catscratch

Forcing myself to pass this one up. Finances aren't great and I simply don't need it. Not that this has ever stopped me before but, you know... trying to be more responsible, mature, and all that nonsense.

Haven't heard Cynic's latest. I haven't gotten any new metal in about 2 years. Just not in a metal phase, though I may get back into it. A few more regulars I forgot: Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve, Chaosphere Fear Factory - Demanufacture Isis - Oceanic Green Carnation - Light of Day, Day of Darkness (one of the very few pretentious prog-metal albums that I like) Dream Theater - Awake, Images & Words. Yes, I liked DT and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But they sucked since Kevin Moore left and I stopped caring after Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. What a horrible album, bloated, pretentious, and thoroughly devoid of songwriting talent or emotion. They need to kick out Jordan Rudess and find a real songwriter to actually stand a chance at making good music again. But at least the Liquid Tension Experiment disks were pretty good at times. I never cared for Opeth that much though I did like some stuff from Morningrise and Still Life. Opeth I think are too unfocused and while they have melodic talent they have terrible song structures. I mean, look at most tracks from Still Life - play good catchy riff 4 times, modify slightly, play 4 more times, switch to acoustic segue with a melody repeated 4 times and some mellow vocals, then play first riff 4 more times, the repeat... boring and predictable and a waste of good melody. Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane is the album that Opeth wish they could write, but they never will (IMO). Also not a fan of Agalloch even though everyone used to rave about them. "Grey Metal" is right - grey and dull. Melechesh has some amazing tracks, but is also very uneven. I can't call any single Melechesh album my favorite but a few tracks I do really like. Proscriptor's drumming is amazing and the vocalist sounds like a tortured imp, which is a plus. Naglfar I thought was a pretty solid Dissection rip-off. This isn't really a bad thing but they will always be measured against Storm of the Light's Bane (as well as The Somberlain though I like that disk less), and they will never measure up. They need to do something different, and they do have the talent, but maybe not the motivation. I also think that you cannot make truly evil and tortured music unless you are evil and tortured yourself. When Ihsahn was evil he was making fantastic, bone-chilling evil music. When he became a star he tried to fake it but it wasn't the same. This is why Burzum will continually make music that sends chills down my spine - he is an evil, twisted, anti-semitic murderous monstrosity and it shows in his music. But when you take some posers - which a lot of successful metal artists become - and ask them to write evil music, you usually get a caricature of the genre that is laughable at best. There are lots more albums that I liked but I don't remember now.

Perennial metal favorites regardless of genre: Nile - Black Seeds of Vengeance, In Their Darkened Shrines Dissection - Storm of the Light's Bane Alchemist - Organasm. Damn you Alchemist for overcompressing Trypsis. DAMN YOU TO HELL!!! Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse Arcturus - The Sham Mirrors, Slideshow Symphonies Finntrol - Jaktens Tid Cynic - Focus Watchtower - Control and Resistance Cryptopsy - None So Vile Nevermore - Dreaming Neon Black, Dead Heart in a Dead World Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding, Accident of Birth Outworld - Outworld Falconer - Falconer Devin Townsend - Ocean Machine, Terria, Ziltoid the Omniscient Strapping Young Lad - City Pretty eclectic metal tastes and of couse I'm leaving out all the old-school Megadeth and Iron Maiden I usually can't get enough of. Though to be perfectly honest, I haven't fired up any metal in about a year, just not in a metal mood.

Holy fuck, PCM1704, analog volume control, FLAC, OGG, and APE? Want. Want badly. However no digital output = fail.

Then half of them will be inscribed "Waddragon" or whatever name that fucking douchebag uses at the moment.

Very likely Chinese fakes. Fake A-T's are something of a rage these days and any time you have an unknown vendor selling A-T's well below the asking price you can pretty much assume that it's going to be a fake automatically. I would only buy A-T's from known, reliable, legitimate vendors even if I had to pay more. RE OP: IEMs are the way to go I think, and the SE530 is definitely a good candidate. I was playing around with the idea of getting the UM3x to play with but I may just skip straight ahead to the ES3x. If you have the funds I would very much suggest doing the same - not necessarily the ES3x but a good top-tier custom-molded IEM in general. The UE11 is another candidate and Jude is busy pimping JH IEMs over on that other forum right now but they may be worth a look as well. IEMs are doing very well and even my old ES2 was very good as a closed headphone, and the new generation of customs should be an improvement.

