aerius

Nope. Knowledge is power. Ignorance ain't bliss.

To me cables are the final step in tuning the system, once you have the rest of the gear, listen for a while to see which way the sound needs to be adjusted, then get the cables.

Personally I feel there's nothing wrong with the responsible use of alcohol & other drugs. If you want to drink, smoke, or shoot up, I have no objections to it as long as you don't ruin your life or run over little kids while driving drunk or something stupid like that.

Audio Aero Capitole CD player, a headphone whose sound you really like, and a custom built amp to drive the darn thing. Go out to meets & stores, arrange to borrow other people's gear, and listen to as many headphones as you possibly can. Eventually you'll come up with a shortlist, then narrow it down to one or two, then get someone to custom build and amp for the chosen headphone(s).

I just pulled out my old computer speakers, I'm going to listen to them for a bit and then do the EnABL thing and see if it does anything. I'll know in a week or 2 if it really works as claimed.

NFL stars can practically get away with murder, I'm not going to hold my breath for a conviction since I very much doubt the asshole will get anything more than a token slap on the wrist.

My friend contacted Mr. Purvine who holds the patents to the EnABL process and got the specifics on how to apply the pattern to the RS-1 driver and housing. Then she got her sister to apply the pattern on the RS-1 drivers & housing after practicing on a cheap walkman headphone. The cable build and recable job was done by one of her university classmates. No idea of cost, but she said it was a pretty delicate procedure and there's no way in hell they're doing it with other people's headphones. According to Mr. Purvine's posts on DIY audio, the best bet is to get a kid to do it since they have the best eyesight and hand-eye co-ordination.

This just in! I'm told you just got put on double secret probation.

This is a very important point, to me at least, there's no point in having a "100% super duper perfect system" if it makes 99.9% of my music unlistenable. I have a lot of albums in my collection which aren't all that well recorded, I still want them to sound good and enjoyable and if "upgrading" my system makes the music suck then it's not worthwhile for me. I have amazingly well recorded albums as well as ones that might as well have been made in a garage, I want as many of them as possible to sound as good as possible. Back to the torture test. Tori Amos - In the Springtime of his Voodoo (Boys for Pele). This one's been in my test rotation for a long time. Most systems have a hard time keeping the low piano notes from blending into mush, and some systems even end up blending the electric bass into the piano notes. Keeping the piano & bass groove going is a nice test of bass control. The bass drum hits are pretty cool too, it's pretty hard to get the impact right without having it get boomy. Getting the balance right between tightness, impact & dynamics, and keeping the bloat & boom under control is surprisingly hard, especially with speakers. There's also the cool hi-hat cymbals in the 1st minute or so where they go "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch" really fast, I think the first sequence of that is around the 30 second mark, give or take 10 seconds. The Tea Party - Psychopomp (Transmission). This one's another nice test for what happens when things get busy and loud. On the quieter simpler parts, it shouldn't be too hard to hear all the details & texture of the instruments, and when it gets loud all those details & textures should still be there. Also good for checking to see if the system can keep the cymbals and other highs under control when the song gets loud, or if they start getting distorted & harsh.

I can't say I know the answer to any of these, but I'd bet the guys on the Steve Hoffman forum could probably list a dozen examples.

Likewise, except he'd have to pay me $200 to take those off his hands.

As some of you might know, I once played Slayer and Guns n' Roses on a Quad ESL-57 system. Surprisingly, the audio gods didn't smite me for this blasphemy, and thus it was learned that Quad 57's don't exactly rock. Recently, Biggie has mentioned playing Slipknot to stress audio gear, and Dusty Chalk admits to blasting NIN while auditioning speakers, while I've inflicted Metallica and Fear Factory on various systems. Which brings me to this topic, lots of people play Norah Jones, Diana Krall, and Miles Davis when auditioning systems or writing reviews, and then they oooh and aaahh at how warm, intimate and real it all sounds and give it an A+ rating. Which would be great, except the piano in every Norah Jones album sounds like ass, but I digress. What I'm getting at is this, I just don't think the music most people use to test out gear is all that challenging, it sounds good on almost every system and you basically end up grading on a scale of good-excellent-great. For some time now I've adopted a different approach, music which will severely stress a system and fuck it up. Like "Sister Awake" by The Tea Party where there's a dozen instruments going hard & fast at the same time, and where lots of gear blend everything together into mush or in less severe cases, lose details when the dynamics kick in and the volume goes up. For instance, an acoustic guitar sounds fine when it's playing by itself, but when the full band kicks in it sounds like shit, and all the tone & low-level details of the guitar are lost. And so I have a torture list of music, if the system makes it through it's truly a great system, almost everything fails, including my own gear. Below is a list of some of the music, with brief notes. Slayer - Angel of Death, Necrophobic, Postmortem, Raining Blood. Can it keep up with the furious drumming and guitars? Probably not, the ending of "Raining Blood" is pretty nuts and the speed & dynamics will kill most systems. Fear Factory - Messiah. The bass drum is stupid fast and hard, most systems run out of steam trying to play it. The Tea Party - Turn The Lamp Down (Alhambra version). Very busy percussion jam at the end of the song, systems have a very hard time keeping it all separate. Nelly Furtado - Wait for You. Deep fast bass, a lot of systems start running out of steam after the first few bass hits. Did I mention deep bass? It'll flop the woofers on a loudspeaker an inch or two even at a moderate volume. Tori Amos - Space Dog. Huge dynamics in the intro. Few systems can play it without compressing, especially at higher volumes. SRV & Albert King - Blues at Sunrise. See if you can hear where they break their guitar strings when they're jamming away.

