aerius

And here, we see the trickle down theory of economics in effect...

Thanks to a person on DIYaudio.com who had a blown MOSFET on this PH12, we now have this wonderful schematic so we can all clone "the best amp in the world that's ever been built", that is if you believe dretardwells.

Speaking of masturbation machines, I tell you, women get all the best toys. Like the Dorky Donkey.

B.B. King at Roy Thomson Hall last night. I had to hear the Blues legend again before he passes on.

In theory the output impedance should be a bit over 4 Ohms with 6BL7's and about half that with 6BX7's, however I've never measured it so I have no idea what it actually is in real life. I do know that it'll drive 6 Ohm speakers with either tube so the output Z can't be too bad.

Stop visiting teen porn sites?

Yeah, they omit everything which makes music good.

I think it makes a lot of sense from a commercial standpoint. The trend in mainstream hi-fi has been towards "accuracy & neutrality", and the K701 sounds pretty "accurate & neutral" unless the person's heard something like the HP-1000 or K1000 which actually is accurate & neutral. They're a company, they gotta follow the market to some extent to stay profitable.

Sing along to some Frank Zappa: "Catholic girls, She gave me VD!"

But did you break them in for 10,000 hours and run them with the special K701-approved amp, source, and cables? Speaking seriously again, I agree on all points. I'm still trying to understand how people think the K701 has a great midrange and what they're comparing it to, the midrange to me is among the most dry, flat, and dead sounding midrange I've heard in any headphone. It discombobulates me.

I have quite a bit of experience on both sides, as a customer and as the guy who had to answer the phones and deal with customers at a small business. From the business side, if a customer calls me only once a month or once every 2 months, he probably doesn't care too much and I can string him along as long as I damn well please. Yes yes we've been terribly busy, we're very sorry and we'll get to it as soon as we can. Click. And we're good for at least another month when we get to do it all over again. I spend 5-10 minutes on the phone every month or two and I don't have to do jack shit about him. I can just let him hang while I do more profitable projects. On the other hand a customer who calls in every day and goes "is it fucking done yet?" and gives us shit for our excuses (real or not) gets very annoying very fast. After a short while of dealing with the cockmunch, we just want to get the asshole out of our lives any way we can. So we buckle down, do his project ahead of the others and send him on his way, then we hope to god we never have to deal with the goddamn fucker again.

The key is to make enough of a pest of yourself so that he makes the time to work on the amp. This is known as the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" theory of customer service. If you don't bitch enough, he ain't gonna serve you until he feels like it, which may be never, if you call him up every day and go "where's my amp? I want my fucking amp done now or else!" he will break down and get your amp done, and if he doesn't then you fuck him up good on Head-fi.

Let's just say his idea of a headphone amp is a single stage OTL using a 6H30P. It had an output impedance of something like 500 Ohms and no bass. Unfortunately I didn't know that much about tube design back then or I would've told Jay to tell Ori that he's a fucking crackhead for coming up with something that dumb.

Go to DIYaudio.com, or the Tube DIY forum on Audio Asylum. Search. Read. It'll keep you busy for months.

Read it again. I agree on a point or two (transformers), elaborate on others, and say fuck no to the rest while explaining why.

Go to Google. Look up "anal fisting". Or just go to archive.org and lookup "goat.cx" from 2004 and earlier.

In short, no to all of the above, and fuck no to the 6SN7. A 300B is anything but mushy and slow, the mushy slowness is the result of the worthless crap-ass driver stages used by 99% of amp makers, it typically consists of a 12AU7 or 6SN7. A 300B is a lot closer in sound to a 45 or 2A3 than the typical mush you hear, which is the sound of an overworked and underpowered driver stage. Swapping 300B's isn't going to do much, you might get a bit more treble and slightly less mush, but at the end of the day you still haven't fixed anything, the fundamental problem of a crap driver stage still remains. The 6SN7 with its low power and high plate impedance is not a good driver tube unless used as an SRPP, mu, or cathode follower of some sort, and that has a bunch of its own issues. To me it's a kludge solution. Making a 300B quiet isn't all that hard, as far as DHT tubes go the 300B has low gain, and as an output tube there's nothing after it to amplify any noise it creates. Its noise rejection is also on the better side, and combined with its lowish gain this means it's not that hard to keep quiet. Contrast that with say, a 26, normally an input tube with higher gain and a bunch of other stages after it to multiply any noise it creates, and it will make noise since they're pretty temperamental. Back to the problem, it's not that hard to keep a 300B quiet, the problem is keeping it quiet without fucking up the sound. If granodemostasa's impressions are anything to go by, Woo hasn't succeeded there. They can sound good, hell, I'm using $20 transformers in my amp and I can't complain about the sound. But if the rest of the amp is good enough then it's worth it to splurge on $1000 exotics. If I slapped some amorphous core Lundahls or something like that on my amp it ain't gonna do much if anything, but if I put my transformers on my friend's 2A3 amp it'll crap up the sound.

Seriously, for that price it better come with a one pound nugget of pure platinum inside.

Here's a word of advice: use your brain, if you have one, before typing out random bullshit and hitting the post button. This is not Head-fi where people will respect you for spamming your way to 2000 posts.

There's so many things wrong with this proposed amp of yours that I can't even list them all. For one thing, if a 6SN7 has trouble driving a 300B, what the fuck makes you think a 6SL7 will work? Have you even looked up the specs of these tubes or are you just name-dropping because you think it makes you sound smart?

Heh, no beef, it's just that our tastes & preferences are so different that I can't recall the last time (if there was one) that we agreed on anything.

Holy shit, Iron_Dreamer and I actually agree on something. This is a monumental day.

Experience levels. At one time I thought a Senn 580 with Gilmore Lite was the best shit ever, and it was the best sound I'd heard up until that point. I had a ton of experience with speakers but not much with headphones, so I had no idea what headphones were capable of. The 580 was good, and I didn't know if things could really get any better. Then I heard Biggie's RS-1 rig at my first meet, and I was like "holy fucking shit!!", it literally made my 580's sound like a broken piece of crap. Now I know what good is, and the 580 is no longer good, and so eventually I ended up with something better. The problem is this. I want to hear the best so I know how my stuff stacks up, and whether or not it's worth it to move up. If something blows away my gear, I'm happy, because now I know I can get better sound. Most Head-fi guys aren't like that, they just want to pimp whatever they own as "the greatest", their egos are too fragile and tied up with their gear to acknowledge that there's better stuff out there than what they own. So they go into denial and circle-jerking.

Scarily enough, I know a chick who has RS-1's, a custom 2A3 tube amp, and an Audio Aero Capitole CD player. If I were single, I'd marry her.

I'd say at least 90% of Headfi members who've actually heard the good stuff are either here already or have quit the scene, and most of the rest are either banned from or don't post much on headfi. The answer to your question is therefore "vanishingly small". Or to put it another way. Amongst Head-case members, I own an average system at best, over on Head-fi I'd easily be in the top percentile. That tells you something about the experience level over there. But this should come as no surprise since the attention over there is directed at the mass market stuff, and not the more esoteric high-end gear. If I were to say "HP-2", most of us here would know exactly what it is, what it sounds like, and so forth because we either own it or have experience with it. Over there, I most people would go "a what?" if they weren't allowed to use google.