spritzer

My point was that why on earth would you fuck up one of the cleanest amplifier circuits there are with a tube preamp, as I've never seen one that is well designed and will not do more harm than good. To me tube rolling is just a practice that makes no sense, especially in circuits like the BHSE/T2. Sure they will sound different, has anybody ever matched the quad of tubes to each other (?) but are there any actual improvements? You know, the real stuff...stuff we can actually measure? Not soul of the music, how it makes me feel bullshit. This does bring us to what is "tube sound". Since I received three emails just now from Carbon owners laughing at the retarded notion Mulveling put forward on HF that the Carbon doesn't have "tube mids", what the actual fuck is that? I mean seriously, can anybody tell me? I mean his Carbon isn't a Carbon, it is a badly built mess of V0.1 boards when we are at V6.0 for my "production" version. That amp must be doing something truly fucked up shit but I'd really like to know what. For me tube sound is just distortion so when people claim some tubes sound "warmer", yup that's more distortion for you. I know to many of the idiots out there I come off a 009 hater but in actual fact, they just aren't that good but how many haters would set out to design a special amp for something they hated? Ehh none but these clueless fuckers really can't get their head around that the Carbon was my project from the beginning to try and improve the 009. I drew up so many different ideas from super simple to crazy complicated shit but this one proved to be the best. More power into the top end plus some other neat things which didn't always follow what we'd normally do. Since it was pointed out that my T2 wasn't working and I fucked it up. Mine was the second one built and suffered what any amp can, shorting through the insulators on the transistors which blew up an entire channel, making it unfit for repair. What I did was to completely redesign the T2 amplifier board, spent probably 10 hours just fixing layout issues making it the best board yet. Built and my amp works perfectly, still not better than a Carbon which any fool would know from looking at the design. As Kevin pointed it out so nicely when I proposed doing an all SS T2; "why bother, we have the Carbon". Yeah, he was right and I'm still sitting on probably the largest stash of T2 parts in the world. I could easily build 150 amps so why wouldn't I? Because the Carbon is better... I also find it so funny that we keep having the same arguments and this is identical with the Cavalli/Woo Audio/RSA/Single Power etc. supporters. They have zero technical knowledge or any clue what they are talking about but this is what makes it funny...arguing with the people who actually designed the stuff. I don't think you can get any more retarded than that...

They are single output units but the outputs can be tied together to form a split supply. I've tried it a number of times with no issues at all.

Show me any good tube preamp and we can look into this. I don't think you can find one though...

Use a 10mm hex standoff for the nylon screws, not a nut. Gives much better grip. As for the locking washer, I use the ones with external teeth for a proper bite. I would use the ceramic and extend the transistor legs.

I think if you go up to 100$ then the shipping is free. Something to think about... That is a good question as most of the fiddling I did to the Carbon circuit after the common release was to make it work better with the 009. Now this isn't the idiotic audiophile notion of tuning (i.e. put in some different parts) but rather seeing what actually enhances the performance of the transducer. The end result is the best I've heard the 009's but they will never be my go to set. They are just too fucked to be ever taken seriously but the amp does help a lot. Another point of reference are the almost 10 people who own a Carbon and a BHSE. All of them prefer the Carbon with the 009 and that makes perfect sense from a technical point of view. One of them even recently got a brand new BHSE and asked me what he should do with it...the Carbon was much better. Most of this is due to the superior high frequency driving potential. This was a large part of the design process but it naturally works just as well for the 007's. More HF power means they aren't as dark as they used to be. The BHSE will roll off a bit so this is a change to the better.

What the 009's need is power delivery in the top end, they don't need amps that just gloss over the top end.

No it isn't.

