Currawong

Jimi Hendrix :blues

Mine finally arrived. Drivers sound rather tight in the mids and treble, with the bass a bit loose. In an interesting contrast to the HF-1s, they don't sound terrible even out of a Compass, possibly because they don't have such a peaky treble. I'm hoping they will be my plug-into-anything cans. A thought came to mind that they are rather a kind of HD-650 where the HF-1s are rather more HD-600, tonally that is.

I reckon, give it a week of solid use and see how it goes. Like their tech said, if anything goes wrong, it'll be sooner rather than later. Of balanced, wouldn't it mostly benefit high-impedance cans, since it's the extra voltage swing that makes the difference?

Darth Teslas?

Yeah, they are on their way, finally. My sympathies regarding the thesis, they are hellish things. My suggestion would be to DIY a headamp that known to be a good match with Grados and use the Compass as a DAC, which it is reasonable enough as. Though, of course, DIY can suck plenty of time and patience.

I'm trialling Backblaze now. You can add a private key into their control panel, with the warning that if you lose the key, they can't recover your data, so that at least covers the security base.

I forgot about that.

You need this (linked to the blog not the main page because their bang-for-the-buck is just too cool not to).

Crap if I am browsing from my iphone. Guess I'm going to have to turn off avatars before I go out anytime.

I didn't like HF-1s from the Compass personally, didn't have enough bass or punch. I'll do a HF-1 vs HF-2 vs Symphones Magnum with everything I can lay my hands on though when I have time. Turned out I had forgotten my CC expired after I placed my order with TTVJ btw. so my HF-2s are finally on their way to me now.

I only recall it being pretty narrow. I don't want to guess how much narrower than a regular lambda though as it was a few months ago.

Add the Lambda Nova Signature to the above list. With a 007t and tube dampers, it does everything except a HD-800 style wide headstage. The 4070 has better mids though IMO, but sounds more closed (obviously).

Ha, talking to a co-worker on Sunday who is into hi-fi, he said, "You paid $1400 for a pair of headphones?!?!". Could be worse I suppose...my best friend in high school became a lawyer..

That's odd then, because it was definitely running when I was using the optical output.

I think anyone building one of these should be required to have a video camera recording at the moment of first power on. No fair blowing stuff up if the rest of us don't get to see it.

In 10.6, Safari blows away FF by a considerable margin. However, with 3GB of RAM, Safari will use 400 MB just browsing GMail! I guess that's where the speed comes from -- it caches everything in RAM. I might give Camino another go on my Mac, now that it has Flashblock built in.

I'm in maybe when it supports ALAC as well. It works with the optical output, though I think that optical isn't the most ideal output for it. I'll give it a go with USB some time. If I can get it to give a significant improvement one way or another then I'll change some of my better recordings to AIFF until ALAC support comes. iTunes sharing compresses everything with ALAC for transfer. At least in 10.6, if not 10.5, it appears to vary the quality if sending to an Airport Express as well, as I had sudden SQ degradation when doing a large file transfer over the network while listening one day.

Such a comment is extremely tempting: I know what the parts are and how to read their values and can solder fine. I do this kind of stuff very slowly and carefully and triple-check everything. I guess if I put in a couple of dozen parts every weekend I could have it done in a year. It would neatly spread out the costs too. The only thing is I'd have no idea how to test/trouble-shoot it and I'd probably blow up my apartment.

My order somehow got lost in the system and wasn't shipped. Todd is on to it though.

Grahame, you brought back a flood of memories with your post. Duggeh, the counter will likely be all plastic parts and may have worn out it's gears or such.

Grahame, you brought back a flood of memories with your post. Duggeh, the counter will likely be all plastic parts and may have worn out it's gears or such.

I'm speechless.

Tapes aren't too bad to set up. I regret my father's R2R broke down, the brand of which I've forgotten. I could thread it when I was a 10yo, it's just a step backwards from a cassette. I'm not sure what the go is with blank tapes themselves. When I was a child, there were a couple of different types I do recall, rather like there were with recordable cassettes. If I was in your shoes and had a friend with a high-end turntable rig and large collection, I know what I'd be doing. You may find it handy to hunt for some smaller reels and a splicing/joining kit if you get into it in any big way.

Apple was bleeding money with the Newton. It had to go, regardless of how good it was. The 2000 series was brilliant, but at its price wasn't going to compete with Palm, who were nailing the market. Apple has brought back the the Newton with the iPhone, nailing the things that the Newton, and Palm, could not do well, such as browse the web and work as a phone without being clunky. There's a story that, a few years ago, either hospitals or doctors had a meeting with Steve Jobs to try and persuade him to make a tablet for use in hospitals, and he turned them down. I think now with the iPhone being successful this has revived the idea of a tablet, but, other than being used by doctors, there's still the big question of, what would it be useful for? Just being cool isn't good enough. How many people look at tablet PCs and say, "Hey, that's cool, I'd love one" but never bother, or if they have the cash to throw away on one, almost never use it in tablet mode? How many people do you know who own a tablet PC? None? The only reason I can see Apple making a tablet/large iPhone is they have a software idea in mind that makes it a device you never knew you wanted, just like you never knew you wanted an Airport Express until you saw one, a Time Capsule, an iPod or an iPhone. There has to be a point to owning one, and I haven't seen that yet.

I just thought to ask, is it possible to open them up to re-cable them afterwards (should a customer wish to do so)?