spritzer

I had the HE90 and all of the Sigmas which will give you an expansive soundstage (washed out to my ears thought the Sigma 404 is the best of the lot) yet I still prefer the more controlled soundstage of the Omegas and ESL's that beam the sound to your head. The soundstage should be large if the recording was mixed like that and not all the time. I'm listening to some Icelandic Best of CD now which covers the last 50years of our recorded history and some songs have a tiny soundstage and on some it is fucking huge. The Omegas portray all of this with ease even when fed by something as non high end as the stock Shigaclone transport though the DAC1. Better is a tough word to use here as the 404 does do some things better then the Signatures but that blasted upper midrange coloration makes them unusable to me. The Signatures are more balanced over all though they do have some of the midrange etch but it is different. I have compared them on a KGSS (my DIY one) but it was a few years ago and the amp has been scrapped for parts a long time ago. There is no way of repairing the Signatures since there are no spare parts available. If you were to send them to Stax, they would just fit them with 404 drivers and send them back to you. You could send them to somebody who has a Signature and ask them to compare sets side by side. One of the dark sides of vintage Stax phones is that they aren't always what they seem. If the drivers have been replaced or the phones tinkered with in any way it is often very tough to tell. If this set has copper colored stators then the drivers should be stock.

Think of it as selected types of gas to enhance the properties of the copper conductor.

I'm looking at a Nextgen socket now and it could be 75ohm since the ground connection is only a thin silver film on the outside of the socket. I don't have a male WBT here to test it though...

I somehow doubt that the mercury would pass the RoHS mandate... Not much of an issue since most of the crap sold in this hobby would never be UL or CE approved.

Make the cables liquid and I'm sold.

From that point of view you are now my mortal enemy and I have dispatched Stax mafia agents to your house... If there was a mafia that is... Is this for a project that will be used on 230v...? That is true but the size of the windings also matters since a given size of wire can only handle so much current before it burns up. Due to the cost of copper they are often wound with wires just big enough.

Add that to the epic size of the SR-Omega driver (90mm across) and it's clear why Stax used circular drivers. The circle is also a very stable shape and resonances spread evenly which was one of the major design targets of the Omega range.

Not all transformers are created equal so this might be an issue with some really cheap stuff. Knowing Marc's tastes I doubt that is an issue here...

The same size of wire is usually used on the entire winding (one size for primary, one for secondary) so current handling in that way shouldn't be a problem.

The wider the diaphragm, the larger the excursion it can manage.

A set of electrolytic output caps makes any turd sound great and you could say that it was OTL... I really don't see why you wasted time to design the PICO with built in battery charger when you could have some massive external unit and tell everybody that it sounds better that way.

It's all about the parts cost... so yes.

The 404 sucks to my ears (I've had 9 new units here) but the vintage SR-SC1 I had was brilliant so it could be that cryo actually does something or there were some changes made during the 10 year life of the SR-404. Speakers are the ultimate goal but headphones offer something that speakers could never pull off i.e. the sheer amount of detail and presenting the sound without the bloat that most speakers are guilty of. Once you go over to the dark side then no dynamic speaker will do so a full range panel for me please. Me thinks Jacob needs to spend some time with a SR-007 Mk1 and a BHSE.... The only thing I don't like about the 717 is the slightly overblown soundstage (which works well with the SR-Omega and the Omega hybrid) but it is a minor quibble. I do miss the power of the BH though and I'm always reaching for the volume control to get the extra bass that is missing... It looks like the 717 will be in my computer setup for a while now so I'm thinking about doing some mods to it. Nextgen RCA sockets, better caps, better wiring, replace the pot with a TKD unit etc. The 727 sounds like a bad tube amp... think Cary.

Shame on you Justin for charging so much for this stuff since we all know that the chassis, battery, PCB's and all other components are included with the chips.

The only true 75ohm RCA connector I know of is the WBT Nextgen line and only when used with the Nextgen sockets. BNC is much cheaper and easier to use though

Yup and you you need output caps to remove all DC from the output.

Happy birthday guys!

A pretty esteemed crowd of snake oil you had there but I have special hatred for the likes of VD and Nordost.

I'm not a patient man so that one is out... What cables did you compare? I only ask since there are designs that will be an improvement and then there is the "RSA" class of products which are just an epic fail.

Nope, since it is almost impossible to do. I do this for fun (something which DBT's aren't) and short "burst" impressions are worthless to me. I prefer to use the gear for a while and get to know its quirks and limitations which is impossible to do in a short audition. Comparing AC is also made harder by the ever changing line voltage and there is no easy way of making it a constant. It should also be noted that impressions of power products do not translate all that well between US and other places since the power system in the US is the most craptacular of any developed nation.

There is VAT in the Uk so the price is less in the US but all you get is two amps and the crates they come in.

6moons just put up a review of the Kondo Gakuoh amps with an internal picture. All that Tango iron sure is nice with silver windings but it is still a lot of money...

Power cables can change the sound considering all the crap that is on our AC lines. There are switching PSU's in almost every consumer gear we buy and most dump their switching noise back onto the lines, not everybody is as clever as Ray and dumping it in the signal ground . There are a few ways to get rid of this and the ferrite in VD cables surely helps but an isolation transformer will do a better job for a fraction of the cost of those power snakes. Passive filtering works too but why anybody charges more then 200$ for those units is beyond me. I tried running my system off batteries once (with an inverter salvaged from a scrapped fishing boat) and even a small hydro plant that a friend of the family has next to his county house. Both were interesting but highly impractical... The best I've heard is in our summerhouse during the wintertime as there are only 20 houses (empty for most of the winter and off the grid) which share a transformer and the geo-thermal power plant is only about 5km away. Here at home I settle for dedicated lines and they are a solid investment or worth the time if you can DIY.

I'd much rather go for a low wattage ClassA amp then the ICEpower stuff in a dedicated setup. Slew rate is king here and the primary impedance of the transformers can be managed with resistor in series/paralell. That's how Koss always did it but using an output transformer in reverse would give you an 8ohm primary.

Great impressions and we really need to come up with a better transformer based solution...