I'm not sure how it started, as I wasn't there from the beginning. I'm told it began mostly as a Star Trek, Star Wars, and Sci-fi board, but the focus has shifted over the years and we get into some pretty heavy stuff on Science, Politics, Religion, and the usual off topic stuff. And of course the discussions on weapons systems and how to properly plan a nuclear laydown on various countries.

Happy Tree Friends, get your dose of gratuitous cartoon violence.

Head-fi thread in the DIY forum, in the KG's thread about his 6AR8 hybrid amp. From which we learn that Rudistor doesn't understand too much about amp design, and that's putting it a little kindly.

I'm told it's been that way for some time now, and I wasn't exactly surprised given how he's been a Rudistor shill for ages. http://www.head-case.org/index.php/topic,933.0.html

Personally, I wouldn't touch a Rudistor on general principle given that Sovkiller is the North American distributor for them, and I have absolute contempt for that asshole.

Grado SR-60 & 225. Senn 580, but only with vinyl AKG K340 - The best $130 I ever spent on audio

You seem to be rather preoccupied with jerking off.

Looking at the schematic again, I think I've figured out why. There's a current path from the cathode of the input tube, through the resistors, and to the pot and the grid of the tube. That's almost certainly the cause of the swooshing sound.

When we came back from our food break I wanted to see what it would take to trip up the RS-1 system, if this was in fact possible. So I pulled out some Metallica, Slayer, and Fear Factory, go fast hard & heavy as hell and see what happens. I wanted to see if the sound would hold together with the volume cranked up a bit. It laughed at Metallica, even the loudest busiest parts of S&M with the full orchestra going were no problem. Same thing with Slayer, the last couple minutes of "Raining Blood" with the crazy fast drums & cymbals hit with a new level of dynamics & clarity. Then I put on "Messiah" by Fear Factory to see if the ultra-fast bass drums would expose a weakness, nope, I just got whacked with the hardest fiercest drum sound I've heard outside of a live Slayer concert. At this point I gave up and we went back to listening to more normal music. We then traded some CDs, wrapped up the meet, and went out to dinner. Over dinner, we talked about a whole bunch of stuff, had a few drinks, and I learned the secret of the RS-1 mods. It apparently has something to do with edge interfaces and how they reflect energy to cause resonances & screw up transients & low-level details. By applying a specific damping pattern to the driver, it's possible to significantly reduce the reflections and the amount of resonances & stored energy in the driver. I'm not a physicist or mechanical engineer so I don't know how it works, but it does work. I was referred to this page for further info, I think I understand like 10% of it and I haven't even looked at the patent yet. Sarah's pretty amazing, I've been lucky enough to see her live a few times, including once when I was literally close enough to reach out and touch her. If she tours in your area, go.

The answer to both questions is at this point "I have no freakin' clue!", unfortunately. I've barely started reading up on DHT designs and familiarizing myself with their design concepts and how they work, I just don't know enough about them right now. I have bits & pieces here & there and some things carry over from IDHT's, but I'm still quite a ways from putting together to make a working picture. One of the instrumentation guys at my friend's company, apparently he used to build 'scopes & other stuff at Tektronics. I have the schematics for the amp but not the PSU, but don't even think about building it. I'm told the 6C45P is twitchy as hell, so the wire routing and grounding has to be absolutely perfect. It took the guy a couple tries to get it right and he has many years of experience with high-performance tube circuits, so us mere mortals are most likely SOL.

I doubt the Bugle 45 will be as good. There's a reason the designer has since moved on to using WE417A & 437A along with 6C45P tubes in his designs. More power, more goodness, less distortion. The Bugle's a good amp, but it still leaves a fair bit of the 45's potential "in the tube". Actually I was quite interested in the technical aspects of my friend's 2A3 amp. One of the coolest things was what's known as the Western Electric Harmonic Balancer, it substantially reduces 3rd & higher order harmonics and makes the sound a lot cleaner. It cancels out harmonics the same way Broskie's Aikido circuit cancels out PSU noise, by using it against itself. Apparently, this distortion reduction technique was invented over 70 years ago and then forgotten about for decades. Flat pads, the way god meant them to be used, IMO.

