Voltron

A few things I forgot to mention! First of all, we all owe JP#s a lot of thanks for setting this up, booking and paying for the room and for managing to keep it all together even with HF down. Thanks JP and Also, I thought it was important to note that we decided early on that this was actually a Head-Case Meet given the fact that Head-Case saved the meet and made planning possible. So we started swearing a lot, trading insults, and being open about our disgust for each other. That made it even more fun than a normal Head-Fi meet. Lastly, I_D's great pics of Satan's Delicious Sound reminded me that I wanted to thank GuzziGuy for jump-starting my amp. The regulators on the PS have to ignite and require a fair amount of juice and/or a healthy light source. The cafe was over-taxed and under-powered to begin with so I couldn't ignite more than two tubes at first. I set it to four tubes and switched on the plates but no ignition. The only lamp was a cheesy fluouresant so that wouldn't do. We had the idea to try using a camera flash and Ken stepped up with his dinky digital. One flash and POP went four tubes! That was funny as hell and really made me believe Mikhail's comments about either using light to ignite.

Now that's some funny shit.

Alex talked about this future uber rig, which I think is a P01 and two D01s all fully modded to APL 3.0 level. It will be over $60-70K.

During the day I had one Pliny draft, one Sierra Nevada Celebration draft, and one Fuller's London Pride hand-cask draft. Life is good. The NWO will be at more meets and you will too, one of these days.

Congrats on pulling off the meet against the odds folks! Looks like fun and of course plenty of great gear was there too!

"Modding" is such an understatement. The APL unit uses the case, the transport and half the power supply. Otherwise everything is replaced with Alex's hand-done work and of course the addition of the s/pdif input and the tube output stage and whatever other magic goes into this beast. WOW is right.

More pics: Gran's tube stash and the ZD: Gran with the K1000 on the HD2: The rest of JP's rig playing from the Mac Mini to the Cosecant DAC to the HD2. Very good stuff: JP rig with the nice big iPod thing: HD2 is BAD lookin': JP enjoying his own rig with the balanced brown leather old school RS-1: What's this? An RS-1 with old school dark wood on one side and newer lighter wood on the other? Strange but true. But maybe the plutonium in the paper bag was the real secret to the power of the HD2: Ori's rigs with the modded Chinese 300B amp on one side and the really nice new DAC/amp combo ($743!) that Ori was showing. Good stuff. Still waiting for a face plate: But it would look something like this: Random fun with multi-thousand dollar power cables plugged into a $2.99 power strip (stolen from HeadFest 2007 by the way! ) GuzziGuy rocking to his own rig, which is worthy of rockin': Min's Zanden rig sounds amazing every time I hear it: Alex P got a listen and thought it was pretty great at well: Oh, and here's my stuff, which looks a lot like it does at my house except without the big giant mirror wall behind it:

Look at this crazy thing! Alex said it takes him about 40 hours to build this thing and it isn't even the bulk of the time he has to spend modifying the Teac. The bass is truly something and the clarity across the range was wild. The NWO involves you from the first notes and this unit was just completed the day before the meet. Alex said that after 200 hours the sound will really bloom and be markedly better than it was today. That is something to think about. Looking forward to hearing the A-B comparison at Neil's with the Emm Labs but my wallet is worried. Not saying I am less satisfied with my Emm but there is a chance that the NWO is the best digital source in the world. Here are some more pics of the insides: The APL, complete with the JJ Tesla ECC99 tubes on the back: The Teac (Dan's) with the standard boards and such: The man and his creation: The NWO with SS-1: The late-arriving ES-2 had to find space on the ground with the grocery bags and fanny packs and such:

Look at this crazy thing!