I'm getting so tired of these inane posts of yours but I'll bite for the last time. These amps have been discussed a few times but you are clearly too lazy to look it up. This is really the "lipstick on a pig" way of building amps. Shitty circuits that are badly implemented but throw enough expensive parts at it to make the poor souls stupid enough to pay for this happy. Seriously, it is pure joy to read the Demograph posts on the Russian forum, he's like Mikhail from Singlepower but with even less skill. Utterly delusional and once claimed Kevin and I didn't understand the "soul" of the music...what ever the fuck that means. Ohhh wait I know what it means. It's just the standard reply used by any peddler of sub-par gear when called on their shit. Let's call high distortion, high noise and no ability to drive the load at hand "soul".

Hehe... Seriously though, a good 1k$ amp can be done with some serious penny pinching and having most of it made in China. I was actually planning on making a mini Carbon but Kevin talked me out of it.

Yeah, that was my point. Doesn't have to be good and if Cavalli or Woo are involved it sure as hell won't be. We could easily do an opamp front end with high voltage output stage to easily drive them. Just look at the Koss E.90.

Or just burn it...burn it with fire!!!

I agree, the design ideas behind this make very little sense to anybody but idiots on HF. Any benefits doubtful and more likely to just sound different. Now as we all know that is good enough to the tuberollers so why not for the headphone rollers... For me this just shows the very tenuous grasp Dan has on electrostatic theory or rather how fucking clueless he is. Now for the electrostatic, it would be pretty trivial to make a 1k$ amp to drive it but does anybody really think he can compete against Stax in sound quality? Does he have a clean room to assemble the phones or will they be a noisy mess like the King Sound and HE Audio garbage?

Hehe but if you'd ever been here you'd wonder how we get any coverage at all. There are mountains everywhere!!

Indeed, all the FOTM bullshit alerts going off.

The boards are onboard.

Excellent!! The small box of volume pots should be there shortly.

Looks like I managed to cure the second channel imbalance of the HE90's. The old coating was probably acting up so I cleaned the mylar and started off with a fresh coat. Now they are rock steady. The same issue seems to plague the HE90 drivers as does the HE60, the coating looses some of its properties and it causes the mylar to collapse into one of the stators. I suspect the majority of the damage to the other driver was caused by the Single Power ES-1 but there the diaphragm would be pushed to one stator even with the smallest of pressure changes. To try and combat this I sprayed that stator with an anti static coating which seems to have helped. A small bit about the glass stators too, what were Sennheiser thinking with these? They are so fragile that just breathing on them causes them to crack but it does make me wonder what can be done with modern glass technology. The tooling costs would probably be massive but I'm still curious. I haven't tried them with the Octave yet but it does differ in some meaningful ways from the HEV90 so it should sound pretty different. You are never getting any usable bass out of the HE90, just look at the measurements Senn posted back in the day.

93$ a month is just insane. We have a few packages here that are 24.6$ a month with everything unlimited (yup totally unlimited 4G data) and no contract.

The Carbon has the same issue as the BHSE and the T2. Ruthlessly revealing and the HE90 are not a good match, especially if you are all too well aware of their shortcomings.

Look what just showed up. I decided to treat myself for my birthday... Sounds brilliant with the HE90 and is pretty much required to use them. Also the build quality is nothing short of stunning. Now I just need to address some imbalance in the HE90's as now that the left driver is up and running properly the right one is a bit too weak by comparison.

You can get the foam from Stax repair centers. It comes with the thin wool used in the Lambda/Lambda Pro

Pretty much any strong glue will work but I'd stay away from epoxy as it might do some harm to the materials. I've also used contact adhesive which is very strong once it has been allowed to cure.

One of mine actually shipped in that yellow color as they are like that on the inside as well. The baffle on the other hand is the SR-3/5 color and shows no discoloration. As for the earpads, the first SR-1's had earpads similar to the HE90/HE60. High and thin

There is a difference in the sound but also in what earpads should be used with them. I would also recommend refurbishing them as there are some things in the cups that might require attention.

This one has most of the parts of the SR-2 and SR-3 so a late one. The early ones are very different, quite a bit smaller and made from very different materials.