Got up, made pancakes, worked for a little while from home, ate lunch, worked more, did some chores around the yard, repaired and amp, cooked dinner, built a octal/loctal adapter, watched a bit of BSG, now it's sleepy time.
Given your size constraints I'd say that your odds of finding something cheap and commercially available are pretty slim. I think you're going to have to get creative and find something that's the right size but not designed for the job. Example: a couple of bricks would be about the right size, though potentially unstable.
It's still on the books for Headroom to release an new version although I'm not sure where that project is right now. I haven't talked w/ Tyll or Pete about it in a while.
And lucky you were to grab that, they are few and far between these days. I don't think I've seen one for sale since I sold mine last year.
I honestly think that this perception is purely a result of the Headroom knob's diameter. If you've ever use a Single Power amp w/ a stepper you'd understand as the feel is pretty similar. You just don't generate much mechanical advantage with the stock knobs in both cases. That's why I like to use big honkin' knobs on all my projects, it greatly helps with attenuator feel, whether it's a pot or SA.
Without signal degradation is going to be the kicker. Honestly, the only good cure is to find a source with either a good built in preamp or live with the possibility that an inline attenuator is going to potentially degrade the signal slightly.
I'm tempted to say nay. Tis a shite load of $$$ and the more time that passes the more variable I want my control, not less. Granted, with the gain switch you'll be all set with the HR amp but I'd be shocked if you got back the type of performance gain that the price might have you expecting.
I can assure you I do not.
Yeah, I've got it pretty bad. But I started thinning the heard earlier this week and sold off a few pairs. I'll unload a bunch of 6SN7s if the 7N7 experiment goes well.
I'll be curious to hear what you think of them once you get the adapter. I found the listening experience from the stock amp pretty lackluster. Running of Justin's BHSE was a different story entirely. I think grawk had much the same experience and may have even tried them off of a third amp.
You're driving them off the stock amp, right? Having heard them properly driven at CanJam I can say that they do in fact respond favorably to better amplification. One of these nights I'll get my Koss to Stax adapter built and be able to see how well the SRD7 does driving them.
The Touch has no issues with it and the Phone doesn't seem to either. Postjack and I were both posting live from CanJam. He was on Edge, I was using the hotel's wifi.
The problem with DIY Duet cables is that Apogee seems to be using a non-standard receptacle that isn't playing nicely w/ the VGA connectors that I've been able to source. Their receptacle is so shallow that normal male plugs can't seat fully and the retention screws can't reach the embedded fasteners. So it's a somewhat tenuous connection, seems ok for really static setups but if anything gets moved around the connection gets lost far too easily for me to be happy. If I can get through the rest of my fire sale on Head-Fi I might pick one up to do some research with. So far Apogee support has been ignoring me and I don't have much recourse with them since I don't actually own one of their products.