The RS-1 was redone with copper litz wire, didn't ask who made it though. It also had some mods done to the drivers. Basically, take everything about an RS-1 that's not so good and make it all go away, or almost all of it. Then take all the things that the RS-1 does well and crank it up to 11.

Impressions. Today I heard the best headphone setup I've ever heard in my life, and by a good sized margin, it was one of those rare experiences which redefines for me what is possible with headphones. I learned that a tweaked & recabled RS-1 is capable of shockingly good sound, it made my K340 sound broken and smoked it in everything except soundstage size. That ain't an easy thing to do. I also now know that I MUST build a DHT amp, a great DHT amp is as far above my amp as my amp is above an entry level tube amp. It's not a "yeah there's a bit of a difference", it was literally a "Holy fucking shit!!!" kind of difference. The Capitole CDP, well, not much needs to be said about that other than it fucking rocks. I'll start with the amp, it's a balanced amp using a transformer phase-splitter input to a pair of 6C45P tubes, to a switchable interstage transformer to a pair of 2A3's, then the output transformer. CCS's everywhere with glowy VR tubes and a separate tube rectified PSU with damper diodes & those motor run caps I love. What hit me from the start was the resolution, speed, and texture, it was like making a jump from 128k MP3 to the original CD, there's just more of everything which I never knew was there. One of the first songs I played was "Sweet Ones" by Sarah Slean, fun song which I hadn't heard in a while since I overplayed it a few months ago. Anyways I always figured the chorus part was just multitracked vocals with a bit of a chorus effect, but I found out through the amp & RS-1 that it was a lot more than that. Today, I heard that each vocal track got its own chorus & echo effect before getting multi-tracked, and the last chorus of the song had a vocal track which was itself multi-tracked. The ability of the amp to resolve and separate out all that in the middle of a band playing full-out is freakin' wild, I've never heard this kind of resolution before, even on a high-end speaker rig. Talk about hearing all the layers of the recording, this was nuts. It was pretty much the same idea for the next few songs I played, it got pretty intense. We took a short break while I redid the wires on my K340 so I could use it with the amp, and redid my amp so she could use the RS-1 with it. Then we flipped the amp to high-gain and plugged in my K340. Going from the RS-1 it was a letdown, yes the K340 sounds better than it does in my system but it still got stomped. It fell far short of the speed & resolution of the RS-1, it was congested & confused, especially in the bass & upper midrange where it couldn't get textures right and blurred tones & details. Guitar notes & tones sound a bit too alike, for instance SRV's Fender and Albert King's Gibson start sounding a tad similar when they're jamming and playing fast & hard with the band going full-tilt. When things get busy & loud, the K340 starts losing its ability to keep sounds separate and prevent them from blending. Same idea in the bass, the K340 isn't fast enough to keep notes from blending and more importantly, preserve the unique tone & texture of each note from each instrument. These are usually the strongpoints of my K340, and it's handily beaten almost every headphone in these areas, and here it was getting wasted by an RS-1. I haven't experienced anything like this since my first Head-fi meet, where Biggie's RS-1 setup make my Senn 580 sound like a broken piece of crap. Oddly enough, the RS-1 strikes again. After a break for snacks we got back to more listening, this time with both tube amps running off the Capitole. It turns out that my amp still has some performance left "in the bag" and my CD player is definitely holding it back a bit. It and my K340 are pretty well matched in performance though, so neither of them is really holding the other back. The RS-1 sounds better out of my amp now than it did out of my CDP, but it's still got a ways to go to match the 2A3 amp. 27's, 37's, ECC40's, 1633's, and 6BL7's are pretty good tubes, but they ain't DHT's. There's still a big gap in speed, resolution, tone & texture, and the ability to yank out those low-level details from a recording making it sound whole and complete. It was around this point where I remembered something I first heard from the guys at Fab Audio, that is, a CDR copy can sound different and sometimes better than the original. So we decided to test that one out, and I'll be damned cause it's true. In this case, we both agreed that the CDR copies sounded better, it was pretty much impossible to tell the difference with my K340, but with her RS-1 it was fairly apparent, though it's not that big of a difference. The CDR is more analog-like, there's more space and blackness which allows a bit more of those low-level details to come through. It's a little smoother & more musical, and I think for long listening sessions this could all add up to a big difference in enjoyment and lack of fatigue. This was a consistent difference we noted with all the CDR copies I had on hand to compare to the originals. I guess this means I'll have a lot of CD copying to do if my system ever gets good enough. For those who want to try and replicate this, my CDR copies were burned at 4X on a Matsushita 32/8/4 CDR/W on Fujifilm (Taiyo Yuden) CDRs after ripping on EAC on secure mode. Stay tuned for more...I'm still trying to digest and think over today's events.