Kung

Many audiophiles in China can't stand the warm bass and dark tone of OG 007, then some people replace the OG 007 earpads with kennerton thror earpads to make 007 sound more transparent and neutral. The Japanese official website says that 007s earpads are sound absorbing, which improves quietness and refine the sound...It also looks like a reverse operation for current stax tuning but stax did it themselves, this makes thror 007 VS 007s very interesting... And according to my experience in making earpads, the use of different cloth on the inside of the earpads will warm the tone, although to different extents, so I'm also curious, if 009/009s are replaced with 007s earpads, will it alleviate some wonky or bright problems and make the sound more natural.

If I were able to design new 007, I would use the ODM look shown in the pic, add cable sockets and make the headrest wider, then keep low sensitivity driver with new etched copper stators and OG earpads to maintain the 007 appearance and wearing style while inheriting the vintage driver of stax，that can also keep different from 9 series. The now 007s just gives me a sense of Frankenstein。。。😶

Damn, that is really disappointing, the diameter of the stator hole of the new headphone is reduced by 20%, which means the hole is reduced from 1mm on 007 to 0.8mm, the sound-transmitting surface of the stator looks to be larger, 007 was about 54-55mm, the new one looks to be over 60mm, the sensitivity must have been improved, the fabric on the inside of the earpads is breathable, which is probably used to maintain the warm tone of 007.

Stax is very stingy with its accessories. Their product positioning strategy is that if the physical specifications of the drivers are similar, the more metal parts, the more adjustable headband functions, and the more leather used, the higher position of the model. At least the headband of the new headphone looks more advanced than that of the 009s. Perhaps it’s a replacement for the 009s, named X8000 or X7000 as a new TOTL product that integrates old 00X series. 009s was launched 7 years after the release of the 009, 009s is now 7 years old and it is time for an upgrade.

I saw a picture where someone turned 'Bliss' potentiometer to the 3-4 o'clock...just another 320Vrms swing with low gain luxury electrostatic amp Perhaps it is thought that the maximum sound pressure can be compensated a bit by increasing the bias voltage. Electrostatic force on the diaphragm is affected by both the bias and the signal.

They are OS film, but the 0.5 micron version was sold out last year https://hobbyspecialties.com/product/os-film/ Only 0.68 micron version of OS7 film is available now https://hobbyspecialties.com/product/os7-film/ If you can use Taobao, there is 0.9 micron version for sale on Taobao. Search: ’0.5微米 F1D’ and you should be able to find the store. Although the title on Taobao is 0.5 micron, the actual version sold is 0.9 micron though... They are all actually DuPont CW02 PET films with special customized thickness, which are also the base film of Hifiman 'nano-diaphragm' planars and the dust cover of their estats.

Long time no see, I have updated many different designs in the past few years. My estats are currently using an omega-like assembly structure but with a driver house made of PPS plastic, and shells are all made of CNC 7075t6 aluminum alloy + hard anodized. The tuning of my headphones has changed to a retro diffuse field target curve which is completely different tuning from stax that emphasizes 1-2khz and 4-6khz.I really enjoy the stax-style assembly method, which makes them look much more refined than German estats.

It looks like the HFM diaphragm is stick to the stators. Most of the diy estats failures I encountered were due to conductive coating problems causing the buzzing sound. I found a frequency response test of Shang-mini, and it seems that the mini driver is a reduced tension version of the Jade2. Considering the diaphragm size(Jade2 and Shang sr are almost the same area as the 90mm Omega）, the DS-gap of the Shang jr/sr is 0.7mm+, while the Jade2 is 0.5mm. For low-tension diaphragms, 0.5mm DS-gap is difficult to work stably. I can understand the "hangs there in mid-air" of HFM estats. The bass of HFM estats are even weaker than many Lambdas. The main reason is that HFM adds additional gaskets on the stators for support to prevent the low-tension diaphragm from sticking to the stators, but the gaskets will significantly suppress the diaphragm swing, and the overly breathable design of the HFM earpads also make it impossible for the low-tension diaphragm to work like many planars. Perhaps this is what HFM thinks is good, cause there are many treble heads audiophiles.

I guess the loose wires are used to make low capacitance cables at the lowest cost. I have measured hfm electrostatic headphone cables with a diy Wheatstone bridge. At a test frequency of 7.8khz, the capacitance between the wires (L+ to bias and L+ to L-) is in the range of 22-30pF per meter, while modern stax cables (such as 007 cables) are in the range of 18-38pF per meter. They are all lower than the capacitance of normal 20AWG silicone flat cables (in the range of 28~62pF per meter, vintage stax headphone cables are also in this range).

It's strange that the electrostatic headphone driver is difficult to break unless the conductive coating completely fails.😱

Magnetic earpads are indeed a great idea. After some simple tests, only four 2.5mm diameter n50 magnets are strong enough to hold the earpads.

I heard some news from canjam shanghai and some people who listened it in store is that mini-shang has a greatly improvement in bass and timbre compared to OG jade2, but there is no more comparison with other stax/dca/audeze except hifiman estats, and we all know even shangri la jr/sr are hard to say it's good in this regard😅. Considering that people in Asia are more accepting of bass light headphones, I am more curious about the experience in Europe and the US.

brilliant🤩

from the picture above, the driver of X1 seems to be slightly larger than that of sr-x. I remember that sr-x has a 51mm diaphragm, while X1 may have 60mm or so ？

Whoa~thats news