catscratch

Have you ever heard the 003 / 001 mk2? I kinda agree with this, but you can make some of the new Stax stuff sing with some EQ and a few mods. I had a L700 mk1 that was pretty magical after some fettling, and same goes for the new X1. But the old stuff did do it out of the box, and modern day Stax are certainly way past their prime and tuning seems to be a lost art for them. Or making headphones that properly fit human heads.

The hobby is fucked, but it also opens up the opportunity for others to come in and sell stuff that isn't bullshit. That's kinda where we see stuff like ES Labs come in (though here in the US the tariffs make it harder, but that's another brand of bullshit). Basically, the old guard can go ahead and price themselves into the stratosphere, but smart people will take advantage of it and outcompete them. Or so I hope. Maybe it's just the booze talking. I'm usually not optimistic.

Welp. There goes that I guess. Be careful what you wish for. Hopefully it's mostly a pad issue and we'll find something that works eventually. How hard are these to drive compared to the older versions? How do they compare to the two new ES Labs headphones? Seems like that's going to be the closest competition. Also, would the increased acoustic damping, if that's indeed the case here vs the last gen, reduce resolution? Hopefully someone with a squiggle machine can post some squiggles. Technically I have one, but I'm not going to jump on these just yet.

What do you think causes the double resonance in the mids though? I may be the odd man out here cause I don't see too many others complain about it but to me it is very audible in the 2.5 and later models, but less so in the mk1.

Interesting, but I also expect crappy tuning and 2x the price. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised. They need to revise the pad mounting mechanism too, I'm not an expert here but the spring in the middle of the driver thing seems stupid and I'm guessing that's where the resonances in the mids in the old version come from.

Corporate media is a bit like fast food. In small quantities it won't hurt you, but if that's all you eat, you're gonna get very sick very quickly. By the same token, if it's all you watch, you're gonna end up with a very distorted worldview. Keep in mind though that other people's corporate news doesn't exactly contain less bs and propaganda than ours, it's just different bs and propaganda. You kinda have to cross-check, fact-check, and put two and two together, and then you might end up with something resembling an accurate view. Or not, it's honestly hard these days. I don't think the US public will tolerate boots on the ground in Iran, but Washington is certainly salivating at the thought of bombing them back into the stone age, and is more than happy to let Bibi do the dirty work. Iran is both weak and vulnerable, and the mental image of Hamas getting their hands on a nuke is all the justification they need. At the same time, the mullahs have certainly learned the Libya lesson, nukes are their lifeline and they're gonna try their best to hang onto it, any and all negotiations for them are simply a way to buy more time. It'll be ugly, but probably not as ugly as our worst fears make it. And Iran is not exactly popular in Sunni countries either. (In before eating my words in 3... 2...)

I think the point of all that AMTS stuff is to act sort of as a passive EQ and reduce treble resonances. The Corina does seem to measure quite nice: Graph courtesy of techpowerup which is a reasonably sane spot for reviews. Now, if only the point of a headphone was to measure nice and not actually sound good to real humans.

Are any of these midrange artifacts position dependent? From what I've read their AMTS damping or whatever they call it can give a lot of FR variability based on headphone position. Is their self-adjusting headband system fine for bigger heads? I always had huge issues with the 007 and its system. The Voce's FR with the stock earpads looks like a complete mess, and I was wondering why you praised them, but with better pads it makes sense. How's the build quality on them? Are they likely to hold up over time? Too bad the price of the ES2a is likely to skyrocket over here, but what are you gonna do.

Huge fan of Lynch. This sucks.

Right, so let's say Donny ends this - by giving in to Russian demands and giving them land concessions and blocking Ukraine from EU/Nato membership. How is that going to be seen in any way but a Western loss? How will this discourage Putin from going further? Already Georgia has a pro-Russian puppet government and brewing civic unrest, and have we already forgotten what happened there in 2008? It's a shit sandwitch any way you slice it. Keep the war going, more people die. End the war, Putin gets a dub, the West gets an L on its record, while Putin starts another conflict and more people die. Those are your choices, folks, and I fail to see how the Very Stable Genius makes this any better.

From the man who brought us the world's fastest trashcan.

Well those are technically mating calls, so I'm going to have to go with yes.

Goats are hilarious though NGL

FWIW mine's been working just fine with daily use. But the question is, are the issues limited to the initial batch or are they still happening with new ones. I haven't heard too many new reports of it lately but all I've got to go on is stuff from the internet, I'm not in touch with vendors or anything. I hope they got this shit sorted out as I'd quite like to recommend these.

$6000? Please. All the cool kids are asking $8-9k for their new flagships. What, are they trying to tell us their headphones aren't as good as the new Hifimans or Raals? Also, they should make the cables a subscription-based service and sell the bass separately as pre-order DLC.