spritzer

I like it and that ground planes are fancy... I do spend a lot of time on my ground planes though.

Yeah, the ST ones certainly overshot with no load.

Ok, found them...

Dan has claimed they are using at least 0.6mm D/S spacing or even more so yeah, these won't be easy to drive at all. Super low sensitivity doesn't match all that well with the "cheap" angle either. If a Carbon can't drive them, what the hell can? It has more power than any other amp out there... I'm designing my own drivers and using 0.5mm spacers is dead simple. To me they took the easy way out... I do like the stator design and I will naturally tear one of these down and show how they are made. That connector though...what the actual fuck? Looks like a D25 shell and that's good for some reason?

I like that one a lot. I'll dig out the new boards tomorrow and take a picture.

Yup...(with the Single Power ES-2 half built in the corner of the room)... they sure can be.

Worth more than what, the raw materials in them? Broken amps aren't usually worth a whole lot...

At least three people stepped in as CEO's or sales managers of Cavalli over the years and I heard they all paid a huge investment for those positions. That was really the issue with Cavalli aside from amps needing a lot of servicing and not being made to be serviced, too many fingers in the pot. I spent a lot of time working on the LLMk1 and ended up completely rebuilding it. New PSU, new output stage, new input stage, new gain stage and even a new transformer. I lost a pile of money on it too but I knew that going in. We do this because shitty products should be exposed. I was at the local Senn dealer today to setup my HE-1 audition (tried to get them to bring it to my place but no dice ) but while there they were asking my advice on some amp designs and one of the guys said "you are always so negative about the designs!!". I said "true but that's because for every Headamp amp that is built properly you have dozens of posers who don't have a clue what they are doing. If they were charging 250$ then who cares but 10K$ for the Goldmund pile of fail is just too much to take." That's pretty much what sums it up for me, nothing has changed from 2005 when nobody wanted to discuss the amps in detail. It was all about the beautiful, beautiful music and any dissent to that was crushed. This is a wider subject for me though as people are willing to swallow just about anything, regardless of how stupid it is. Just see something like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" or classics like Solar roadways... Stupid and bad shit needs to be called out.

Goes to show how delusional his fanbase/worshippers were. All of it was great despite what the empirical data said but then again, none of them paid even close to retail for this junk. A lot of people were cheated though as he burned through investors money time and time again. Claiming Alex "sacrificed" is just a load of bollocks.

So if the - input is floating, you will get a whole host of issues.

Why would you not ground the - input? It should never be left floating like that. Ohhh and what mosfets are you referring to? The Dynahi should have bipolar outputs...

Not Cavalli Audio but Massdrop is having these built using Cavalli circuits...well as far as that goes at least.

Setting the right temperature is key but even if you lift a pad, it's not that bad here. Easy to jumper everything as needed.

Yup, I thought about doing a RIP Cavalli thread with all the bad shit he's done over the years but didn't find the time. Even the site now throws up a cert error... Must be nice to have a terminally flawed Liquid Carbon with a "lifetime" warranty.

I've had to desolder a RK50 and it is easy with a desoldering gun. You can get a cheap one which costs a fraction of what the RK50 costs...

In other news, I just heard a Senn HE-1 has landed in Iceland. I missed a call from the Senn rep during the week so I guess I need to haul some gear over to their place for a comparison...

Indeed and when the charge is there, it will stay there for some time. The ifi spiel is just BS on top of other BS claims.

There is a lot of BS in that...like a lot a lot... The whole part about the bias supply being a battery supply and the super 1kV Wima caps... Also why the hell at the Stax sockets upside down? True but it would have been beneficial to keep them at an angle. It would also have been beneficial to have a better amp in there, a proper preamp not using the cheapest parts so it was really nitpicking...

It probably has a capacitor dropper in there. Now how they crammed a cap in there that is large enough and with a proper safety rating is a bit dubious...

First off, anybody who plugs anything Stax into that box deserves the Darwin award, plain and simple. Going by that the new Floats are supposed to be compatible with the old ones we are dealing with a bias of +1500V... yeah...just about three times that of the Stax. Maybe they lowered it but I some how doubt it as those drivers need a lot of bias to work. That "Thinker" (the irony is palpable) states over and over again that the bias is 800V but how was that verified. Perhaps by measuring after the (32M) ballast resistor? Then we have the transformers, Stax used a ratio of 1:25 but Jecklin...1:120. So, even with a low input you are overdriving the fuck out of the Stax. I guess that is one way to get a "meaty" impression...

To take this pics and post "best amp evah!!" shows a special level of something... Some things stand out for me, the total lack of heat shrink on the mains switch which means the CE rating doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Also just the sheer level of hacking going on. Parts suspended in mid air and other marks of quality. Also just the general lack of giving a fuck...

Even though I've already replied in private, it might help others. Here is the official Stax repair service for Stax in the UK: https://electromod.co.uk

The boards have been here for a while now but there just aren't any parts available so I can't test it. I'll have to dig it out and take a picture but basically, it's a stereo board, all through hole and it is pretty small.

I just loved to see the inside pics of the "best electrostatic amp in the world" over on HF, the QA Jecklin Transdyn. So it's a badly built EQ board with a B&O IcePower 125ASX2 power amplifier module and a couple of cheap looking transformers. Also locating those two transformers side to side... yeah there will be some crosstalk.

Sounds crazy, we could do it...