Currawong

Pics are here: MobileMe Gallery Notes: The latter pics were to show how the cable can get rubbed. It needs a couple of layers of heat-shrink around it. Also, it only came with half the screws. I hope the rest will come with the updated drivers.

Mine arrived with the stock drivers and I'm listening to them now. Quick summary (or maybe not so quick): 1. They were nicely boxed, Grado-style, but the box was a regular brown thing. No issues there. 2. I'm guessing for the modified drivers, they are held in place with a few allen screws (of a size which I don't have an allen key for -- Rhydon, please add an allen key in when you ship the drivers. ). The stock drivers seem to be held in by friction, as the screws were loose but the drivers weren't. One driver wasn't seated perfectly, but nothing a bit of finger pressure wouldn't rectify. However, how I'm going to get them out will be an interesting matter, but not one I will worry about now. 3. The new half-ring that the cups swivel on has a half-moon cut-out where the cable passes through. It needs some sculpting IMO as it rubs against the cable, scuffing and squashing the cable a little. Since Grado cables are covered with the best generic PVC tubing (ok, I'm being a smart-ass but you know what I mean) this isn't really an issue. 4. The sound: Understand I usually listen with HD-800s or Stax, so my standards are high, and that these are preliminary impressions. They are brighter than HF-2s without the mid-bass bloat, all in a pleasant way. Turns out they are brighter than the HD-800s possibly as well (but I have to do some proper testing, I only did a bit of quick headhone switching just now). The thought that comes to mind is that they are what HD-600s are to HD-650s compared to the HF-2 with regards to tonal differences. With the Kind of Blue 50th anniversary album, the sound is more open and clear. I feel there is a little roughness compared to the HD-800s, which I suspect the new drivers and a re-cable will help with. Overall, tonally, it has that HD-800 trait of "What do you mean is there enough bass?" with there being enough of it, neither overwhelming nor thin, but mostly "just right", though probably more than the HD-800s with the stock cable. There does appear to be a little bloat in some songs, such as with the bass in "Shining Moon" by the Cowboy Junkies. It sounds as if there is a bit of emphasis, possibly at slightly different frequencies than the HF-2s have. Mids (vocals) are very good, but get boxed in by bowl pads, which is a fact of life, making them a bit recessed, which is fine with me, and gives a sense of space in the recording. This didn't at all prevent Norah Jones distracting me from writing just now (from The Peter Malick Group Featuring Norah Jones CD). The treble is a bit squished as well, and in some cases they are brighter than my HD-800s, so may be sensitive to the quality of the rig they are used with, but is otherwise very clear. I am, of course, used to listening with the fastest headphones available, so these sound a bit lacking in detail overall. Overall though, I really can't wait for the upgraded drivers. So far they make the HF-2s sound dull and bloated to my ears, and aside from the big change in soundstage, switching to the HD-800, when I switched to them just now, I actually want to go back to the Magnums. Once the last 10% is fixed, I reckon these will be very kick-arse headphones. If they are designed to sound like the discontinued HP-1000/HP-2 etc, then I entirely understand why people wax lyrical all over those models. Sure this is just the first hour of listening, but I'm already scared that this pair could potentially knock off both the HD-800s and HF-2s, neither of which I planned to sell (in favour of Stax and possibly orthos as my other headphones). One thing to note is that my rig doesn't at all present issues with headphones with peaky trebles (except with a lot of sibilance in the recording, which then is unavoidable) and that I've only listened to about a dozen songs as I've written this (and written somewhat poorly). Pictures to follow. I can't be bothered uploading them now. Workmanship (apart from the obviously stock driver and small quibble with the cable) is fine. The MS2s I bought were a bit battered to begin with so there's not much to see.

Happy Birthday Crazy Monkey.

You evil bastards, you now have me wondering if I shouldn't consider orthos instead of Stax as I wont have to get more amps. Look forward to the shootouts definitely.

I'm with "SPDIF to spec" but analogue cables get the law of diminishing returns applied strongly (probably most due to the increasing amounts of marketing given to them as they get more expensive).

My pair have been shipped and have moved through a couple of postal facilities in Canada, so something is happening.

Mac Forum support for Macs: Person A: I have a problem with my Mac. Person B: Have you tried repairing permissions? (Even though they don't know what permissions are, let alone that it has been pointless for the past few years to do so.) Person C: (Some other useless suggestion parroted from elsewhere). etc. They've been "taking care" of it for years by doing things such as removing support for hardware not used in Macs and overwriting the kernel every time an update is installed.

Seems that way, with the promise of better drivers down the track that I have to solder in myself.

It can be done so that everyone has the option of setting it, by the admin creating a user option and then adding an <if></if> around the postcount in the postbit template that checks that option.

Fair enough. Maybe I was thinking more of the regular manual that came with cars my family owned that had the schematic, a practice that stopped at some stage. His quip about my father was un-called for though. I say his mother wears army boots.