Try angling the earbuds slightly forward if you're wearing them without the headband, and also you can try wrapping the cord around your ear IEM style to alleviate some of the cord pull, though this does but a bit of pressure on the detachable joint. With the headband, I used large-sized tips and bent the headband to alleviate some of the pressure. The fit was way more comfortable, but sonics were I think a little better without the headband and with the tips shoved right in... It's a tricky little bugger but you can get it to fit well.

Strange question since I know you've sold your Opus 21 a long time ago, but how do you think this would do as a DAC vs. the Opus as a DAC? I'm not asking for anything exact obviously but just ballpark rough estimates. I'm not happy with some aspects of the Opus, specifically grain, but I also don't use a conditioner and the grain may be caused by that - it could simply be AC noise? Me = technically incompetent noob utterly confused

Hit up Stone Brewery if you're into beer, it's only 30 minutes or so outside of SD. Also there was a nice Russian bistro that I really liked in SD, Pomegranate I think it was called but not sure...

Saw Shpongle yesterday in NYC. Kinda disappointed since it wasn't a full live set, but Simon still put on a good show. There were tracks from the next Shpongle album which sounded very promising, and some Younger Brother stuff which I really didn't like. This was more of your standard psytrance party than a serious show, but it was a good one regardless. J. Viewz opened and actually were great, with a full band setup and fully live. Never heard of them before but will definitely check them out.

'Stats are actually amazing for metal, since they're so fast that they can resolve each and every riff and drumstroke, no matter how fast and dense it gets. Listening to something like Nile - Black Seeds of Vengeance on the 007 is pretty special, and no matter how chaotic it gets you can still hear absolutely everything. No dynamic has ever been able to do the album justice and things just start to smear together. Old Megadeth with the 007 is pretty fantastic too it has to be said, though the 717 will compress once you crank it to concert-level volumes. But I usually don't do that so it doesn't matter as much.

If that were the case, why do I still have the HD600? HD650? K340? 003? UM2, ES2, E500, W3, K1k, etc etc etc? Well, you could say "because I'm too lazy to ditch them" and you would at least partially be right. However, I can't listen to any headphone that has the same coloration in the midrange as the SR-404. I hated that coloration in the SR-404 and I'm reminded of it every time I listen to something similar. Midrange tonality is the most important thing to me in a headphone, and if you look at what I generally like, then you'll see a common trend in all of it: very good mids. The Mk2 and the Mk1 sounded like different headphones to my ears. Yes they had similarities, but the Mk1 is a lot closer to a balanced HD600 than it is to the Mk2 in terms of tonality. The Mk2's mids were way off. No matter how good it was in other respects - and it was very, very good in many respects - I could never like it for that reason alone.

Some say that he was born with a tube tester on each hand, and that all his account numbers end in "6sn7..."

Bah, me = sarcasm detection fail. Oh well, at least I got a rant in.

They already did that. It's called the O2 Mk2, it's more Lambda-like, and I don't like it because of that. The O2 Mk1 is about as flat as I've ever heard a headphone sound. Now, there's nothing wrong with liking a more colored sound, but I hate that particular coloration, and the day Stax decided to put that coloration into their flagship headphone is the day they lost my respect. There are plenty of more pleasing and euphonic colorations to choose from if they actually wanted to pre-tune a headphone for easy listening, and if this wasn't simply shoddy quality control and lazy engineering. I hope they get their shit together, and there is some pressure from listeners and a few dealers who refuse to sell the Mk2, so I guess time till tell. All they need to do is to replace the coating or whatever it was that violated health codes on the Mk1, and put both that and the 717 back into production. Not exactly a whole lot of R&D money invested in that move, and there will be a significant sonic upgrade as a result. But if you like a peak in the upper mids, and more midbass besides, then check out the O2 Mk2. It's halfway between the Mk1 and the SR-404 in terms of sound signature. Complete with a more Lambda-like diffuse soundstage and slightly loose bass.

