Dusty Chalk

Good luck with that, I'm pretty sure she has it copyrighted, patented, trademarked, and is working on intellectual property rights.

That sound is turtle for, "Goddamnit, my dick doesn't reach."

I've heard both the Audio Alchemy DDE 3.0 and one of the Parasounds -- the 1600, I think. I still have the Audio Alchemy, but mostly for speaker duty. I liked the midrange on it more. Whenever someone says, "I'd prefer a well-designed DAC that only does 16/44.1 vs. a mediocre DAC that upsamples to 24/96", I usually think of the Audio Alchemy. When we tried it in Hirsch's system, it sounded a little rolled off, though, compared to...well, pretty much everything else he had. It's the K501 of DACs in terms of top end/midrange quality (excellent midrange, meh top end). Or perhaps the LS3/5a of DACs. In other words, there are more modern designs that are better, but it had its strengths, and if I had to sell everything else I had, I could live with it.

Nun Moar Blak!

There's a book with a highly stylized illustration of a muscle guy on the cover that's got some good exercises in it. I forget the name, though, and it's not handy. Of course, you can look around on amazon for good reviews. But yeah, exercises, learn the basics, develop your calluses.

ESP950's were not bad -- this is actually the first time I think I heard them. A little rolled off on the topmost extreme highend (compared to Stax und Senns), but that's not a deal-killer. The rest was real nice.

Salmon burger from Harris Teeter's.

I can't.

Am currently listening to 'gumption' music. But that only applies to Reks. Everyone else should actually type shit out. Oh, and fuck convention.

Well, by watercool, I meant liquid cool -- they have special non-conductive coolants to submerse one's entire PC in, I was thinking more along the lines of something like that. Albeit not seriously. The heatsinks weren't serious either.

You could just watercool the whole thing.

Awesomeness.

What about just having a virtual machine inside that runs Windows, just for the CAD software?

You and my cat would get along just fine. I however, consider "only throwing up once" one too many times.

So, it just NEEDS MOAR HEATSINKS?!?!?

Liszt, Totentanz & Piano Concertos 1 & 2, SACD 'gumption'? Why does it take 'gumption' to listen to something?

The biggest difference is isolation. I can't stress this enough, people don't realize how much that changes the entire listening experience, even were the rest of the room entirely quiet (which it weren't). It is the equivalent of making the background blacker. Dogs go from barking noisily to just flapping their jowls; cats go from insistently vying for attention to being perfectly content; friends go from whiney airheads to intellectual confidantes. It's really win-win all the way around. The low-end extension out of the BH was about the same for the O2 and the 4070, the Orpheus had more. It must have been the opposite on the KGSS, based on Chris' take on things. I should also mention that Hirsch's Orpheus was modified to able to take the Stax bias, you probably shouldn't try that with just any Orpheus. I think. Although I think he did, which is how he found out it couldn't take it. Or something. I'll let him post about that, I don't remember now. Hirsch? As was already answered, it is, indeed, the playful kitty-kraken, which seems to have confused a ship full of people with a large ball of yarn.

For those of you who don't frequent Head-Fi, someone posted that Oldies.com is having a fantasy warehouse clearance sale similar to that other one. Some of them are SACD's, but don't just search on the text "SACD", as not all of them are correctly identified. Ends Wednesday.

Orpheus, by a very wide margin. O2 MkII and 4070 were too close to call. The HD800's sounded great out of the GSX (as a baseline comparison point). I didn't listen to anything else. The kitty was pretty playful, too. Skinniest cat I ever did see (without looking scrawny). Thanks to Chris for having us over, Dan and Colin for making the pretty far trek to bring most of the gear, Mrs. Dreadhead for the snacks and being tolerant of a great big geekout, and everyone else for playing along, and all of you guys for playing along at home. EDIT: I should mention that this was entirely unfair, as the BH was running on Stax bias, which was complete overkill for the Senn, which made it sound really good.

Well, if you separate out your choices to integrated amp + USB DAC later, yes, your options just shot up about 10-fold.

What price range? I just recently read a very positive review of the Cyrus 8 XP d.

I'm looking at amazon, and I'm not seeing the one I have, so I'll go and check later. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but when I bought it, my guitarist friend (Spacey) told me to get this one, it was the default one that everyone got, did the job, and was relatively cheap. I want to say it was a Yamaha, but I'm only seeing one Yamaha, and mine looks more like one of the Korg's, but cheaper. It's just got a simple little LCD display, tunes, and does nothing more (no metronome, no nothing).

I got as far as St. James Infirmary and decided I needed something with a little more energy, so it temporarily got eschewed in place of Amorphis' Skyforger:

Okay, > 1:1.