aerius

Both versions. The frequency response (new version) is a bit flatter in that the bass is a bit fuller, but the other problems still remain. The midrange hardness was especially annoying on piano since certain notes and chords containing those notes have a distinctly different tone and jump out in a bad way. The closest description I can think of is this; imagine a piano piece that's played on a Steinway grand, everything's cool until you suddenly hear a couple notes and chords that sound like a generic Yamaha piano, it just doesn't go with the rest. That's what the Adagios do to piano. It's a very narrow range of wonkiness though, you might spend quite some time listening to piano pieces before the magic notes & chords get hit, I got lucky and heard them on my first session.

I've listend to the Adagios recently again and I don't think they'd be a good speaker coming off the Quads. The midrange hardness and bass issues which I noted in my impressions when they first came out are still there after lengthy break-in and use, they never went away. Compared to the Quads, the Zen's coherency throughout its frequency range is probably going to be a bit disappointing. The bass just doesn't keep up with the rest of it. Personal choice for me would be the Opera Callas Sp, if you're not careful you can confuse them with a set of Quads. Quads are bit clearer & faster while the Operas have a bit more warmth & weight. Or if you can find a pair on the used market at a decent price, the Living Voice Avatars is likely your ticket. Basically a Quad with a slightly warmer balance and more dynamics & bass.

You mean the amp experts on Head-fi are lying to me? Those bastards, they ought to be sodomized with a cattle prod.

Remember, all you need to do is add a bunch of 2nd harmonic distortion to any solidstate amp and it'll sound just like a tube amp.

If I were to take a guess, I'd say it has something to do with the tubes and the amp design. It's possible that one of the tubes was slightly wonky and did something stupid when it was warming up, which then did bad things to the amp and fried the RS-1 driver. This is why I plug in my sacrificial headphones when I'm firing up new tubes for the first time on my amp, you never know where the tubes have been and what they'll do. Alternatively, build a protection circuit of some kind for the amp to keep it from doing wonky shit. Moving a couple posts back: 1) This is a bad thing, you're making & breaking ground contacts & loops which can result in big thumps, hums, and pops which may damage the headphone. 2) Depends on the amp design. Some amps really don't like this, others don't care.

Someone should do that with one of the huge picture threads like the "damn you head-fi" thread. It would be pretty funny to scroll through the posts of people's systems and then suddenly come upon a picture of Tubgirl.

It tastes like chicken.

I've seen nude Van den Hul cartridges and I'm like "damn it would suck if I had shaky hands". This one doesn't look quite as bad since there's actually a way to hold on to it without using tweezers. How's the sound on it?

How about stretching your budget and getting the Manley Reference DAC?

I'd much rather go with this. Sells on audiogon for around $1000 or so.

In other words, business as usual at head-fuck-up.

After reading through John Atwood's DC filament supply test, I did some thinking and decided to give DC heating another try using the parts I have at my disposal. I went with a variation of circuit #4 from the report, but with a couple extra RC stages and different parts values. Damn, now we're talking, this little simple circuit is as good as the big benchtop power supply, it works, and it's so simple it's not even funny. I only converted the input tubes to DC since I don't have enough room to do all the tubes, but yeah, this was worth it.

600mA at 100V is a cool 60W. The tubes would quickly melt into slag if you tried to put that much power through them, that is if they don't implode. To get 60W from an OTL will take a large number of 6AS7's as in the Atmasphere designs or a really crazy tube like the 833A.

Ask 5687, he seems to get a constant stream of Singlepower gear delivered to his home.

Sure, there's Thorsten Loesch's Full Monkey design about 2/3 of the way down the page. WE 437A's ain't exactly cheap but at least there's only one of them per channel.

I came across this on DIYaudio. 200,000, that's right, 200,000 tubes going for the low price of $5000. That's like 2.5 cents a tube! Transporting them all is going to be a bitch though, but seriously, 200,000 tubes.

Played some Talking Heads and Depeche Mode, and I can't remember the others. The owner's a great guy, he's a member of the local audio club and he's hosted a few small meets at his store in the past. Lots of amazing gear in there, Quad ESL 57's & 63's, Lowthers, Wilson Benesch, Opera, Audio Aero, and more turntables than I can count. Every single drawer & cabinet is also stuffed full of LP's, you could probably spend months in there listening 24/7 to vinyl before going through them all.

Look on the bright side, at least you weren't ass raped by some guy who got into your apartment before you and was lying in wait for you. I believe the movie you're looking for is Sliver, with Sharon Stone and one of them damn Baldwin brothers.

Let's see, speakers aound $12k CDP $16.8k amp ~$7k preamp - no clue probably $5-10k turntable & arm ~$10k cartridge - no clue cables - probably a couple grand power conditioning & RFI prevention - a lot My rough ballpark figure with loads of guesswork comes out to something like $65k or thereabouts.

Yeah, it was sweet. Audio Aero Prestige CD/SACD player, EAR preamp, Gamut amps, Opera Divina speakers, it's a pretty sweet system. Analog setup was a Nottingham Dais turntable with Anna arm and Van den Hul Grasshopper IV cartridge. The turntable setup is ridiculously fast & clean while remaining quite musical, the music wraps around and basically, there is no front to the soundstage. It's like wham, here's a dude with a guitar like 3' to the right of me, and another time it was bird chirps and monkey calls coming from behind me. The first time I heard that setup a couple months ago I was like this can't be real, where the hell are the hidden speakers? I'd like to own the system one day, but I'd have to sell a kidney and a lung.

Me & philodox met up at a local store yesterday where he was introduced to vinyl and had Massive Attack ruined for him. I'll let him fill in the rest of the details, but suffice to say, we had a fun time listening to cool music & gear.

I think jpak's being sarcastic, the K340's are a pain in the ass to drive, in an OTL amp I personally wouldn't use anything less than a 6BL7 and with transformer output a 6SN7 is about as low as I'd want to go. A 6BZ7 just doesn't make sense to me.

Biggie has a well known love for Sony and Audio Technica headphones.

Don't forget the gratuitous Boomer nudie scene, and the one with Six's naked butt.

Meh, it's just another one of the countless 6SL7-6SN7-300B amps, nothing special, those things are a dime a dozen. Not bad, but nothing special other than the 2-chassis design. What I'm saying is, go nuts, get really out there on the fringe and build something like The Karna. Push-pull 5687 to 2A3 to 300B, loads more power & control, sounds radically different from the traditional single-ended 300B. The only downside is it's gonna cost a fortune and you need to get someone to custom-build it.