aerius

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.

It's called drawing by hand and scanning into Photoshop to adjust the contrast a bit. Oh, you mean the PSU. That's PSU Designer II One of several things, or a combination thereof. Bass loses control and gets a bit loose. Dynamics get softened and lose impact. Tone shifts towards warm & fuzzy instead of neutral. Soundstage & imaging may not be as clean & precise. Also, final changes to the schematic. Use a red or yellow low current low brightness LED to bias the ECC40. I'm currently using a yellow LED rated for 2.1V, 5mA, and 8mCd. I've thought about LED biasing the output stage as well, but if I'm using 6BX7's I'm going to end up with a string of something like a dozen LED's on each channel. That's a little much, even for me.

It's from the Sybian people, makers of the famous Sybian Orgasm Machine for women, and you can order it from various mail-order sites on the 'net. No I do not own one, as I have a girlfriend who's great in bed.

Have you thought about buying a Venus 2000?

It makes sense since the LD2 is a horribly coloured tube amp, except in this case the colourations work to its advantage in helping to fill out the sound of the K701 and not make it sound too sterile & tight. On anything close to a neutral amp the K701 ends up sounding sterile & dry.

Yes. It's because you touch yourself at night. It's all your fault.

Having heard a K1000, neither would I. Though using a K1000 while lying down, as I often do while listening to my K340 would probably be a pretty interesting experience, and not necessarily in a good way...

Preferences differ, sure, but I have to clear up one thing here. I've heard the K701 on more gear than most people ever will, everything from my own tube amp, a KG Dynahi, several Headroom amps including the Balanced Max, and it never woke up. It was slightly better in some systems than others, but nothing really significant. There's a guy on Head-fi with a custom 300B amp and Audio Aero Capitole SE CD player. When he said he didn't like the K701, the fanboys cried that his system wasn't good enough and didn't have enough power. I damn near pissed myself laughing, as the morons doing the crying own bargain basement made in China amps with a fraction of the power & goodness of his gear.

I found that comfort was about the only thing I liked with the K701, and as I've long said, they ain't even close to hanging with the K1000, HP-2, RS-1, K340 or any other headphones at that level. I'd take a Grado SR60 over a K701, at least the Grado can do tone and make music, something which completely eludes the K701.

Yup, that's him. The only moments of peace and quiet I had was when I was trying out the closed headphones.

Heard the MSB Link II (I think it was a II) way back at my first ever Headfi meet. I was pretty indifferent towards it, I just remember a certain dumbass named Trevor who would not shut the fuck up. I felt like pushing him down the stairs at the end of the meet. I think Biggie might remember that dickhead.

If I wanted to hear positive negatives, I'd subscribe to $tereoshill and give up on webforums altogether. It's ridiculous that one has to put 10 different qualifiers and sugarcoat the negatives on Head-fi to avoid starting a shitstorm with a bunch of whiny cunt rags. Fucking bullshit. As Dusty Chalk mentioned, I'll sugarcoat the negatives when the fanboys start start putting qualifiers on their rivers of gushing praise. Since that ain't happening, I see no need to soften the negatives. If it sucks, I will say it sucks ass in clear bullshit-free language. If people don't like it, tough shit.

Here's my short & sweet summary: A lot of Head-fi members are angsty belly-aching cunt rags. If I were granodemostasa, I'd just flip'em the bird and let them whine & cry to their heart's content. Let the cry-babies wind themselves up, it's their problem, not mine.

In that case, go about 60% of the way down this page till you get to the heading "Even less is even more". I'd swap the rectifier for a pair of 6CJ3 TV damper diodes as they are quieter and can pass more current than the normal 5xx4 rectifier bottles. Use the 6C45P as the input tube if the WE437A tubes ($350 each) are out of your price range, reports say they're nearly and possibly as good. Handily beats the 5687 in drive capability, and should kill it in sound quality. I'm thinking about a set of 6C45P's for my next project, don't know when I'll build it though. You need a Pace PRC2000 soldering & rework station. It's only $4500 or so these days, back when I was in the electronics assembly industry they cost something like $10,000. It'll be the last soldering iron you ever use! Serious answer. I like Hakkos. They fit my hand the best and I haven't heard any complaints about them.

Find some Nichrome wire. Measure its resistance for a given length. Then cut a length equal to the resistance value needed and wrap it around a dowel or cardboard tube. Dip the whole thing in epoxy. There's your resistor.

Speaker amps, yes, headphone amps, can't think of one. For speaker amps, see Amity and Karna.

Yes. It's an OTL with 5687's, which means relatively high output impedance and low output current capabilities. This is not a good thing with low impedance 'phones like Grados. I believe KG measured the output impedance at something like 30 Ohms with a 32 Ohm load.

The last time you might've heard my amp was last summer. There have been many many changes since then, the most important ones being the improved biasing & new operating points on the ECC40 along with the grid neutralization for output tubes. Slightly more gain, but a lot cleaner and it won't distort or do anything funny at high volume like it did before. Everything else is also a lot better.

Automatic colour balance on my digital camera was fooled by the glowing tube filaments. Soundwise it's up there, it's probably limited by the output tubes and transformers but it's still handily beaten every commercially available design I've heard so far. It'll squash a PPX3 Slam like a bug, the proof of concept build which used crappier transformers and a far less optimized design & layout with crappier output tubes was still dead even with that Singlepower. Why? Why??!! It's a complete waste of a 45 or 2A3. All you'll hear is the sound of a 6SN7 straining to drive the output tube along with the sound of the output transformer. For the $500-700 budget you're not going to be able to afford good output transformers either seeing how there's also a bunch of chokes and likely a custom power transformer which also needs to be bought. At the very least use a 5687 family tube which has better drive capabilities. The 6SN7 has a plate impedance of nearly 8k Ohms, it's simply not going to be a good driver tube for any power triode. Use the 6SN7 for what it does best, either as an input tube or a driver for Pentodes and other easy to drive tubes.

I just noticed I now have a custom title. It fucking rocks.

I think you're onto something here. It's as if the headphone, and especially the headphone amp industry is moving towards the planned obsolescence model of the computer industry, except unlike computers which keep getting faster and cheaper the headphone amps for the most part just get different and more expensive. Hooray for the free market and unrestrained capitalism, it's almost like manufacturers are trying to spam the market with as many products as they can in the minimum amount of time, gotta keep up with the Jones's and all that. I can't say I'm surprised though, it happens in many markets once things hit a critical mass and people realize how much money there is to be made. The problem is people are going to get disillusioned and pissed, and that ain't good for the industry in the long run.

There's probably at least a dozen of them floating around on Headwize, but I can't vouch for the goodness of any of them since I haven't built them. Anyways, quick correction to the schematic. Use a red LED instead of the blue one. I used a blue one at first siince it dropped about the same amount of voltage as the cathode resistor I had in there before. However this runs the tube too close to cut-off and the sound suffers a bit compared to a red LED. My particular LED runs at a bit over 1.8V, and is rated for 20mA and 1400mcd. From my research on DIYaudio.com, brighter is bad because of higher impedance, so look for a lower mcd number. If possible, try to get an LED where the bias current of the circuit is in the upper half of the LED's current rating, apparently the LED is more linear when run that way.