spritzer

They could coat the spacer with something conducive but yeah, I doubt that is the case. Pure single ended shit with all sort of weirdness. Pure win!! Now...now... don't drag things like science into this!! It should be clear to anyone that the stators stand in the way of the sound molecules and there is no way the bass ones can get through those small holes!! Just like Ray said about the wires, they have to be thick enough for the bass to get through. In all seriousness, the stators aren't a problem in any way that I can see and getting rid of them, or making some flimsy as shit mesh stator will make everything worse. Can you even imagine how hard it is to make the Shangri-La stators actually run parallel to one another? Pretty much impossible I'd say let alone what happens when you start playing something. Hello high distortion electrostatic!!

Ahhh so it sucks in its natural form so they are trying to fix it in DSP. Sounds like pure win to me...

The BH PSU is two PSU's tied together at the output to create a bipolar supply so this wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, the same old BS as with all "revolutionary tech", it will be much cheaper and used everywhere!!! Remember the NXT panels?

We never did one of those that I can remember. It would be easy enough to cut the back off the PCB but the connectors would have to be moved.

You can do single ended if you simply ground the other "stator" which makes them pseudo push pull. The Koss ESP6, 7, 8 and 9 do it this way and so do the odd Philips electrets from the 70's. Now how this is done is very important as to how well it works but it is never the equivalent of simply using a pure push-pull setup. I agree that this is basically what Beveridge did back in the day and relies heavily on bias with all the issues that entails. I'm highly skeptical of all of this but hey, let's take one apart and see how it works.

Indeed, cables made by people who have no idea what they are doing adding a level of danger to the listening session. Pure win!! I'd love to hear these but I'm very skeptical that they are any better than traditional electrostatics. Also that amp is probably utter shit...and wasn't the dac just a bog standard ESS Sabre?

Yes

They are a bit smaller but I need to series connect to bring down number of values used so space saving is pretty much zero. My goal is to have them assembled for me a thus cut the cost of the amps.

Last I heard there is no stock for anything Stax in Japan so they would be the newest version.

It is indeed all soldered by hand and they are 2510 resistors. Only size you can really use for electrostatic HV use even though I also use them for the LV stuff as well. That is mostly to use the same parts more than once. The through hole resistors are there because I forgot to order 200R and 300R units but I might change them to series connected 100R's anyway. With pick and place it helps to keep the parts numbers low so hello series connection. The 2SK170's are just covered with heatshrink and the HV parts are out of stock but I have thousands of them.

Here are the boards mounted to the heatsinks. One small mod wire as the bloody layout software doesn't check the ground plane for continuity... The board has already been through major revisions to adapt this to mass production and I doubt I am done.

Here is something new that I might make more of... the SMD KGSSHV. This is really my attempt to build a "cheap" electrostatic amp to bring a great amp to the masses. Lofty goal and I have no idea if it will succeed but its worth a shot.

Yeah that and the pretty shitty switching power supply...

WTF indeed. Notice that those are 230V models as well so not the Airbow stuff from Japan.

The RIAA in that thing has to be seriously shitty to not crush the Graham Slee so well worth the rebuild.

I would certainly swap out all the caps, diodes and the like but this looks to be a very nice piece of kit. I doubt our RUV (public broadcaster) had anything this nice at the time.. Nice P+G slide pot there.

Nope, just equally retarded and in a rush to loose some money.

A surprisingly small one. There is a mild suppression in the upper midrange where you loose some "air" and the bass is clearly tuned like other Pro model Stax so lean but insightful. Their major drawbacks are just how heavy and bulky they are. Also the first ones are so uncomfortable that it isn't even funny. Ohhh and as I found out...stay far away from ones that have been serviced. Stax will turn them into an unlistenable mess which sucks so bad that it isn't funny. Now we all know that the SR-507's are garbage but those drivers in the 4070...holy fuck that was bad.

The official Sennheiser schematic is out there but it is incorrect. We never drew up a corrected one.

Sure cost cutting was a factor with some designs but tubes had to become more reliable into the 50's so the build quality jumped by leaps and bounds. Take the sub-mini stuff. It was designed to be used continuously for years where it couldn't be serviced at all so yeah, these are far better tubes than the anything before them. Are some of them a bit more linear, sure but the designs were far more compromised in other ways. We have the full schematics of it but I did take my old one apart. Classic Sennheiser, nothing but the cheapest shit possible is allowed to be used. Then we have the small issue of at least half of them don't work due to the wrong implementation of the circuit. 4K7 output tube load in an electrostatic amp? This thing can barely swing any voltage at all. It's a HE60 so you will have dust inside the drivers, no way around that. That is a likely culprit but they might also have arc'ed at some point forming a hole in the diaphragm. This is possible when using them with so many amps so the driver could be pretty much toast.

Brain transplant might also help. If you can't get a viewer to work but want to build high voltage equipment...it might just be Darwin at work.

Stax SR-007's with any capable amp should be on the short list. If you like (can stand) the unnatural sound of the 009's, L700 and L500 then try those as well.

The EL34 can handle 800V all day long and with equal power plus it is a far more modern tube design. That's what I find so funny about tubes in general, people overlook that the tube design and build quality got better by leaps and bounds from the 30's to the 50's. Onto the 60's, the sub-miniature tubes are nothing short of stunning works of engineering marvel. Sure, cost cutting started to creep in but there is just so much nostalgia BS associated with this stuff. "NOS" tubes (i.e. old rejected crap nobody would have used) is always better and we must use the oldest designs possible. Where is the clamor for old transistors? Go, go germanium!!! We should setup a non-profit organization with the sole goal of buying audio equipment and take it apart for the world to see. I think Senn would be thrilled if we were to rip the HE1's apart...

They are indeed designed as transmitter tubes but that is of little use for audio, Class B and all that. As you push the tube further past its max op point it starts to compress more and more and yup...more and more distortion. Let's say the tubes could run at 500V, no way to implement a CCS for them in that chassis and you burn up most of the voltage in the plate loads. Another point, yup this has nothing in common with the GES. Much closer circuit would be the Eddie Current Electra and we all know what a massive clusterfuck that was. Didn't work and drifts like mad. Also, weren't we going to permaban mtoc after he showed up with an another account during his last ban? I mean I can't take this level of retard any longer...