Currawong

Sounds just like my home town, Canberra, with everything shutting at 5pm and the city dead on Sundays. I think it has mostly changed though and shops open until the evening and on Sundays now, but it was the most utterly boring city to grow up in. Even 24 hour supermarkets didn't change that.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust myself either in the comparison, but it has a lot of bass, too much at times with some music, but to me, with the AT amp, it sounded good and punchy, at least better than the "needs-fuckloads-of-dynamat-to-fix-the-poor-construction" Denons. It didn't seem to sacrifice everything else (my complaints about mids notwithstanding) for the sake of the bass, as much as the L3000s seemed to. That probably means it's brighter. What I wish I knew right now was how much the L3000 sounds like the W1000. I hope to go into the city again this weekend to get an iMac, so I might have another shot at nailing down the abilities of the W1000X (I'll use the Luxman/Yamaha combo this time). Any music you want me to try with them suggest away (and anything I should listen for) and I'll see what I can get together. I'll have a go at a better AD-2000 and W1000 comparison too. They have the SA5000, D5000, A2000X and W5000 on the bench too and I could take my HF2s in.

I thought that ED9s sounded like Denons, but with all the problems fixed, making them boring. Since Denons are about as popular here as suppositories, take from that what you will. I guess some people's brains are fooled by the S-Logic, but mine weren't, so music sounded like it was playing on a stage in the middle of my head, not around my head. I reckon the only reason the ED9s were FOTM for so long was because of the fancy metals and strong, tight bass.

I'm keeping track of the drama FOTM impressions in my HF blog. So far, on first listen, Skylab has declared them better than HE-5s and another person said they have, out of the box, less detail than HD-800s. And yes, I know perfectly well what you guys think of Skylab's reviews and impressions, but I couldn't resist.

I think, despite the crap source, I still got the general idea. At most the sound was more digital and less detailed than I was used to, so I put down any harshness as being from the source (I've not tried any ATs that I thought were harsh, one good thing about them). I did try Craig's woody AT collection on my rig at one stage and found no improvement, with the tonal balance still off-putting. Another thought that came to mind is, I'd take the W1000X over L3000s. The bass was a similar kind of awesome, from what I remembered of my brief time with balanced L3000s, but at 1/6th of the price.

Mac Fact #23098 I'll bet you didn't know: iPhoto and Aperture use iSync to upload photos to MobileMe galleries. How do I know this? Because I couldn't upload photos without getting an error and my iPhone calendars weren't syncing with my Mac. After much dicking around, I figured out what I had to do to fix things, which might be useful for future reference: 1. Quit all apps. 2. Sign out of MobileMe in the System Preferences. 3. Attempt to sign in again as "Apple" with password "test" to reset things on your computer. (Tip courtesy of Apple's live chat help.) 4. Open up iSync and select "Reset Sync Data" in the Preferences. ----- 5 and 6 may not be necessary, but for good measure are recommended ----- 5. Delete the contents of /Users/yourusername/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches. 6. Restart. (Required for 5) 7. Sign in again to MobileMe in System Preferences and turn syncing back on. 8. Click on "Sync now". 9. When prompted about it being a first time sync, select to OVERWRITE MobileMe with the data on your computer. This nukes the corrupted MobileMe data. 10. Everything now works.

Bigger numbers look more impressive? Probably the same reason many DACs up-sample to 192k.

It's a rare thing and I was surprised to find they had a high-end table. All the stores have the same headphone racking, all the cans hooked into a distribution box with crap jpop playing. Even on this table, they had a couple of headphone splitters coming from the amps with all the headphones plugged in.

Yup.

The only thing lacking is ClicktoFlash, which means I am going to stick to Safari for now. By the way, iPhone users, Dragon Naturally Speaking is free on the US iTunes store for a while at least. An interesting review is here. Shotgun summary: It works surprisingly well, but has to upload the voice to their servers for the recognition bit, which only takes a few seconds. It also uploads the names of your Address Book contacts so they can be recognised too (but not any other data), which some people might not like. The recognised text can be edited and copied to the clipboard for use in other apps. It'd certainly be a good app to use with Tapatalk on here.

Intel is supposed to release a version of the Core line for notebooks and the like in January, which might mean they'll appear in the next MacBook Pros.

I'd say you description of HD-800 and the O2 is spot-on and the best summary I've read so far. Your description of the effects of the Crystal cable match my experiences with my DIY CryoParts copper cable, as well as that of other people with other cables. This makes me wonder if most re-cabling efforts don't have much the same effect with their tone. The two things that made me decide to keep the HD-800s (for now anyway) were that with a big amp improvement, the smoother presentation, especially in the treble region, makes them much more listenable, where as on my previous mid-range amp (the C2C) the inability of the amp to present the treble cleanly made them less comfortable to listen with. In that price range, I found the Elekit tube amp a better match, which to me explains the comments about good synergy with the WA6. The tonal alteration provided by the re-cable makes them more musical, but not so much that it interferes with their general presentation.

4GB is enough unless you plan to do crazy amounts of stuff at the same time, such as run a VM while processing tons of RAW pictures in Aperture while you have 50 tabs open in Safari at once. Apple Japan are offering Macs with 1% finance until XMas. If I qualify, that will be serious win and I will be able to have an ortho Xmas too.

