Currawong

I'm scratching my head over coming to Canjam or not. Having missed out on the special room price wont help, but if it's only one night, it wont kill me. Plane tickets from Japan are cheap, surprisingly. Would be good to meet everyone face to face and try out all the gear I've only read about for a year and a half.

YMMV. The last time I saw it used someone nuked all their pictures, and only recovered the files, randomly named 000001.jpg to 005678.jpg or somesuch.

DR II will probably recover the files, but likely they'll be unnamed and have no folders. A good rule for next time is, copy first, then delete afterwards. Other than that, it's time for 10.5 and Time Machine so this doesn't happen again.

I can get up to about 50 Mb/sec down and 2.7 Mb/sec up over here on FTTH. I tried on Speedtest.net now, but the local server is crap.

At around $6k it's in Blue Hawaii (BHSE) territory. Lets not say anything about the kind of speaker rig one could get for that either.

I wish my LNS had the detail of the O2s as they are lovely with the 007t. I've traded the fun of them off for the detail of the O2s though recently. I might use the LNS when I feel like being Shpongled or similar.

I'm sure it'll be outside my price ceiling. I wonder if he can keep the price down to around $3k or around 2 GES's.

I'm going MacBook Pro -> Audiotrak Prodigy Cube (USB to Coax) -> Ref 1. Kingwa refused to put add a third input and use a switch, which would have been perfect for the MBP, as he reckons it would degrade the sound quality. I regret now not asking that the coax input be replaced with optical, as the BNC can be used as a coax input with an adaptor.

I was wondering about this as well. I hang all Stax by the arcs off the Koss hold-a-fones except for photos. Nice to know the elastic wont wear out in a hurry though.

I asked him a while back how many workers he has, and he said 15. He wants to find more, but he said he's having trouble finding audiophile types who can do the work.

You'd better email Kingwa and ask him about shipping. When I emailed him it was before we found out it was the agent's responsibility for the box fiasco and not DHL themselves. I'd choose EMS though. Even in Japan, where things are efficient and reliable, I had to deal with the DHL "Clearance Delay" bullshit.

Seagate got a bit of a bad rep recently when a manager pushed out a firmware update before it had been properly tested. Otherwise, I'm fairly impartial to manufacturer preference. The G5s tended to use Maxtor HDs (who have been bought out?) which ran hot, so much so that if you put them in a non-well-ventilated case they'd die. The G5s are very well ventilated. I'd google for "Powermac G5 hard drive issue" to see if anything interesting comes up. Occasionally you might get some incompatibility between drives and machines, but it's quite rare. The last one I recall was between MacBooks and certain WD models, where a feature on the WD drives would cause issues with the controller in the MacBooks.

I pointed Kingwa in the direction of jp-nums about sending some gear for Canjam (after it was suggested in HC chat), and it's happening, so you'll be able to check it out yourselves if you're going. There will be a Reference 1 there too, but I don't know what it will be hooked up to. Hopefully a good Stax rig. The DHL issue was the result of an agent being paid to take the gear to DHL from Audio-gd removing the boxes on the way to make an extra profit on the shipping costs by saving a pound-per-box sending them. I emailed Kingwa that DHL suck anyway, and he should ditch them, and he said he will use EMS from now on.

Are they 2-channel or 5.1? I found I couldn't use Max for SACD rips, but are fine for, say, 24/92 2-channel music from Linn Records.

x2. The shooter would've been lucky to kill a single person if everyone else was armed. More than likely they wouldn't have tried in the first place.

Crack dealer? I saw that big, suspicious box with lots of little Stax boxes in it on route to you when I picked up the LNS. Confess!

Japan is like that though, they will sell them too all the otaku (fanatics). That's why there are so many expensive AT woodies.

Happy birthday man. I see they've put in a "Duggeh float" smiley in the HF forums specially for you.

This is definitely on my list of projects, along with the CTH.