Meh. I think he's just insecure and can't deal with people disagreeing with him, so he gets defensive about it. Just look at the way he sucks up to Uncle Erik as if he was his personal God and Saviour, and clings onto his every word like gospel truth. I do love reading his DT48 posts though because his attitude is so hilariously full of fail, but if I were you I wouldn't lose any sleep over someone not liking you because you happen to not share their opinions. Not everyone will agree with me or like me very much to begin with and that's just fine. Let him get defensive all he wants since it is, after all, his problem. I'm not going to make any comments on the DT48 personally since I haven't heard it, but it doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Accurate does not mean analytical. Real music has bass presence, fluidity, rich tone color, and massive dynamic range. A dry and analytical sound is a coloration if anything. Comments on good mids and proper midrange tone do sound enticing, since this is what I usually value most in my systems, but there are plenty of headphones that do that already without missing out on anything else.

Raising some Old Rasputin in your honor.

Fantastic writeup. But, Is that Spritzer's Egmont-building cousin? *Jeremy Clarkson voice* Some say that his brain is biased to 580 volts, and "EL84" really is his middle name. All we know is, he's not Spritzer, but he is... Spritzer's Egmont-building cousin!! or maybe: There are those who say that "Stax" was his first ever uttered word, and that he can replace the pads on an O2 Mk1 in his sleep, with his toes. All we know is... Bah, must make stig-style intros! Can't stop!!!

Lambdas? Floats? Sigmas? Piezo ribbons? Bone-conduction headphones? And, lest we all forget, plasma headphones? Sorry, plenty more weird headphones out there than just what they found. Though the K1000 is pretty cool, and the HE90 certainly deserves mention based on asking price alone. And where's the Sennheiser Surrounder?

HE90 had a massive wow factor and a very strong initial impression on me, but then again it was a fairly long time ago and I was still pretty new to this whole headphone deal. It definitely sounded pretty colored, but those colorations were very euphonic and pleasing. This was with the HEV90 BTW, I heard a (then prototype) ES-1 with the HE90 and those colorations that I liked so much with the HEV90 were gone, and all that was left were the HE90's technical merits which were less than stellar. At the time I wrote that off because of the amp, but right now I'm having second thoughts. I would very much like to hear the HE90 again and see what's what from a more experienced viewpoint. I do know that I like its colorations, and I could probably live with the HE90/HEV90 system happily ever after, but there's no way I would fork over the asking price considering what else can be had for the money. I haven't read all of Jude's reviews, but a lot of them do seem pretty fishy to me. He does have a track record for endlessly hyping up new incoming products, and a lot of stuff that he was claiming as the best thing ever in its category - like the E4c - I thought was pretty substandard. So, I don't know the guy and I won't make personal judgments about him, and he's always been very nice to me in online interactions anyway, but I don't trust his reviews at all. Needless to say I will take KG's technical analysis over every other opinion. I don't have the knowledge to formulate educated technical opinions myself, so I'll trust the people who do, rather than going by random and potentially questionable people's audio impressions.

Can't comment on any technical aspects of the amp obviously, but I do like the look/design a lot, especially the power supply. It's simple and classy, not overblinged like a certain amp builder's stuff. Now I'm just waiting for (or dreading more likely) the final price.

Well you could always go the intermediate route and get the K1000. Still a headphone, but pressure issue solved

Darth Nut's review is fantastic. It's one of the few really good attempts to actually discuss sound and break it down into easily understandable and identifiable parameters. Really a rarity when most reviewers feel the need to talk about improvements in sonic gestalt from their $7000 power cables... Unfortunately it ends up being too detailed and intelligent for its own good and many people will not have the patience to make it through a review of that magnitude.

I wouldn't pick DHL even if the alternative was an oversized catapult. My company did shipping with DHL exclusively for several years and we've collected enough horror stories to never want to go near them again.

Wow, nice work on getting rid of the SR-404's midrange coloration. I guess I don't have to tell you that this coloration drove me insane while I still had the phones. The driver is attached with double-sided sticky tape? Good God. I don't know much about headphone design but that strikes me as awfully lazy construction. Won't this make the housing pretty much useless at dissipating excess energy regardless of what the housing is made of? I can't believe that mounting the drivers properly would drive up the cost or manufacturing time that much, at least in comparison to the sonic benefits. Stax's standards and QC have slipped enormously...