Well, noboody else seems to be starting the impressions thread so here goes. I just left JP11801 and Iron_Dreamer at the Englander Pub where Peter steadfastly refused to consume alcohol. We have to work on that and maybe provide a travel couch to see what this kid has in him. Great vibe at the meet, and it was not just the coffee jitters. Yergecheffe rulez! The meet was great fun and the stalwart 15 or so who showed up were treated to some of the best available headphone rigs. It was especially cool because nobody was feeling it necessary to strut their gear as everyone with a rig was comfortable in their own choices. It was particularly cool to have an outsider or two -- both Alex Peychev of APL personally delivered the AMAZING NWO 3.0 and hung out the entire day with us, plus a couple Bay Area Audiophile Society (or whatever it is called) folks came along as well. We'll get around to some pics and some real impressions I am sure, but the first one is that the NWO 3.0 is one incredible piece. My EMM Labs SE stack was quaking across the room but held up just fine with the help of the SDS-XLR. The 3.0 is quite something and when I can post up the pic of the stacked boards that make up the 32 bit DAC, you will see just a part of the madness that makes up the APL genius. When heard right out of the XLR output, the H650 sounded better than I have ever heard them direct from CD, but when the ES2 and HE90 were connected up to it, the combo was stunning. Really really really great stuff. More to follow...

My car is packed up but I am on a work conference call and will try to be there as soon as I can be. See you all soon.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BILLY! Have a Chiumphant meet! Cheers.

I found some stuff in my Hydra 8 box that may belong to somebody from the last meet in SJ. They are all cables of two types. Weird I never heard about this but I will bring them to the meet saturday. It seems possible that some of them were Dan's or Mikhail's. I have boxed up the SDS-XLR and lots of tubes and the Emm Labs and some cans and some other stuff. I will bring my rack so that little or no table space is needed for my stuff.

Evil Spock is going to drain away all your head-fi knowledge!

Bring your own! What the fuck, ok. Call Min, though, and see if he is coming and what he is bringing. I don't have his number.

Den Mother, do tell why you have this info...

That's what I was wondering. Talk to you tomorrow to see where we're at and who is MIA with HF down and out.

Where's that "MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS" pic when you need it? \

I can make some calls/send emails tomorrow. Did you get guzziguy's info? Does anybody around here know how to contact him?

Plenty of info on stevehoffman.tv/forums on these and earlier reissues. Check it out Mike.

I talked to Jude today and the story is so heinous that it is unbelievable. Not everybody around here gives him much credit but he is really pouring his guts out over this thing and feels what he says way deeper than most people understand. Plus, the fact is that everybody here reads HF and relies on the info there and a bunch of it may be down the shitter from what he posted on Facebook. That sucks for all of us.

So, I gave BigGuy the info through stevehoffman.tv but nobody else over there seemed to be on the list for the meet. I will call Neilvg tomorrow and check on Leeav and Min also. Did you ever ping any others JP?

The latest at head-fi.org. That really sucks for Jude and whoever is helping him. 2007-11-14 1025 EST We are still at the datacenter, working with the vendor and OS team in Europe to restore the NAS. Even with 16 gigabytes of memory, the file system repair ran out of memory. The OS team in Europe has since upgraded our version of the file system repair program, which is apparently more efficient and less memory-intensive. It is in process right now, but getting it re-configured (including installing still another drive to provide ~160GB of swap) took most of the night. I have, for the most part, been at this datacenter since Saturday night. I have my portable rig to help me block out the din of the thousands of servers behind me in this datacenter, but I'm so ready to go home, and I'm so ready to get back to Head-Fi'ing with the rest of you. Thank you for your patience, and, once again, sorry.

I have a sealed pint bottle of Old Taylor in its original box ("Spiritus Frumenti") that was casked in 1919 and bottled in 1933 during prohibition. The bottle and box are labeled "For Medicinal Purposes" and the box actually markets that by stating it is "Unexcelled for Medicinal Use!" My grandfather collected mini bottle from the 30s-50s that I also have, but the Old Taylor is most excellent. 100+ years old. Wonder what it tastes like?

If X really meant what he typed and wanted to limit himself to American or Irish whiskeys and exclude Scotch or Canadian Whisky, then Pappy VW is a nice choice. Tyll had a bottle of the 20yr at Head-Fest and I knocked back a sizeable amount from a HeadRoom mug saturday night. Very nice. Knob Creek is everyday bourbon, but Black Maple Hill makes some nice whiskeys. I also like a good rye whiskey, and have mostly run through a bottle of Sazerac 18yr. Next I want to try the Black Maple Hill 18yr or maybe the 23yr, which is way too pricey and very hard to find.