n_maher

Happy Birthday!

Large Coffee from my local Turkish Coffee shop along with a Cinnamon Coffeecake muffin. Although newegg does have a ripping HTPC setup sitting in my shopping cart...

Heh, if I could just get a couple things wrapped up I'd be on a selling spree.

Yeah, for the DIY crowd we can save quite a bit on portables. I see a singlebox mini3/Alien combo in my future for the office. I miss the PIMETA that I had built like that.

I'm with you. Whenever I'm on the move listening it's hardly focused or concentrated enough to be worthy of some $400 portable amp. Don't get me wrong, I can see the point for having a small, easily transportable amp but I think my budget would be under $200 for something like that.

Happy Birthday!

I know, I know, ancient topic but I've got news... I decided to take one for the team and order some of the bulk anticables speaker wire. At $1.25/ft it's pretty impossible to beat for high quality 12ga copper and he'll also sell you the spades and heatshrink to go with them. Based on my emails with him Paul seems like a genuinely decent guy and is actually quite the DIY electronics enthusiast. Color me gullible but most DIY guys I know are more skeptical than your average "audiophile" when it comes to the typical snake-oil type stuff. Heck at $100 for a 10' pair of speaker cables he's probably not charging enough.

Here's another deal that someone might be interested in and strikes me as one of those opportunities that might not present itself again for a long time. Mark levinson MODEl 36 dac For the banned among us here's the Agon link.

The DAC is nearly done, and I'm taking a bit of a gamble selling the SE beta this early but the opportunity to sell the amp presented itself in my favorite way, that being that someone I'm friendly with was looking for one and the deal worked well for both of us. It won't be leaving the Headcase family. And until the DAC is up and running I'm going to keep mum on the source. By all reports it should be friggen killer. Six, since I'm clearly unbalanced as well. Yeah, my first beta was my quickest build ever from start to at least sort of completed. I'm hoping the same holds true for the balanced version but holy mother of pearl there are a lot of parts to solder...

Well, with the sale of my single-ended Beta today I will be officially launching into balanced-beta land shortly. My wallet weeps.

I'm certainly no authority on this as honestly I've never tried to roll ground channel opamps to see if there was a difference. Based on what I've read there is good motivation to use as good an opamp (if not better actually) in the ground channel. There are some interesting discussions on the three channel topology at Headwize if you're looking to learn more. In short, my advice, use the 627. If you don't have one post a WTB thread at Head-fi, you can usually pick one up for about 50% of retail without too much difficulty.

You rock, Salty.

Please, please, please someone submit this to the headphone price guide on Head-Fi.

I spent about 3 months with an HA-1 MKII at work alongside a tricked out PIMETA and preferred the PIMETA by a fair margin. If you're ever wanting an amp like that again I'd see if you can't get MisterX to build you a PIMETA/Alien DAC combo. I seriously miss having that setup at work and will probably build another one like it one of these days.

Yup, just tried to head over there and send someone a PM with a progress report. The Fi no worky.

One other thing worth noting, the money you spend on mods is likely money that you'll have a pretty hard time recouping later on where something like a DAC is going to maintain much better value. Not that you ever buy equipment with the idea of selling it but it's not something that I ignore either unless I'm comfortable with the loss.

Just one alternate suggestion, why not upgrade the DAC to something like a DA220 and have the option of going balanced? I don't know about any one else but I find myself listening to less and less redbook stuff and using my squeezebox or PC as my source. What can I say, I'm lazy but if I were spending money it'd be focused or more flexibility. That's just me though.

Just in case anyone didn't see this elsewhere: I'm currently running a group buy for the e22 backplane pcb's that can be used with a beta build. See Headwize or "that other headphone site" if you'd like more info. And I'd third the recommendation of the Mogami cable, I've used it for all my current interconnects as well as a few recables and have no complaints. Well, it is a bit stiff for headphone cable but strip the jacket and shield and it works ok.

Reks, FTW!

sniff sniff Do I smell the next Head-Fi sponsor?

My addition to your musings would be that I find it funny/frustrating/odd how amps get pigeon holed into only being good for one kind of headphones. Unless there is justification related to output impedance (or similar) I just don't see why a good amp wouldn't sound good with lots of different headphones.

If that's the case one of the my big summer projects is to build an extension off of my back deck. Space is a little tight now so I'm going to add 4' in one direction and 3' in the other. Should be able to bang that out in a couple days. My dad and I built a shed last summer when I found out that HD/Lowes wanted about 5 grand for what I could build for $1500. It has doors now, but that's pretty much it.

I've received multiple items from overseas and never had to pay anything regardless of the shipper, I guess I've just been lucky.

That's pretty much what I did.

Busy weekend... I also got the sigma22 built for my DAC which means that I might get to fire that up for the first time in a week or so... YIKES!