aerius

This is not Head-fi, let loose, say what you really feel, you can even use fucking swear words. That's a dilema? Let's see, you're a well respected long time member on Head-fi, if some schmuck wanted to rip off your mods and do them for a fee, all you need to do is start a thread saying "that fucking assclown is ripping off my hard work, don't do business with the cocksucking dipshit", and people will listen. You can slime him so hard that he'll get death threats and angry calls & emails at all hours. If someone wanted to profit off your work as you claim, you could've fucked him, but you didn't. I find it hard to believe that this course of action never crossed your mind. By the way, I've been in your exact same position when I was dicking around with mods on my K340. The thread is still there on Head-fi, I still have all my saved PM's of people asking me to do the mods for them, and offering to pay me for it. I have PMs from people asking me who can do the mods for them. I could be around $2000 richer right now just from those PMs. I told'em I don't do mods, I refered them to others who had successfully done the mods, as well as commercial modders such as Headphile. I've spent close to two years dicking around and improving my K340, and every last thing I've done is available to the public for free. I don't give a shit about "owning" the mods, I don't care that Headphile does a simpler version of them and charges a crapload of money for it. It ain't important to me, it's not some earth shattering invention, it's just common sense stuff that anyone with half a brain could come up with given enough spare time and that's why I don't care if others are making a crapload of money off it. If I didn't come up with the idea, someone else would've, and it's not like my idea was original in any way since many others have applied similar principles to other headphones. I just happened to be the first to adapt prior art to a K340, and you're the first to adapt what has been learned in the past to a Denon. I ain't special, and neither are you, both of us are just adapting ideas which have been around for decades, and which have been used for ages in speakers & headphones.

I haven't heard a single one of these amps, I'm totally out of touch with the solidstate amp world. The last high-end solidstate amp I heard was the Dynahi and that something like 3-4 years ago. But that's ok, cause

Some ovens and older kitchen appliances also have some nice knobs & dials you can steal. Take a walk down the street on garbage day with a couple screwdrivers and you should be able to find something.

Similar electrical characteristics as a 45 as far as Rp and power go, but in terms of distortion harmonics it's not even close. The distortion harmonics of 45's, 50's, and AD1's is literally unmeasurable at any reasonable listening level. Design the amp properly and the 2nd hamonic will be over 100dB down from the fundamental, and everything after that is buried in the noise floor. 6SN7's, 6BL7's, 5687's, and 6EM7's will generally be somewhere around 50-75dB down depending on how good the design is, still orders of magnitude worse than a 45.

No, it doesn't. Maximum plate dissipation on 6DN7's is 10W, with a plate resistance of around 2.5k. For a 2A3 it's 15W and 800 Ohms, respectively. I have a whole box of 6EM7's, 6DN7's, and other such dissimilar triode tubes, they're not as good as the two RCA (dual plate) 2A3's I have. The output section on those dissimilar triodes is basically the same as one section of a 6BL7 or 6BX7, good, but still not as good as 2A3's, nevermind the AD1.

This is why I'm damn happy there's a large electronics surplus store near me where I can pick up parts for pennies on the dollar. Of course there's no guarantee on the parts and I've had a couple things blow up, and that can be a bit of a bummer...

My experience has been the complete opposite of 5687's, I've yet to hear an OTL sound as good as even my lowly DIY tube amp, which uses $20 toroidal power transformers as the output transformers. I've heard more Chinese tube amps than I care to count, I've heard the Singlepower PPX3 Slam, MPX3 6BL7, and SDS-XLR. The last can beat my amp in resolution, but gets thumped in snap & dynamics, while all the others are soundly beaten in all respects. And that's before I slapped amorphous core Lundahls on the outputs of my amp. And there are still 3 fundamental design improvements I can make to my amp, all of which can signficantly improve the sound, but I'm just too damn lazy to do them.

Which would point to transformer output amplifiers being the optimal match. My DIY tube amp as is will put out around 700mA, and if I don't mind running the tubes hot I can push the output to over a full amp. No OTL is going to match this without a stack of large power tubes. Stick 6BX7's in the output of my amp and crank'em up and I can have an output impedance of under 3 Ohms and a full amp of current available.

Silicone rubber washers, or possibly silicone caulking, or both. Silicone rubber can stand up to fairly high temperatures without melting like regular rubber. Just make double sure it's silicone rubber, cause regular rubber will die pretty fast if it doesn't go up in smoke immediately.

About 40 hours or so on my graduation day from uni. Since then it's been my goal in life to sleep a lot every day. Now I rarely go for more than 13-14 hours without sleep, and I haven't gone past 20. If I had my way I'd spend half of every day sleeping.

Note for the future, Krazy Glue is your friend in this situation. It seals the cut and stops the bleeding instantly and keeps the cut from opening up again until it heals. I learned this working as a bike mechanic where we'd get nicks & cuts on our hands on a semi-regular basis.

I'm going between squished bowls and flats depending on the music, most of the time I'm using squished bowls since they have a nice balance, but sometimes I want the extra bass to fill out thin sounding CDs and switch to flats.

About 30 minutes or so, out of a Simaudio Eclipse. Great with Senns, kinda "meh" with RS-1's. With the RS-1 I found it lacking in snap, dynamics, and control, it's fine with Patricia Barber or Cowboy Junkies, but it doesn't work with Black Sabbath or Slayer, let along Fear Factory.

