spritzer

So Stax just unveiled their 80th anniversary products, a special limited L300 and a black and gold SRM-353X... Pretty underwhelming but hey, at least it is something. The L300 is limited to 800 units.

The 404LE's are leather and the older shape used on the prototype Lambdas. The 404 uses the same fake leather stuff as the LNS back in the day and the same shape as all the Lambdas used.

Yes and no. The drivers are probably the same but the earpads do make a difference. Both are nice though.

They are great and so are the 207's. 404LE's are also excellent.

They changed the voicing of the drivers or even just the glue for the drivers. Hard to say but SR-404's can sound very different from one another and they are all but identical to the 303's.

Excellent. You might remember my hatred of the King Sound earpads and I finally found a good match for them with the custom pads for my own design. Much smaller opening there and more height. I saw those "electrostatic" pads advertised on a used Ether on HF and was shocked to see them. That amount of open area is just going to cause problems...

One question...did it have these pads? https://www.mrspeakers.com/shop/accessories/ear-pads/ether-electrostat-ear-pads.html If so, it is the same crap as the King Sound. Massive open area in the earpads which creates all kinds of issues.

They are more different than an upgrade. It really does depend which version of the 303's you have though as Stax tinkered with them at some point in the production.

No it's 10ma.

Nahh...it's balmy 2°C out now!!

Makes one wonder what is inside the Shangri-La and the Mr. Speakers Voce cables...

It's warm to the touch, not hot at all. I've had the first one running 24/7 now for a few weeks and no thermal issues at all.

I want what ever these people are taking...

I'll see what I can do about that. There are three amps in this batch with one being for me so two up for grabs. I have parts for a few more but this isn't a pleasant build...

Here's to the next 15 years!! I like it a lot.

Not sure if we have a KGSS thread but I'll just post this here. So last year it dawned on me that I built my first KGSS amp 15 years ago and something had to be done to celebrate that. It started off pretty mild with me reworking Justin's old KGSS board file, changing parts as needed, updating and the like to what we do now. Then it hit me, that's too easy so I went off the deep end. I wanted to do something unique so why not the smallest high performance amp I could possibly do? The KGSS offers some advantages over the KGSSHV here, fewer parts due to the resistor current sources in the third stage. Now there are performance issues, we all know that but this is how the KGSS was back in the day. The plan was to be authentic so 2SK389 input devices and the only major change being a switch to 2SC4686A's from the 2SC3675's as they are simply superior and fully insulated to boot. Power supply is similar to the old KGSS and is a reworked one from my cheap KGSSHV. 2SA1627A based CCS with the regular fet output for a +/-350V output. The output stage current is set to the standard KGSS setting which is ideal for this tiny chassis. So how tiny...this tiny... Pictured here in the KGSS normal habitat, with a SR-007BL mk1 and a Stax HPS-1. I did say it was tiny... 21cm wide, 29cm deep with the knob and just 7.5cm tall. That doesn't leave a whole lot of internal room so very strict transformer specs, about 15 drafts of the fully through hole amp boards to make the ground plane work and for it all to fit strict height requirements of the parts used. So here are the internals... Now you can please excuse me, I'm going to go and listen to some early 2000's music on the 007Mk1's...

That's indeed the issue, it's mediocre to a fault but fucktards like astroglide look at it and think it is the second coming. Tubes...a wooden chassis!!???!!!??? Sign me up!! Reminds me of the Demograph crap from Russia, exotic tubes, massive silver foil caps, ancient circuits but here is the kicker...things have progressed quite a bit since the 40's and we can design out all the expensive components needed for what ever reason you want. Let's take the above circuit and do some changes. Get rid of the pentode and and put a LTP there or something so it is fully balanced. Might even cross couple like the SRX and drive it all with CCS. Even better, swap out the front end for a fet driving some bipolar stages and does anybody really think the original circuit is better than either of those?

Shut the fuck up astroglide!! We all know it is you, you pathetic piece of crap. Ohh and I've seen the schematics but you know...I can read them which does help

Might just be but why would you want to be outside? Our houses are never cold...cheap hot water FTW!!

That is just wow...just wow...

So interesting is a substitute for good performance now? No matter how bad the engineering is, just slap some transformers on there or a DHT and it is interesting aka great? Fucking pathetic...

The SR-Omega cable is indeed detachable but it's not really a connector in the normal sense. Stax reputably were planning on offering different cables for people to try but that never panned out.

Add to that the questionable engineering over all with Woo amps, Malvalve etc. and this is just fucked.

Well it has more than that...1200Vpp so yeah this makes no sense. You can't use just 600V insulation for this unless it has some special properties like the Belden wires. Add to this that many cable makers fuck up cables which carry 2V max...this is a scary proposition. I for sure would not fix any of my amps which were used with a sub standard cable and damaged by it.

Yeah no matter than the marble would be pretty shit for this use but lets loose all common sense and dew eet!!!!