Yeah, I am slack about the SACD player. I googled it though and it was a SCD-X501 very likely, unless they have more than one SACD player that looks like this: In the Headroom graph, if you add the part of the HD-800's FR below 1k to the W5000's FR above 1k then add more treble still (maybe a result of the thicker pads?) then you have the W1000X, roughly speaking.

I finally managed to get a few hours to myself to head into the city, have a relaxing lunch and try out the W1000X in the Best Denki, which has a high-end headphone listening table. When I arrived, they were plugged into the AT-HA2002 and sourced from a Sony SACD player. I didn't note the model as I've become a source snob and consider just about anything sigma-delta to sound harsh and digital. Ignoring the inevitable fact that my the classical tracks on the CD I brought with me were going to annoy me in that regard, as well as a lack of familiarity with AT amps, I concentrated on what I could of the sound. Shotgun summary: Imagine W1000s with more treble, or W5000s with much more (possibly Denon-level, but better quality) bass and a bit more treble, but still with the forward mids and the drop in the upper mids/lower treble that is the AT sound signature. Both were on the table too so I could compare them, but I didn't do so comprehensively, but enough to get the primary tonal differences. I admit I'm probably not that great at quickly determining some of the other abilities, such as speed, with headphones and really need some time with them at home. What struck me most is that is that because of the very forward mids, they will be somewhat annoying to listen with using poor equipment. For me, I hate mids so forward, as it makes a lot of music sound tinny, as well as making the headstage seem much smaller. However, with the W1000X there is a lot more treble and a lot more bass than what I'm used to hearing from an AT. The A2000X to me, for this reason, sound like they are all over the place, in the wrong places tonally, in a somewhat similar way the HD-650s do to me, excepting that the HD-650s have much more bass. I think the W1000X would rock balanced on my smoother-than-a-baby's bum rig, but I'd still wish for slightly less forward mids and a bit more in the upper-mids -- around 6.3k where people find the HD-800s annoying. The Headroom graph below (for the W5000) shows it well. They are though, for me almost there tonally otherwise. If you don't want all that "LETS PARTY!" bass, but want more treble than the W5000s, there is always the A2000X. Pity about the poor fit though. Here are the notes I made on my iPhone while listening, cleaned up so they make some kind of vague sense: Busted (dZihan & Kamien): Good bass punch. AT vague upper mids show here. Monsoon (Jack Johnson): The deeper bass comes through clearly along with some mid bass. 2nd choice (Marti Jones) sounds rather tinny because of the forward mids. Tin Pan Alley (Stevie Ray Vaughan) bass comes through strongly and sounds glorious because the mids are mostly all guitar and Steve doesn't sing so close to the mic. Serves Me Right to Suffer (John Lee Hooker) sounds rather boomy. Chopin's Berceuse in Des-Dur, op. 57 (Vladimir Ashkenazy): Badly recorded Chopin that has glare (?) is irritating, emphasizing the effect of the mic being possibly too close to the piano and digititis in the source. Ditto classical and jazz. The Body Acoustic (David Chesky) fares better with more space around the instruments. Next time I go, I'll pull the AD2K out of the rack and compare it as well and use the P1u instead. Unfortunately they don't have the Esoteric SACD player on the table any longer.

I have two. One of them, in winter, is hard as a rock unless i warm it up in front of the heater first, and the other isn't, though they are almost the same shape and size. I pack mine and take it when I'm travelling because I can't sleep with normal pillows any longer, unless i want to wake up with a neck and head-ache.

It makes me wonder if the whole bullshit movie and ego thing wasn't somewhat the fault of Hollywood, putting pressure on him to be impressive, especially if they are cutting the footage as you describe. You'd have to be one of the world's biggest dickheads to have a egotistic attitude teaching people whose lives will be on the line, so as silly as he looks nowadays, I have trouble imagining him being other than sincere about his police work. He could do with getting a lot fitter for his job though.

I have it set as my default search in the Advanced Search box everywhere. Saves a bit of time. Would be good in the regular search box though.

Sounds like Steve Jobs couldn't just steamroll the kind of licence for the technology he wants, as he usually does, so he hasn't bothered.

I agree about the Liberal bullshit, but guess who would be suing in the future if they got cancer and didn't smoke? Not that I believe dealing with tar would result in that unless the exposure was huge, but you can see what I'm getting at. (I was a Health and Safety officer at a previous job and things were getting ridiculous, I must say.)

Typical American attitude that. I think that question "Why isn't there anything in the warranty about cigarette smoke?" question is bullshit. If you kill your computer by getting tar all over the internals, how is that a manufacturing fault any more than a laptop failing from spilling liquid on it? It's PEBCAK.

How does the iMod compare to an iPhone in sound? I thought my 6G iPod had a bit of an unpleasant upper-mids/lower treble boost (IIRC) but my iPhone sounds quite good. My 5th gen sounds muddy in comparison. At various times I considered both upgrading the 5th gen with a bigger HD and getting it iModded, but since I rarely listen to music outside and my experience with portable amps lead me to decide they were a waste of time, I gave up the idea.

10 minutes is too much work? Not pushing you to do it, just saying it's easy to implement stuff like that. If you want to any time, just ask me. I spent a solid year screwing with VBulletin so I've been through this kind of thing.

Yes, that's what i mean. They don't have the option now, but the admin could easily create it so they did, or so they could switch anything else viewable on or off in their user profile.

It also shows how the labels have been ripping off artists for years (decades actually). They don't want to change their hugely successful model of paying a pittance to the artists and gouging the rest for themselves.