If he could guarantee the quality, he might go for that. I'm not sure if Burson doesn't essentially do that already in Australia, but under their own name, I haven't asked. He does sell assembled boards for some of his stuff, such as power supplies, and schematics for some of his gear is available on the web site. When Tyson on HF got his DAC 8 and amps, he had bias issues IIRC, so Kingwa sent him the schematics so someone local could adjust it. More DAC 1 impressions though, reposted more or less from HF: Zanth asked me about the Nakamichi: It had more of an impact on me, maybe because I wasn't expecting it to, and also possibly because it was 10 years old and probably had been used for thousands of hours by various people. The Ref 1's impact is more so on re-visiting tracks I've listen to many times, as like the Nakamichi, the beauty of, say, the emotion conveyed by Jeff Buckley, or Sara K, comes through in such a more meaningful way. So, more than anything, it draws me to the music and the expression. I went randomly through my 3+ stars playlist to see what I felt like listening to and hit classical. Violins no longer sound ridiculous, as they tend to do from digital. I was listening to Mozart's Symphony No. 40 from Linn (Scottish Chamber Orchestra) and with the O2/007t rig the difference between how the sound of the different instruments reverberates off the walls of the concert hall was apparent. I really need to go to a concert again to get a basis for comparison, it's been a while. Now I feel I want a Blue Hawaii to go with these O2s so I can find out how far this can go. I bought a PS Audio Statement from Patrick82 and plugged it into the Ref 1 today. I haven't done a comparison between power cables, but I will at some point. I know quite a few of you guys probably think audiophile power cables are a load of crap. I tried the Audio-gd one (discounted to $60 because I bought it with other gear) and I felt it made a very solid $60-worth of difference to the Northstar at least, just as paying an extra $100 or so for the Northstar from the Lavry DA-10 added a solid $100-worth of detail and natural-ness to the sound. So, the power cable thing is an experiment to see if it's worth it or not.

If you haven't already, you guys should install Spam Decimator into VBulletin. Lets you nuke them with two clicks. It's on Vbulletin.org. There are also a few anti-spam plug-ins that auto-moderate anything with certain keywords, though I don't know if they work with 3.8.1.

Pricklely Peete on HF (however you spell it) is the true mad scientist. He's has a ton of high quality audio gear, all of which he's modified in some way. The backstory though: There was a lot of opamp rolling and the like going on with the cheap Zero DAC. Someone, I think Pricklely Peete wondered if the Burson HDAM would work in one, and someone tried it successfully. It was a bit of a crazy idea, as it cost more than the Zero itself. Then someone (probably PP again, but maybe csroc) found Audio-gd made them for about $25 each for a double. Even though people were buying just a $25 item from him, Kingwa was very receptive to suggestions, adding caps on the voltage input to the design, which is recommended by Burson. He also sent out some new OPA HDAM designs, the "Sun" and "Moon" for people to try and give feedback on, which are based on different circuits and have different sound signatures. From feedback again, he redesigned the Sun. I saw he made quite a bit of hi-fi gear, and decided to take a chance on the C2-C headamp, since it was about the same price as my LD MKV, so if it could better it, then the value can't be argued with. I have the original version, with the hand-built case (see the pics in the head-fi review). Apart from the case and the awful Chinese imitation of the Neutrik locking jack, I feel it's detail-transparent from deep bass to treble IMO and, I feel, drives both low and high impedence headphones well. Considerably better than the MKV in all cases. I don't have anything more well known than a Corda Move to compare to, so take from that what you will. The C2-C has been upgraded now with a proper case and a real Neutrik jack. I told Kingwa, the owner, never to let any headamps out of his business with that cheap Chinese jack ever again, as you quickly get channel drop-outs with it. I can find no fault with the rest of the design though. At some point, people were starting to receive modded Zero DACs (from the two eBay sellers) which were arriving with opamps backwards or not working at all. The worst case was someone's headphones being fried completely. Since I'd taken a chance on the C2-C headamp from Audio-gd and he has been very enthusiastic and receptive to ideas, I suggested he design something as an alternative to the Zero for the price of the fully upgraded model (about $220) based on suggestions from people on head-fi. It's gone way beyond what I imagined though, but the basic concept that, as an intro to head-fi, people should be able to buy something reasonably priced and good quality from a company that seriously gives a shit about its customers and wont compromise quality, even when they become popular. I wasn't considering one of his DACs until the Nakamichi experience and some research, and so far so good. Someone who owns something more hardcore than my Northstar will need to compare it to get any real idea how good it is I think though. Random stuff: Kingwa insists on burning in/testing all gear for 100 hours before shipping. He won a prize in something called the "National Semiconductor Design Contest" in China, with an integrated amp. Can't find the link to the pics, but he's selling the winning amp on his BBS. His company is called "Reiz" in Taiwan, but he's based in China, near HK. He told me he only employs dedicated audiophiles, which he's having trouble finding more of to work for him. He has some other gear in the works: Balanced headamp, small power amp to go with the Compass (it has pre-out) and a usb to coax digital adaptor, hopefully with 24/96 using the Centrance/TI chip. He refused my request to put optical in the Reference 1, as he didn't want to add a switch between the coax/BNC and the optical, which might compromise SQ.

