spritzer

I guess I've just become jaded over the years following the newer is better crap and seeing people throw thousands at a system they were "supposed" to like. All these hopeless souls on head-fi in an endless FOTM merry-go-round. The same can be said about the speaker side of things with people always claiming they've found the next great thing.

Check and check. Add to that smoke friom burning equipment like my KGSS did when I soldered an amp board while drinking heavily. Don't use the hour you have to kill before a party to drink and solder... My strangest thing was probably to hang an experimental ESL driver I was working on over the ovens in my bakery to test how it would be affected by extreme amounts of heat, moisture, dust and high level of fat in the air.

What I was getting at (finally) is that there is no perfect DBT. Gear is dismissed to early or something like that but I'm not going to loose any sleep over it as there isn't a perfect capacitor either. I just don't like the stigma the word audiophile carries with it. It brings up images of people with thick copper cables and shielding, high power amps coupled to speakers with as many drive units as they could fit on the front panel and some on the back for good measure. I use what sounds best to me and that is silver every where and huge line sources coupled with SET's. I talk about the gear online but the music offline as more people can understand that. Lets just settle this and call me a "Stereo weirdo".

Ok I'll chalk that up to the same language thing. It means basically the same in Icelandic. I would much rather look at my self as a music lover who cares about what I listen to my music on. While I have all these high level phones here it's often a old SR-3 that gets the most use.

The word steal in Icelandic isn't as strong as in English so yeah, the patents have run out. Btw. Damn you guys are fast... My issue with DBT's (I've conducted quite a few before I started to loath them) is the false positives through expectations. You can comment on some basic things like extension and soundstage but gear reacts to different cables, amps etc. in different ways. Then there is the dark side of the DBT's or how they are used to make consumer gear worse by measuring the threshold of when people notice the difference. Says the man with the electret...

I guess it me being tired and not making sense again coupled with the language barrier. What I meant is that the DBT's cause false positives and this is part of their "job" so they use a control group and test only a limited spectrum at once, say one drug or something like that. When we were talking about this it was in the context of using DBT's to evaluate cables and the small nuances you can only find over time. Taking this over to audio is a very stupid mood and is what defines an audiophile to me i.e. a person that has something to prove. I like to read about other peoples opinions but "audiophiles" can go on into a rant defending something as idiotic as green paper stuck to the inside of a CDP.

I don't know what they are called in English but they basically steal the drug composition and make a bundle of money of somebody else's work. What i meant was that the DBT causes false positives and I know it was meant to do so because the control group is large enough to make up for them. Why anybody would like to use this to test something as complex as audio equipment is just nuts. Nobody pays any attention to impedance matching or what kind of a PSU is inside the units. The same can be said about meet impressions. Don't insult me by calling me an audiophile. If I buy Transparent or MIT cable, Magic pebbles or a Clever clock you may to so.

In comparison with the SR-007 they could be considdered forward and some tube configurations can cause that effect but as a whole the sound isn't that forward. Could have been drunk though...

I got this from one of the heads of a big pharmaceutical company who is a close friend and an audiophile. The mind is a powerful thing and can produce false positives. The DBT's do work but you can't base your findings solely on their results.

I know you were laughing at my precious stats so the only recourse was for you to explain yourself... I've never quite understood the argument behind dbt's as they are regarded as highly unreliable in the medical industry.

I don't find the HE90 forward sounding at all. They have some slight upper midrange hardness but it's minor. The HE60 can emphasize the HF a bit but not enough to be considered forward. We could have a different take on the term though. That does indeed suck balls... any tracking or insurance on the package?

I don't do double blind tests as they are idiotic and produce too many false positives on both sides of the argument. Still I'm confident that I'd be able to spot the electrostatic with ease. It has a lot more to do with the harmonic structure rather then bass or treble. Imaging characteristics are also a dead give away and how fast the sound is. One major factor is how much can the phones change with the recording, not to be confused with their own sound.

The He60 will put up a fight but the HE90 is all show but no go. The HD's are dynamic so they don't have a chance...

I dare say that the HE60 is more enjoyable then the much more expensive big brother. They do so many things wrong but they just play music brilliantly. Now if they only had better earpads and some dust covers every thing would be so much better...

It was all original but the difference in humidity is a dead give away that something was misaligned in the driver. It's so sad that the second best headphone in the world has a fatal flaw... :'( Ok, thanks for clearing that up

They are very rare in its original brown color but the 303 cable is the same. Shame about the color though... That SR-Ω had problems and was most likely going to the great scrapheap in the sky. The glue in the drivers was going soon and there are of course no replacements except the SR-007 drivers. When the price was still sane I was thinking about buying them to have spare for my own set but at 300kYJP it was way too much. It's such a shame that the spare parts Stax has don't match the original headphone at all... \

The SC1 and the 4070 are both a bit too "monitor" like. They are in many ways better headphones then say the older lambdas and the He60 but they lack that spark of life to make them great. While I don't find the SR-007 colored in any way they have that X-factor, musicality if you must, that makes them stand out. This is also why I prefer the He60 to the He90.

They are very elitist and the tiered upgrade system doesn't really work. The simple truth is that they are cutting corners by building on cheap PCB's and using fast drawn wires instead of P-P and age annealed wires. The name thin is just silly. They also have an Ongaku and it is more expensive then the Kondo one with inferior components...

That was a bit much for it. The cable needed to be changed as well as it had a nick in it and sourcing a real brown PC-OCC cable would be very tough.

There was one on Y!JP this week, not NOS but the condition was above average. I'm a little crazy as I prefer the original SR-Sigma with a ribbon cable over the Pro's as it is far more believable. The 1um drivers just don't cut it. Fair enough. You bought the 404 so he could compare it to the SC1 so I think he should repay the favor.

AN UK was the international distributor and owned the name worldwide except in Japan. The distribution deal was canceled after some disagreements over the sales so Audio Note JP had to change its name and AN UK started to manufacture its own gear based on the original designs. Their gear is ok but they just don''t get the Japanese attention to detail and the design talent Kondo had.

Sigma Pro's are few and far between. I was like this when I found a NOS set.

If the speakers were just called Audio Note and not Kondo then they were the UK clone company and it is far from comparable to the real thing.

Criminal is more like it but you've got the general idea... Collecting electrostatic headphones is a serious business and the more you have the greater the need for more...

Huh... there are not only electrostatic headphones in that picture? My brain must be blocking them out...