n_maher

Bwaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahaha. Nice one!

The writer's strike has left me with more free time than usual.

Well, most cables aren't shielded so you guys must be extreme like Patrick to need shielded headphone cables.

I believe that grawk gave me the hookup first, technically speaking.

Well grawk got the mod discount, it's how you get ahead doncha know?

Well, after recovering from whatever event yielded the horrid picture above I got busy building...

Ever wonder what was inside that insanely expensive Zu mobius headphone cable. Well, I did and considering that I'm converting my headphone rig over to balanced and wasn't about to shell out the current asking price of ~$400 for a balanced version I decided to do it myself. Step 1: hack off existing 1/4" plug. Wow, that's a lot of conductors for a headphone cable. A total of 8 w/ 3 different sizes, all silver plated copper. Step 2: deal w/ scratchy techflex and something else... Hmm, evidently this cable is shielded. In fact the shield and the two largest conductors are all tied to ground at the plug. Seems like an awful lot of effort since headphone cables have never been known to pick up noise that I'm aware of. Step 3: expose a length of wire to work with At this point I figured which conductors went with which connector and so on. The + signal is carried by two smaller (28 ga) conductors for each channel and the - is carried by a single (24ga) conductor. The two 18ga conductors act as another shield I guess since they aren't tied to the Senn plugs, only the 1/4" plug. Again, pretty odd construction but hey I like the way it sounds so I should really stop complaining. Step 4: attach new 4-pin XLR That's it, all done. Well, in truth I made a matching balanced to single ended adapter but that's really boring so I didn't bother taking a picture of it.

nicknutson gets a second mention, for calling this place the evil head-fi.

Don't worry about our salted one, he'll have an amp to use with his K1ks in short order, even if Mikhail decides to take his sweet time.

How's the new gig, Ethan?

I guess you wont know till you try them, eh?

Don't start with me MOTjack.

Nice, man, I'm sure it'll do the job admirably. Make an okay headphone amp too, you never know.

Yes, that sounds very cool and if I was a mass transit commuter I might think about it. But the problem as I see it is if you're using it to browse the web (many more page refreshes) the battery life is going to come way down, right? And if you're using it to browse the web the B&Wness of it is going to get really old, really fast. Look at the simulated picture of the NY times on the screen, that's pretty limited gray tones in my book. And it's probably not going to play nice with dynamic content like flash, YouTube, ect., right? So even if it has free unlimited web access I don't see them being able to use that as a big selling point or to justify the price. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think Ed's original comment, that $400 is too much, is right on the mark.

If the sell 0 of them because it looks like it's from the 80s then what does price matter? You mean I can browse the web on a screen that looks like my apple 2e, no thanks. I don't care if it's crystal clear, my cell phone screen can have color so why can't this? They can make a laptop that costs $500 have a color screen, why can't this? I'm sorry, it just seems like a pretty pointless product to me give a seriously limited feature set. It's only advantages over a small laptop are longer battery life.

The black and white only is a pretty big downer.

cue Rek's rage...

Looks like jude just posted another video update - I can't watch it at work so someone else tell me what it says...

They made one version 9+ minutes long? Holy shit, I think I'd rather be water-boarded.

F'ing sweet dude.

I did not see the +/- boxes at the top of the page, only the individuals. After hydro's post all is well. Thanks, carry on.

Todd, yes, you can collapse the columns but it doesn't make the message pane any bigger. At least not in Firefox it doesn't. I have to side scroll most threads with pictures now so I know what Ian is going through.

A similar amp, maybe, but the trafos that John's amp used are out of production so there isn't likely to be another one exactly like it any time soon.

I usually stumble across mine in my wallet from time to time, try there.