Well, after all the shit I had with DHL's "Clearance Delay" crap, a 20Kg box arrived on my doorstep. The courier, from Japan's ultra-reliable Sagawa, not DHL themselves, had a great time carrying it up the stairs to the 5th floor. I had a great time unpacking 15Kgs of DAC as well. I'll repost what I posted on HF, as though I feel I should be wary of posting initial impressions during "new gear syndrome", I've not found fault with my initial impressions of gear in the past: Sometime down the track, after my HD-800s have arrived, if I CBF'ed hauling around 15Kgs of electronics, I'll see if the local Stax dealer is persuadable to letting me put it up against one of their Esoteric CD players.

I'd post your complaint on one of the large Mac forums and see if someone there has info. I don't have a link to where I read it, but I recall someone putting in a MacBook or MBP for repair, and being told that warranty repair was refused as it showed signs of water damage, even though it had been used indoors and nothing was ever spilt on it. When pressed, they were told that the marker inside indicating water damage had changed color indicating exposure to water.

To me, the Northstar M192 MKI sounds digital. Not as digital as the Lavry DA-10 I used before it, but not much less. The Nakamichi didn't sound digital. I put on some Hiromi, and the piano sounded really like a piano, not a digital attempt at re-creating a piano. Jeff Buckley was very clearly defined and absolutely amazing on stage when listening to one of his live performances. It was as if that "he's somewhere out there on stage with his guitar, but I can't define where, only that it's towards the middle" feeling of listening was gone, and he was distinctly separate to everything else on stage, including his guitar. This was with a 717/O2mk1 rig. The only thing I regret not trying was something with violins in it, which I've never heard reproduced from digital in a realistic manner. I guess the feeling was like going from dynamic cans to Stax in many ways, plus believable realism in the reproduction from digital. Some things to take into consideration though: I don't think the Nakamichi was brighter. I discovered later that the Northstar benefits from a good power cable, sounding a bit brighter and less dull. I like the sound of the Benchmark DAC1 with the O2s, which is probably a bit brighter. I'm planning to take the Reference 1 round to Craig/LobsterSan's place sometime so he can have a listen with it as well, and compare it to his Benchmark. The Nakamichi was one of his customer's orders, which he offered to let me be present for when he tested it before shipping. I didn't mention this before as I didn't know what the deal was with his status or lack of being an MOT on HF and didn't want to get him in trouble. But anyway, you might be able to ask him too what he thinks of it, if we can find a couple of spare hours on a weekend to play with gear again. Also, I have the service manual for the Nakamichi which I found online, if anyone's interested.