Bend it some more. When I got my RS-1 I literally had to spend half an hour bending the damn headband so that it wouldn't fall off my head.

That's cause the SDS-XLR is a Senn amp and not the best match with Grados, not by a longshot. Hook the Grados up to something like this and they'll clobber the Senns. Outside of custom DIY jobs, no one really builds a high-end Grado amp, while high-end Senn amps are a dime a dozen. Which to me is criminal since the RS-1 has far more performance potential than any current production Senn. But that's fine for me since it leads to a market of cheaper RS-1's since people dump them without realizing how good they are.

I'd say the HP-2 is definitely above the K701/HD650 level, it's somewhere around the RS-1. In some areas the HP is better, in others the RS edges ahead, and in most areas they're both well ahead of the K701/650.

"Don't you poppa me girl, I'll poppa you so you neva foget it. Git you black ass outta here!"

Sort of. I use it from time to time on message boards when people mention relationships which sheep. Indeed. I was exposed to NOFX in my bike mechanic days, they sure make good music. Kinda got burned out on them though due to overplaying, unfortunately, The Decline is the only album of theirs I listen to these days.

It usually helps cut down the noise, makes it harder for the hum & other crap from the transformer to get picked up by the choke and fed into the rest of the circuit.

Fine then, go build a 0.6W SE all DHT amp. That's right 0.6W. Maybe. I need to go back and take another listen first.

Just get the Artemis DP-2 or Vacuum State DPA-300B and call it a day.

Someone needs to tell me what these miracle amps are, I've yet to hear the K701 sound decent on anything I've heard to date.

Nope, I don't have an ortho and I couldn't get in touch with anyone who has one on short notice. Well, if I weren't into the DIY part of tube amps I'd probably buy one, but since I am I won't because I have almost all the parts to build something fairly similar. It is a nice looking amp, kinda heavy too with all those transformers and chokes.

I called up the Canadian distributors and managed to arrange an audition at one of them yesterday. I used my RS-1 and Senn 580 and brought along my mini Gilmore Lite for a sanity check. CD player was some shiny German(?) thingy, I can neither remember nor pronounce the name. In short, I concur with Augsburger's impressions, this little amp is good and does what an amp should. It's not crapped up and mushy, everything is well controlled. With my Senns I preferred using the 100 Ohm tap, it keeps the upper bass from dicking up the midrange. I think lovers of "traditional" tube sound will prefer the 300 ohm setting which loosens things up a bit, but loses some control of the bass. With RS-1's, I think this is THE amp to beat unless you have a couple grand or more burning a hole in your pocket. With the impedance switch dialed down to 30 ohms, it keeps the Grados nicely in control. The frequency response is about as even as you'll get from an RS-1, the highs don't go PPSSSSSS! like they can with lesser amps and the bass hump doesn't overpower and smear out the midrange, which does retain the Grado magic. The amp works with the RS-1 instead of seemingly fighting against it like my DIY Gilmore Lite tends to do. I decided to play "Whites off Earth now!" because I like the Ambisonics mic and I'm frankly sick of the "Trinity Sessions" album and don't want to hear the latter for a while. This album was recorded in a garage and you can hear it, the acoustics aren't exactly great but the performance sure is. With the Trafomatic & RS-1, there's a lot of depth to sound, I can clearly place all the walls on the garage along with the echoes & reverb, everytime someone moves to a different spot I can hear the change in the sound field. The sound doesn't come from the same place and the echoes don't bounce the same way either. Real fun to listen to, especially the opening track and "I'll Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive". Also played some metal because if it can't rock with Grados, it's useless. I went with the remastered edition of "South of Heaven" by Slayer, it's loud and evil with crunchy guitar goodness and drums. I wasn't disappointed, Slayer sounds darn good on them, though I wouldn't mind having just a bit more dynamics & control when I cranked it to earbleed volumes. The bass started to compress a bit and the treble lost some resolution when I cranked it way up, I'd never listen anywhere near that loud on anything like a regular basis so it's not a concern for me. I only crank it like that a few times a year, and only for a couple songs at a time at most. Also played a few tracks off Blue Rodeo's "Five Days in July". "Cynthia's" fun for checking resolution & separation, can it keep the vocals from blending together, and can it also cleanly distinguish the fact that the female background vocal isn't Sarah McLachlan at all times, especially during the chorus. The background singer isn't Sarah, but lesser gear can make it seem like she is. The Trafomatic can do the job, I can tell the singer clearly ain't Sarah, it's some other woman who ends up sounding like her because of the way the vocals harmonize during the chorus. It takes a pretty good system to make the distinction clear. "What is this Love" off the same album is fun for hearing reverb in a barn, and that's also where you realize that Sarah McLachlan's voice is surprisingly strong. Most of the time I can hear that she's a fair distance behind the microphone, and only moves closer for a few parts. When she does, the tone of her voice should change, and that's also when you get the echoes off the barn. Most amps can get the echoes but leave the tonal change sounding flat, which in turn makes the distance seem screwy. The Trafomatic can get both. This is a good amp, it does a lot of things right. I can definitely recommend it unless you're one of those guys who listens at over 100dB. Also, Avantgarde Duo Mezzos are fucking awesome.