aerius

Well, this is Koss' income statement from their 2009 annual report. Koss says their financial info is untrustworthy since at least the end of fiscal 2006 so that's about 4 years of fraud, or about $8 million a year on average getting skimmed off. That's a good 15%-20% of their revenues every year. Someone was seriously asleep at the desk while the embezzlement was going on.

My impressions are about the same, except for the sluggish sounding part. I don't really find them sluggish or slow, but that's just me.

Wait a sec here, you're getting a custom built EC amp and you're going to cheap out on the 300B tubes? Seriously, for an amp of that level you shouldn't be settling for anything short of the upper tier stuff. Grab the Emission Labs 300B, costly, but still not Western Electric prices.

I think Esoteric is up to 8N these days.

Grado QC is pretty worrying in the cosmetics area but when it comes to sound they do a pretty good job. At one point I had 5 pairs of vintage RS-1s and as far as I could tell they all sounded the same, I couldn't say the same thing about their looks though except for the damn kink & pinch at the cable Y which was identical on each one. I've actually noted a larger variation in the sound of Senn 650s than I have in any Grado, or for that matter any other headphone except the AKG K340.

Distortion spectrum on the other hand, is a fair bit different. It's actually quite similar to the RS-1 in that respect

Hey guys, guys. Let's take a 12AX7 cause we like, need a tube or something, and use it as a cathode follower for absolutely no reason at all. Then let's get a shitty obsolete op-amp chip and run the signal through them before feeding it to the output stage, which is probably as shitty as the rest of the amp.

I wasn't guilty, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I managed to put a few dents in the protective metal grills of my dad's speakers.

Going by their 10-Q and how much cash they have on hand, if they can't raise funds through either an equity or bond offering, or secure some sort of bridge loan, they're going to go Chapter 11. They literally will not have the cash on hand to pay their employees and meet their operating expenses.

Living Voice Vox Olympian If this sounds like the OBX-R with more better everything, I'm gonna have to start robbing banks.

From a greenhouse in my city

About 10 years ago or so, I came to the realization that even if I had a million bucks I still wouldn't be able to buy all the music I wanted, assuming I had a place to put all the discs. Not to mention that it would take something like 50 years to listen to it all.

Anyone who has a bunch of shelves stacked with records. CDs I'm pretty indifferent, but the guys with a wall of records, I envy you people, and I want your vinyl.

I think so, but I'm not 100% sure to be honest. In the shop's picture it looks like the stators are painted while in one of my own photos it looks more like a painted grill cover or something of that sort.

There is to me two kinds of neutral; true good neutral which is more or less a straight pass-through, which to me is exemplified by the Grado HP-2 in the headphone world and the Living Voice OBX-R in speakers. Then there's the kind of "neutral" which flattens and sucks the life out of all music and gives it all the same bland boring character, the K701 is a big offender here. Unfortunately I'm hearing way too much of the latter and not much of the former in the audio world. Making everything sound flat and same-ish is not neutral, in fact I'd argue it's just as big of a colouration as say, the RS-1 which puts its own character on everything. I'd actually say that the HD800 isn't any more neutral than the HD650 or 600, all of them will put a distinct sound signature on the music.

I've had some mystery meats which I couldn't identify, I'm not sure I ever really want to know what they actually were. It might've been "long pork" for all I know.

Yes the Operas come with leather front & back, and you can get them in piano gloss black. And the Quads are totally black Are you happy now?

Apparently, I can't read my own handwriting anymore. The Paradigm speaker I auditioned was the Signature S6 version 3, which I'd abbreviated as "Sig3 S6" and somehow mis-read as SE3 S6. I think. I'm still not entirely sure of what I wrote, but fortunately I took pictures, and the speaker is definitely the Signature S6.

