Currawong

Damn sad to hear that. I was just thinking about a singer I know who could do the most amazing renditions of her songs and how I wanted to hear singing them again.

I have the 4s sitting 4ft or so apart on my desk and a foot in front of the wall with no toe-in and am very much liking them. About all that I can usefully say, given that I don't have much experience with small monitors beyond Paradigm Titans, is that I can clearly determine the differences between what source/pre I use in front of them. The tweeter is pretty good and I have no complaints about the kevlar driver. They are very well screwed together and the only complaint is that they came with one big and one small set of 4 rubber feet, which is a bit stupid. I'm seriously thinking of getting a pair of the 6's for my living room now.

FYI, this was only important back in 10.0-10.2 or so when a couple of programs screwed up system file permissions. The maintenance programs don't do anything useful IMO, except clear caches, which can possibly have garbage written to them if the program crashes or the Mac is hard-restarted.

I have the proto HD-700s. With a bit of a change in the FR they could have been great all-rounders, though that might have sacrificed a bit of their soundstage image. They have great imaging for acoustic music but just don't have the kick for modern stuff and they have the evil treble peak that made the HD-800s unpleasant with some music. If you didn't like the HD-800s, it's unlikely you'd like the HD-700s either. I liked them best when tubes were involved in the amplification as well. The interesting thing is, they did seem to lose harshness with use -- interesting because of Tyll's latest write-up about headphone burn-in.

A Belated Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good holiday season too.

Now they are launching missiles. I'm a little more glad I'm going on holiday a few thousand miles away for a couple of weeks.

Kuboten.com has a link that auto-translates from Rakuten (new) or Yahoo Auctions. Price Japan are about right for Japanese prices though, though retail is obviously higher. I couldn't find prices from Yodobashi online, unfortunately. Maybe they've realised they can no longer be slack now that it will be readily easy to complain to the new owners about their bad history

The W3000 are fairly treble-tilted, but do make vocals and instruments sound good, if a bit weirdly, though not as weirdly as the A2000X do. I agree about the W11s. This could be fixed somewhat by stuffing something under the pads to push them out more, though I still found the old woodies I tried to be underwhelming.

I tried the Isebellina HPA in Tokyo with a pair of HD-800s. It didn't sound that special to me. I actually thought the RX-B/CLAS rig and the Continental with the LCD-3s were more impressive, but that partly could have been because I had lower expectations. For both ALO and RWA I sometimes hit their sites and think It'd be nice to have a TOTL travel rig or a battery powered integrated amp, but I can't bring myself to spend that much on either.

Belated Happy Birthday! Hope you had a fun day with your kids.

Craig brought round the full rig with matching amp yesterday. They were rather bright and I preferred them with the Stacker II. Very nice with vocals and instruments and very quick with drums, even when we were cycling through a 009/007t and an LCD-3/Phoenix rig.

Happy Birthday! (And thanks again for the help with 'stat amps.)

Nice work. That, along with companies like V-MODA, there is some hope that fashion headphones can be decent.

Mine arrived. They seem to have fixed the main issues with the LCD-2s, namely the imaging is better, the ringing is gone and etc. but damn about the price. The 009s still hand them their arse on a platter when it comes to things such as picking the individual instruments out in a well-recorded orchestral piece, but significantly less so than before. I did previously listen with Jude's pair in Tokyo on a few rigs, the two best being an EAR HP-4 with vinyl and an obscure SATRI-based (current gain stage) amp fed by a hand-built R2R DAC. So I reckon compared to the LCD-2s the price increase is somewhat of a hard swallow, but compared to the 009s they are a bargain (but then, so are the 007s).

Upgrade to Lion and use BitPerfect for now? It's only $5 or something. Audirvana Plus has a beta that integrates with iTunes now but it is giving me beachballs if change stop and start and suddenly change tracks though.

The only issue I've had is that not all the photos I take with my iPhone end up being sent to photostream, so I still have to connect it up to my Mac and pull some of them off.

That Buddhism article was a great find Ric, thanks.

You need a black t-shirt with cut-off sleeves and REBEL plastered across the front. This. Whoever writes reviews, if they write any number of them and regardless of what they say, there are always going to be people who look up to them who will use their reviews to make choices and/or are too caught up in material desire they'll ignore any negatives. People will always take the lazy option (and who wouldn't when audio is so complex?). Yeah, it sux that the LCD-3s have to be $55 shy of $2k. Just as we thought good, high-end headphones were getting not too unreasonable in price, they start to become otherwise. I think it's a case of the kids in the store who sees the shiny things and starts on at mum to "gimme gimme gimme" and mum says "no". Now they've seen it, they've created this desire in themselves which wouldn't exist if they hadn't seen it (and it didn't exist in their mind). In their mind it's mum's fault for saying "no" but really it's their mind that created the desire and unhappiness, just as the kids on HF created the desire and unhappiness themselves when the LCD-3s were announced. I did think they sounded very "right" compared to the LCD-2s when I had a brief chance to compare them in Tokyo. I hope the imaging has improved, as the fast attack of the LCD-2s gives the illusion of detail, but in complex music it wasn't all there. This is obvious compared to 'stats, very especially the 009s, but less so compared to most other dynamics IMO.

I've either been using TS to RCA or TRS to XLR adaptors. I pre-programmed the front panel selector (not easily visible in photos) so I can choose different outputs, eg: direct, monitor (to use it as a pre with volume control), or digital. I am not sure it affects using it as a DAC, when when I was playing around with measuring things through the mic inputs, using the external PSU gave better results, so I'd suggest using that and not just your MacBook Pro's Firewire for power.

There's an interesting thread on this on stereo.net.au. One guy likes it using software up-sampling. I'm quite tempted to buy one out of sheer curiosity as I have enough digital gear to experiment with it. Their site shows a perfect square wave at 1kHz, but I really would love to see if it could re-produce a sine wave perfectly at 10k, or 20k. I'd be surprised if it could.

I think I might get a pair of Airmotiva 4s for my desk. Stories of ungodly good treble are tempting me, and they are small and the response is close enough to flat. Then I wont have to care about a speaker amp for my room and only get or make a long pair of XLR cables. I see many good comments about the PSB Imagine Minis from RMAF too, so I reckon I could get those for the family system and be done with with it for far less than the Harbeths cost.

I can't edit the sheet, but I'll take 4 jacks + pins.

Happy Birthday Vicky. Hope everything is going well.

Nice story. It's funny how animals can be more "human" than humans sometimes.

Nice work, as usual. I wonder if that pair of 009s that gave wacky results on one side has a stuffed driver, since the ones that flaked out at first sounded distorted.