aerius

He should've used slugs instead of shot, gotta use the right tool for the job. Slugs will eventually break the lugnut off, shot will just bounce off it.

You managed to hear 2 of the least neutral horns around, well, maybe not quite that unneutral but they're pretty non-neutral as far as horns go and pretty much define the "horn sound". I heard an Uno a long time ago and it was not nearly as coloured as the Klipsch, can't remember too much else about it though since it was so far back.

You mean the games don't already go 5 hours?

Have fun getting that amp stable, you might get lucky and have it work, but more likely than not you'll spend a week or more trying to get the damn thing to stop oscillating, and then still wonder why it doesn't sound right, because it's still oscillating, but at MHz frequencies. High transconductance tubes such as the 5842, WE417A, and especially the 6C45P need damn good grounding and wiring layout, and they may also need to be properly shielded & terminated. Been there, done that, no fun at all. Also, feeding the 5842 off the cathode of the 45 which is biased with a VR tube is not going to help things out, VR tubes go inductive at high frequencies which can lead to all kinds of wonky things. Personally, I'd build Gordon Rankin's Bugle 45(PDF file) for now and then see how things go. Or your could build my P-P ECC40 Amp with 6BL7 output tubes and a yellow instead of blue LED and bump the voltage up to 350V or so for more headroom. It'll run a set of 97dB speakers just fine in a small room so it should have no problems with the even more efficient Duos.

Did anyone manage to identify the headphones been used by the test subjects during the blind test? I think they're crap-ass Sonys, which would go a long way towards explaining why they can't hear a difference.

Interesting. Sounds like Woo cheaped out on the output transformers or messed up something else somehow. When I was playing around with the 6DE7 and 6EM7 type tubes I managed to get pretty decent sound out of them, I'd say it was about as good as my mini Gilmore lite but with a tube sound. There were lots of cheap and/or crappy parts since they were just proof of concept builds for some ideas which I was thinking of at the time.

There is no head-case.

Not really a fan of either one to be honest, the 4 looks overly complicated and the 5 is just another 6SN7/300B design. Personally I'd rather get the Woo 6 and see if he can upgrade the output transformers and maybe get the v-cap and power supply upgrades at the same time. I've found that the 6DE7, 6EM7, and other such dissimilar triode TV tubes are often just as good if not better than the 6DJ8 & 12AU7 tubes commonly used in audio. I've used 13EM7's in a couple test-builds and they sounded pretty good despite all the cheap parts I used in the build.

There was a change? I guess I missed out on everything since I was on the default theme all along...

Maybe if you take the cables apart and melt down the silver into jewellery...

Admin fight!!!

This is what happens when conservative right-wing fucktards get voted into government.

More engineering, no, better engineering, quite possible. If the one man op happens to be someone like Tim de Paravicini or John Atwood, it could well end up doing a better job than the big company. Not saying that APL does or doesn't since I don't know a thing about them.

Do more listening. It never hurts to have more knowledge & experience. That way you have a much better chance of knowing your choice is indeed the best one.

It doesn't. Short of changing the drivers or doing some serious physical mods to them, there's no way it's going to match the speed & resolution of an RS-1. Different cups & damping schemes will affect mostly the tonal balance of the headphone along with its soundstaging, but it's not going to have major effects on the detail & resolution unless the original housing is really subpar. Slapping SR225 or HF-1 drivers into an RS-1 housing isn't going to give them the resolution of the RS-1, ain't gonna happen no matter how much some may wish it did. With that said, the strength of the HF-1 is its tonal balance. It has good tone and it's pretty forgiving while retaining a decent level of the good hifi stuff. It's a well balanced headphone that sounds good, and I can certainly see why a lot of people would like it. If I didn't already have a 225 I'd have an HF-1 to go along with my RS-1, since an RS-1 out of an iPod is kinda ridiculous.

I'll have to agree and disagree on the grounds that some of the 650's I've heard sound drastically different from each other. I don't know if it's break in effects or sample variations, but I've heard a 650 which sounded remarkably similar to a 600 and a 650 which sounded nothing like a 600, both of them out of the same gear. Up until I heard the latter pair, I had no idea what people were talking about when they said the 650 had fat boomy bass.

Go tubes, and transformers. That would my personal first choice for something you can buy off the shelf. I've heard one and it sounds great.

Same here. I figured I'd wait till Bestbuy drops the price down to $10 or so before I pick up a copy since I already have the original version from my high school days.

In this case I'd say the best thing you can do is spend the next few months to a year listening to as many speaker setups as you possibly can. Audition a bit of everything, electrostatics, horns, ribbons, single driver speakers, speakers with 10 drivers per side, high efficiency, low efficiency and everything in between. Find out what you like and don't like, and try to learn the whys behind it. After you've heard a bunch of stuff you'll start seeing which direction you want to go in and what's important to you, then you can make a short list of speakers and make your purchase after a further round of auditions. Then you can worry about the amps.

Well, in that case you'll really love SACD, and any CD player or DAC which uses a single-bit D/A converter chip.

I think you should get Magico Mini's since you don't have a price range.

Ask KG. He designed one some time back, but I don't remember how far along the build process got.

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I wasn't aware that Sarah Slean is my girlfriend, but who am I to argue with you?