That's one of the things I disliked about them when I had them on an extended loan. The soundstage is always big, if I go to a recording which was made in a small garage the soundfield should shrink down accordingly. It doesn't. Yeah the soundstage gets a bit smaller, but it doesn't go all the way down to room sized. Get a copy of "Whites Off Earth Now!!" and "The Trinity Session" by the Cowboy Junkies. Same microphone, same recording engineer, same direct to DAT deck recording. But the first was in a garage while the latter was in a decent sized church, two very different acoustic environments and a heck of big difference in the size of the soundfield. On a good setup there's a big change in the soundstage size & characteristics between the two recordings, on the HD800, not so much. There's a change, but not as much as there should be. "Whites" garage and Church of The Holy Trinity

Before you go Sonus Faber, check out Opera Loudspeakers as well. Similar design, but better sound for the money. I find they're more open and neutral sounding than their Sonus Faber counterparts at a given pricepoint, while still remaining quite musical. MKOM in Toronto has them, take a listen to the Quad ESL-57 too while you're there.

I haven't heard the Senn electrostatics yet so I can't comment on them. Of the rest I'd pick the 650 by a small margin over the 600, and the 800 is way off the back in last place. I found there was a fair bit of sample variation with the 650, maybe it was pad condition, maybe one was a Monday morning special from the factory or something, but the ones which were around "average" had a bit more goodness to them than the 600. It takes all the good parts of a 600 and improves on them a tad without taking any steps backwards. It's not the most involving or fun headphone around, but if I plug them into any vinyl rig they can get down and boogie. The 800 is technically great, wads of detail, measure great, yada yada yada, but artistically and emotionally, it fails and fails hard. It disconnects me from the emotional aspects of the music I'm listening to, my music doesn't move me anymore and I don't feel anything other than boredom. Not my kind of headphone, at all.

Well, since I recently auditioned the SE3 version of the Paradigm S6, I'll go highjack this thread with my impressions. Frontend was a Rotel CD player and Bryston integrated amp, not the fancy tube stuff I normally audition but not too shabby either. The short version is I was not impressed. I don't think I can really blame the frontend since it sounded decent & better with PMC FB1i speakers. The sound is too crisp, I find there's too much emphasis on the attack and leading edge of all snare drum & cymbal hits, it's unnaturally sharp and out of balance with the rest of the instruments. Even on a great recording such as Whites Off Earth Now!! by the Cowboy Junkies the cymbals get to be a bit too much after a few songs, at which point it gets kinda tiring. The midrange seems ok, it doesn't have the full richness which I prefer but there's no obvious colourations, resonances, or wonky stuff. Mass choral works sound fine, as do strings and brass instruments though the latter two tend to get a bit crispy on the higher notes. Acoustic guitar sounds a little weird though, especially when playing chords. They sound like the microphone's too close & placed funny, the pick & string sounds aren't in balance with the sound from the body of the guitar. Bass was ok, except there wasn't enough of it. It was more like electrostatic bass than dynamic bass, it's there but there isn't enough and I don't really feel it. Takes the fun out of blues jams, playing some tracks off It's Time by Jimmy D Lane wasn't much fun. It's a Steve Hoffman mastering job so it should sound freakin' awesome and kill, and on a good system you will get down and boogie. It doesn't groove on the Paradigms, yeah it's nice & detailed and all, but frankly it's more fun & full of feeling and life even in my car's system which is factory stock and nothing to write home about. I could write more, but frankly it's fucking depressing. They K701'd the damn speaker. If you like Beyers, K701s, or the HD800 you can check it out, if you're a Grado person, I can't recommend it.

And here in Canada....we got nothing. You bastards stole all our snow.

Nah, I hear the in thing these days is replacing the fuse with a piece of gold wire.

The problem here is "what is a bad measurement?" If the specification which is being measured has little to no correlation with perceived sound quality, then does it matter if the measurement is "good" or "bad"? And that's a problem in audio these days, getting the data we measure to correlate with the sound quality we perceive isn't as straightforward as it may first appear.