Currawong

Safari 4 in Snow Leopard is so insanely quick (anything clicked on in GMail loads instantly) if it weren't for the better adblock plug-ins in Firefox and other stuff, as well as the INSANE memory bloat, I'd be using Safari now. I opened 4 tabs in Safari: GMail x2 (one for a domain), me.com and HF, and Safari was using 450 MB of RAM!

Apple wouldn't make this unless there was some purpose behind it. As that article only talks about the hardware, there the huge element of what software it will run and what functionality that will embody that has to be seen first. It doesn't surprise me that the idea of a tablet has been floating around in Apple for years. It's probably not been practical until now though.

If that matte paint is the military radar-absorbing stuff, I'd love one.

I was a bit sad Craig sold his 4070's before I could give them an extended audition. The first time I tried them, with Jeff Buckley as the music, just out of his DAC1/717 rig, I had a similar reaction. They are just unbelievably good with vocals IMO.

Ordered. I wouldn't be surprised if they arrived before my HF-2s at the rate things are going.

It probably measures some dB lower distortion or whatever, which qualifies as 4x quieter. Balanced amps don't seem to be very interesting to the Japanese for some reason. People who buy brand-name gear in that manner I imagine are not the type to re-terminate their headphones so readily.

Maybe one of them was Elvis or John Lennon in a past life? My baby is the same, but then, I played jazz to her to help her sleep. She wiggles with all music now. And as for electrical cords, she got bored of her box of toys, so just went for the next most easy thing to grab, play with and chew.

Thanks for that info. That'll give me another thing to experiment with. Some people seem to reckon that regular power filters have a negative effect on audio gear. I found plenty of medical grade filters here. I am thinking of building two boxes, one with the regular filters, and one with "audiophile grade" parts, OFC wire etc. and the filter caps, to see what effect each has. At the very least, if it doesn't benefit my gaer, the regular filter box can be used with my computer, as it is somewhat sensitive to lights being switched on and off (causing it to wake from sleep/standby).

As I predicted: Luxman P-1. It has 3 days to go, so it will be interesting to see what price it fetches.

I was looking at the DIY Hydra today. Does anyone know specifically what capacitors they are? Are these the right ones? In case that link fails for some reason:

I've passed this on to friends who are interested in animal welfare.

How did you get away with using "world class" twice in one post without getting shovelled? You guys are becoming soft.

That I'm impatient to get HF-2s is making me tempted to get a pair of these.

My half-sister is the publisher. I got a free copy when I was in university. Much better than the piece of shit textbook that was the default one for biology.

The Dragon came as a set, DAC + CD player + control unit (which has the controls for the CD player for the most part). They go for about $3k as a set in Japan. The cheapest I ever saw was $1k for just the DAC (and control unit). The shipping would have been murder though as they are heavy beasts.

I was thinking the same thing today. Either needle-drops or a DAC without digititis. I can't help wondering if tubes shouldn't be in the path somewhere in some form or another too.

I had the day off, so I went for a drive with mum and baby to the Elekit factory and a second-hand goods store that has quite a bit of hi-fi. The interstate highway is still shut, but only north of here up to the next major interchange, thank God (I live near to the local interchange), as when the southern part was shut, the roads here were clogged to hell. Despite being the most modernised of the Asian countries, Japan still has horrific roads that are all over the place, often barely wide enough for two cars to pass, with bicycles and pedestrians all over the place traveling along as if you don't exist. The road that collapsed was on the very edge of the river and only 1 car wide, despite being 2-way. Now it's half a car wide with a gaping hold under the guard rail over the river. I wouldn't have liked to be the driver at night when the gaping hole opened up on the interstate. I was on the overhead, ultra-modern city highway on Friday night, so apart from the gigantic puddle I didn't have to worry about anything other than someone with bad judgment driving into the back of me. I'm also lucky to be far enough upstream that the river is unlikely to overflow here (and I live on the 5th floor), but down towards the city (and the sea), I saw news reports of it literally inches from flowing into old houses built on the very edge.

I still have a couple of songs in one of my regular playlists, King of the Mountain and Pi. Engrossing in their own weird way. We need more interesting and original artists like her.

Very monitor-like, reflecting the quality of amp and source behind them, making them very amp and source dependant. Bass is only a concern if you're a bass-head or listen to music where that mid-bass hump many cans have improves the fun. Great head-stage, though very dependant on the mic positioning during recording if listening to classical or jazz for example. Not as sweet as the R-10 (I listened with a pair last night), but considerable more "open" sounding (read: more treble) than late SN pairs.

I think these posts hit the nail on the head too. It's an issue of 3 things, IMO: There isn't the big mid-bass hump that makes a lot of phones give body to the music, making it "fun". It's a monitor phone, arguably one of the best there is, but that doesn't make listening fun, necessarily, as it's going to tell you exactly what you've got going on upstream, which isn't always a good thing, especially if your amp or DAC isn't exceedingly great. The big head-stage works great with some music, but not others (I find HF-1s to be more fun for example). I saw one guy post negatively on them who tried them with rap. No surprises there. The upshot of this is that it's not going to sound great on a lot of rigs, and it's not going to appeal to a lot of people, such as those used to the Denon house sound (lots of mid-bass) and it just isn't for all music tastes either. So, really, it's actually got a lot less going for it than many other headphones.

We got 600mm+ (23.6 in) of rain here in the last couple of days, 1/3rd of the normal yearly total. I was lucky to be able to drive home from work on Friday, barely able to see the road in front of me. One of the roads across the river in front of my apartment has collapsed, and the interstate highway is still shut.

I admit not paying much interest with the headbands, but seeing those pads, they look fantastic.

If the KGSS can bring out the O2s well, I'll have to consider one in the future. There are some great posts by Elephas here comparing both the HD-800 and O2. I think he describes the differences very well.

Sorry to hear about your loss. May she live well in your memory.

I was pondering how involved it would be to set up battery-supplied power to a hi-fi system. I'm surprised all the high-end nuts don't have one.