spritzer

Same thing here, I have thousands of them.

I haven't spent any time with it recently as I constantly have new toys to play with but I'll get back to it at some point. For the price it walks all over the Massdrop and Monoprice garbage. It's also far more useful, a dac (with a variable output too), a preamp and a headphone amp.

Gotta love those clones...

Yeah but I haven't spend nearly enough time with them to properly compare. Anybody thinking this is a L700 lite is sorely mistaken though...

With electrostatics this is more academic that anything else due to their balanced nature. The Stax wiring scheme calls for the + output to be wired to the front stator, i.e. closest to the ear. This one is the reverse of that, with - fed to the front stator. This has been done before though, the Sennheiser HE60 is supposed to be wired like this and some others over the years as well. Years ago when I first got into this (shit...more than 15 years ago) I was interested in this and made a cheater plug which does just this, reverse the polarity of the drivers but naturally both at the same time. It did very little if anything but I might have to dig it out and do some more testing.

I haven't tried those pads but swapping the pads out in general on the KS does wonders. The stock ones are abysmal and yet they use the same ones as on the KS-H1's...

I had one here so why not use it. As for a difference, there is a subtle one but it's hard to know with the shitty earpads. Those plastic clips are super annoying so I can't be sure if they are really sealing.

...because it kinda is?

Good point about the mesh and that it might be even more restrictive. I for one have never felt there to be any real benefit to the mesh in practice but it's hard to know for sure without direct A-B comparisons of identical units except for the stators. In other news, the shitty cable is gone now in favor of a Stax SRE-950S extension cable. I did cut about 1M off it but now it actually reaches my amps... Here is what you get with your 4K$ headphones... It does weigh almost nothing but then again...there is nothing there. With a bit of force I managed to just pull the cables out of the cable entry so no molding going on there. Pull back the techflex and it is just loose wires with the heatshrink at the end used to hold it all together and to secure the cable in the cable entry. Three layers there that I count. Nothing else holding the cable in place unless I missed some glue but I don't think so. The insulation on the wires is also pretty thin and it feels like cheap PVC, it certainly melts easily. The outside diameter of the wires is 0.9mm and the wire itself is 0.3mm so the same on each side to insulate it. Me thinks this is not rated for 1000V+ use but I'd have to break out the HV test jig and zap it multiple times to see how it holds up. One other note, the drivers are wired up as inverted. I decided to keep it like that as it was simply easier to fit the much thicker Stax cables that way in the cups but it should make little to no difference.

The thump shouldn't do any damage but it might be a good idea to follow the original and add some relays to the output. Stax used a 4PDT Omron relay but it is rated to nowhere near the specs we really need.

Awww...I didn't want to do any work!! I have something special planned for those 009's so yeah, I still want them. Hint, I'll replace the diaphragms and retune them completely.

I was going to offer new diaphragms for the 009's so yeah...they needed to be fixed. Justin you know what to do... I'll take one.

The construction is ok but nothing more than that. As a contrast, the SR-007 drivers are in a resin case which is then screwed directly into the aluminum shell. This here reminds me more of the SR-Omega construction where the aluminum chassis is more for show. The extra cable inside the cups has to be there to protect the drivers should the cable be pulled out of the entry...but it's still a silly solution. I'm prepping the new cable for them so I'll do the swap soon.

Well... I dug out the screwdrivers... Sorry for the crappy pictures, I just had the iphone to hand. First off, the true quality Stax plug: So that disk there normally sits flush with the plug as the pins are too long. They had that problem with the Jade so nothing has changed in a decade... Pure class. It is also incredibly crude. Funny how King Sound could make a ribbon cable and a proper plug at 1/8th the price... Speaking off the cable, you can barely make out the loose wires in there when I press it together. Here's the earpads...well one of them. They are pretty comfy but they do stink quite badly. No expense spared here... I did order some new pads to try out. Here is the baffle and the cable entry. The latter seems to not be molded around the cable so I might be able to remove this cable and put in a proper ribbon. Very long screws... They go all the way to the back of the housing which is plastic and has nice metal inserts. Now the baffle is off and it has this nice rubber gasket to maintain baffle seal. Now we can see the cable and the metal frame which provides the bulk of the assembly. Here is the back of the protective mesh. These are not the stators so why Hifiman uses this in the promo's as the stators is beyond me... Another gasket here which is good. Here we have the driver. There is a protective mesh but it is odd. It's not a solid sheet but some sort of a porous membrane. Copper mesh stators and the pitch is very fine. Finally the back of the drivers and the second protective mesh. You can also see the plastic frame which holds it all together. The drivers are glued together so I didn't want to mess with them more at this time. One funny thing, the cables inside the cups are really long. Like 10cm even though they would need only about 2cm or so... Over all, I'm impressed by the build quality. It's not Stax quality but they are getting better. I eagerly wait for the Mk2 version next month...

Ok that makes them a bit more reasonable but still... the parts are crap at this price.

The imbalance issue is still real and one set I know of is now on the fourth set of drivers. Every time it was sent back to Japan and it failed again. There were also issues with the new drivers being installed incorrectly so something is clearly going on. I do get about one email every month asking for advice with imbalance issues and the same thing stands, hit them gently on the offending side while not energized and they should spring back to life. As for the amps doing damage, you can bet your ass that amps out there will do just that. Woo amps with no output protection and laughably small ballast resistors, Cavalli amps with bias supplies which can fry the diaphragm. All those amps with a cap right on the diaphragm which is a very bad idea. Best was the Rudistor crap where he just placed huge caps in the bias supply to get rid of some hum and it had enough potential to burn it all too hell. Great plan...

Well they aren't identical as Stax did fuck with it a little bit but if you look at the schematic it is easy to see where it came from. There is also a much bigger part of this story which involves some people appropriating this circuit as their own that I'm not going into.

Always...

No mods except the 717 is actually a licensed KGSS...

It's always worth it to DIY something.

That's a loaded question but over all...no. In theory they should be the best, effectively open stators with a massive open area with none of the inevitable turbulence you get with hole stators. The downside is rigidity, how do you make them flat and make sure they remain flat when they are pushed hard (pun intended... ) . Since Stax are the only company which have tried these and have some engineering standards, let's take a look. So the first SR-X had mesh stators built into the same frame as the SR-3 drivers. They were tiny and had no support which caused reportedly massive issues so the Mk2 arrived very quickly. Then we have the SR-Omega. Large copper mesh on a resin frame and cartwheel spokes to try and keep it flat. Well anybody whose opened up an Omega knows how strong that resin is (it isn't) so after they were reborn (Stax that is) they tried aluminum cartwheels but that clearly wasn't enough given how very different the 007's were.

Stax are still stuck in the distributor model but slowly embracing e-commerce. There is a certain comfort level in only dealing with a limited amount of customers world wide and having them be your reps with anything customer related. Things are changing though as Stax now has a proper online shop in Japan where everything they sell is listed, including the spare parts.

Maybe there is already a Mk2 looming? The drivers in these are circular so I guess that is the only real difference. The odd shape of the housings is just for show as circular earpads would fit perfectly. I do have some in mind which have similar height and might improve the sound quite a bit. I just need to get some of those hifiman mounting rings...or just glue the fuckers.

Stax with proper English would not be the company we all know and love...

https://stax-international.com/products/sr-009s/ Here it is in English. I do find them funny, gold stators like the 007's and the same round protection mesh as the 007's as well...