I opted to have the headphones shipped now, as they are, with the original drivers. That way, if the driver mod and the business falls through the floor afterwards, at least I'll have a working pair of headphones. If he succeeds, then I get a new, hopefully better pair of drivers and have a pair spare in case whatever they did to them falls apart.

My father was a commie in Oxford University. His sister worked in MI6 too, or whatever it was called back then. Because other Chinese will rip off the designs. And the last time I saw a schematic in the manual for a car was in the 70's. You're close to as bad as a friend of mine who wont buy other than PowerPC Macs because of what he thinks of Intel.

It's voiced neutral, and is smooth and natural sounding. It doesn't have the colouration of the Compass, for example. Still the same overall sound signature though, which to people who are used to artificially bright gear, sounds "dark".

Reading this shit just after waking up, combined with expecting to receive them, expecting to receive a new shipping number already and reading up on multiple MOT fails the night before caused me to lose it slightly and send a rude email to poor Rhydon. His email said to me, "We've given up on the shipping idea, we're going to develop your headphones more.", which raised a huge WTF in my brain. Talk about badly wording and very badly timing an email. After I read this more carefully, I sent an apology to the poor bastard ask asked for my headphones to be shipped and i'll take the better drivers once things are sorted out, which can be a couple more months down the track or whatever. I think you're right. I think he's nuts...in a good way and something that, a year down the track, will have become legend and we'll be raving about what he's created.

Naa, Kingwa doesn't bullshit about parts being real. If anything, it pisses him off as much as it does us. He asked me once about where to buy some or other part overseas as he completely didn't trust places in China. I did briefly try a DAC19MK3 belonging to a Japanese customer who was having issues (with his computer as it turns out, not the DAC) and it was significantly better than the Compass in detail. Other than the Ref 1, I didn't have, nor could I access another other DAC to compare it to, but I can say it sounds like its specs suggest (PCM1704UK, PMD100) -- smooth, but not over-smooth like the Assemblage DAC3. Somewhere in a thread on the other site someone posted the RMAA from a Japanese site of it, which was flat with the usual roll-off at 20k from the filter. I didn't notice anything particularly specific using the different inputs, but I wasn't trying to. I reckon it would be great value if it were balanced and not just SE. Would be interesting to compare it to the usual suspects between $500-1000, such as the Stello, Benchmark and PS Audio and see how it fares in, say, a $1k Stax rig with vintage Lambdas. IMO and all that.

Annoyingly, a quick search online shows that Symphones isn't registered as a business in Canada (unless it's under another name), and whois doesn't show registrant details for Canadian domains, so I can't call him and ask him wtf is going on. Has someone got his contact details just in case we don't get any word in the next few days?

The 4CP2500 is 9,261 yen inc. tax, so about US$100 + Craig's fees.

Seems I do too. Never thought about this. Maybe that is why I didn't find the original iMac hokey-puck mouse to be annoying, but rather good -- it was designed to be used with your finger tips. I'll end up getting a Magic Mouse with my new iMac (though I have to wait a few weeks for that to be available) and then I'll decide if it's worthy of switching from my Logitech G9 (which I program using USB Overdrive).

My friend in Berkeley just set up his mini as a dedicated music server for his $60k+ system:

The new Magic Mouse is heavy, surprisingly. Hard to judge feel in the store standing up. Considering the cost of a new 15" MacBook Pro, which is my preferred size, I'd rather get an iMac for home then buy a second-hand Air for traveling. That comes to about the same price as the 15" MBP I want. If anything I wish the iMac had a couple of eSATA ports.

According to Rhydon, Canada Post wont ship them until all the labels are re-printed under the correct account, so they all have to go back to him to be shipped out again. He said they are going out Monday or he will overnight courier all of them, wherever they are destined. I can believe such a fuck-up actually. But yeah, very sucky timing for it on HF.

Google Chrome is interesting. Barfed on a couple of sites, but that's no big drama. I like that tabs are in individual processes. I don't like that each process uses 40 MB of memory. Feature set so far is very basic. It imports in full from Firefox (or Safari, though I didn't test what it imported), including saved passwords, which is a nice bonus.

Techenvy: Please go back to school and ask your teacher what the difference is between a comma and a full stop. Also please learn how to write with proper sentence structure.

I ended up at the tail end of this enquiry. The factory wont sell direct, which means cherry picking a retailer locally or online. All the ones I tried don't list the CP2500, nor any pots from TKD, so it means contacting them and hoping whatever monkey gets the enquiry wont throw on a stupidly massive markup. Half the retailers are pro-audio or sound-engineer-type pro-audio ("You want what?") and the rest are the odd electronic parts retailers. The latter with online stores will hopefully price them reasonably. I have the day off tomorrow so I'll see what I can find out. Now to find out WTF a 4-pot attenuator is called in Japanese.

Someone needs to read their welcome PM again I think.