spritzer

I don't have a HD800's now but I can get a set to try out at some point. I do have the HD650's so I'll try them out later when I find some time...

So as a counter point to the Massdrop amps, I also bought one of these Audio-GD units used. The R2R15 seems to have been replaced by the R2R11 which is more SMD based but it looks very similar. So this cost 350$ new, is not balanced but has a discrete R2R dac, discrete headphone amp and can also be used as a single source preamp. The Chinese version of the product page is still active: http://www.audio-gd.com/R2R/R2R15/R2R15CH.htm I must say it does look really fugly in real life (as so many of the Audio-GD product do) but it's amazing that they can do this for 350$.

No, I only got the CTH amp as well which should be here soon. The lack of heat sinking will be a problem here, why they didn't use the nice chassis as some form of sinking is just beyond me. It's a nice sturdy aluminum shell so it could take some watts easily. I will probably blow this one up in the name of science... Notice the pissant 2010 0.47R resistors for the output devices... yeah they won't last long.

Needless to say, I invested in one of these works of art and well... it didn't disappoint. External build quality is way beyond the Cavalli Mk1 unit I had but inside...yeah.... So if anybody thinks this is good for 300$ they need their head checked. Every expense was spared here, just look at the high quality sockets used. I mean, who hasn't heard of the legendary "Hooya" sockets let alone "ZWEE". I mean quality stuff... Circuit looks to be identical to the LC minus the internal switcher. All the same issue as well plus the super cheap volume control...

Nope

It takes a special kind of audiophile to find some crap on Alibaba and rebadge it... inu2it or what ever they are really called. I never sold my HE90's...

Nice of you to take over for a week as here we are at 5°C and 1m/s... so pretty much excellent winter weather.

The STN9260 will do just fine.

Who on earth suggested these mods? This is DIY so you can do what ever you want but this is just a shit idea...

I'm sure this amp will be of similar quality as the WES...i.e. pretty much shit. Has there ever been one Woo amp that is good?

NPN in a PNP spot will not make the amp happy so who knows what else was damaged. I would measure everything and lift parts to check the other side for damage. The 2SA1486 hasn't been made for a long time now so the STN9360 is the modern replacement.

I'm hoping somebody gets a set and wants to unload it on the cheap...

I'll get mine from Justin.

From the specs they are 100% Stax compatible so it should work just fine. Now whether they want you to use other amps...well that is more debatable...

It's my thing... New concept was born today for something pretty small.

BURN THE WITCH!!!! Going by the clusterfuck on HF in the last few days...let's not focus too much on what actually differentiates the Stax units. They do tweaks that we can never see so sure..different stator designs, different diaphragm treatment and the like. Of my amps the closest would be the Octave V2. Similar design ideas just crammed into a much smaller chassis.

Nice to see that WAPO is as accurate as horseshit yet again...

Next up the ultimate 5000$ mod....remove the glass...

You can read what it says on the part with a magnifier of some sort. The SOT223 parts usually have some of the real marking on them unlike smaller stuff.

We have so much spare electricity here that it isn't funny. Just the spare electricity from the largest plant (Karahnjukar) is enough to run all of the cars in Iceland if they were electric. This only because there has been a lot of snow the last few years so if that were to change...well.. not good. As for the DHT's, I just don't get it. People are stuck in late 30's tech when tubes did get a bunch better later on. The pencil tubes are excellent though they don't like high voltage all that much... I haven't tried the 300limited yet but out of the other ones, I like the L500 a lot and more than the 700's. They are not a bad place to start and so is the L300 frankly. I use them for testing and they are just excellent.

That is weird, are you sure those are 50K? Can't see from the pic neither what transistors those are.

Given their past behavior...he could also just have been lying...

We clearly need to come up with some crazy expensive amps to compensate for all of this. The insane Carbon is already planned and so is my version of the T2 but I'm going to be the very last with that one... This has transformer coupled written all over it for me. Even if they were to drive the 6SN7 and 300B's within an inch of their lives... simply no way to get the gain needed. Also Woo have never done anything even remotely novel, it's all cookie cutter crap done to the lowest possible standard. Case in point, feeding the output through to the PSU for some reason... Edit: Kevin reading my mind yet again. I'd say go the full hog, input transformer with stepup and splitting the phase into the 6SN7. Again stepping it up with transformers into the 300B's and then transformers yet again on the outputs. Might just get enough volume out of it that way...

Funny enough I just watched a short documentary on Ivan and hour ago...

I have one of those and the iron is terrible...