S and just tweaked the circuit a little bit but with massive changes to the better.

The circuitry is similar (as with the D-50) but Stax always fucks with it in some way. The 717 was too warm for its own good and the 353X is a bit too bright for me. Easy to fix but outside the scope for most people.

For me the issue is paying so much for 009's. I might get one and offload some of my other sets or just have a 009 anodized black...

Nope, normal ones.

New Stax product for the 80th anniversary.... a black SR-009... https://stax.co.jp/products/sr-009bk/

That's a hardcore project. I'm helping a friend now removing all the tiles off the floor, redo most of the internal walls, going through all the electrical stuff and some more which intense enough...

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.