Having 300V less than an inch from my ears doesn't give me warm fuzzies.
Let's hope someone can ship it to Amir.
Personally, I expect very similar results. Check this:
https://www.head-case.org/forums/topic/13627-stax-srm-700t-and-srm-700s/
You are misreading the above measurement. Only second and third harmonics are counted in the total above, not total as THD in electronic measurements show. It is also an entirely different measurement system (chirp versus steps).
Finally, no I don't remember if I used the tube amp. Most likely not as I had to go and fetch them whereas the solid state was right next to my workstation.
Funny you mention that... I had a bit of an "experience" myself... I had the ESP/95X for a time, and relatively enjoyed them... The stock pads were super uncomfortable and provided 0 seal given the massive size of the headphones. I ended up buying some leather pads, and that did the trick. It fixed the comfort, and provided a bit more bass which was quite lacking in my opinion. Over the course of using them, I had a lot of little wonky things happen, like random static popping noises with some very mild static shock sensations every so often... That can't be good... Anyways, I mostly ignored the quirks for a while because they did sound relatively good. I think I mostly enjoyed the fact that I had a pair of "electrostatics" more than anything else...
Anyways, one day I turned on the provided amp, and put the headphones on to start a listening session, when my wife called me to ask me something. So I took the headphones off, put them down on the desk, turned around and chatted for a little with her. All of a sudden I heard this loud noise that sounded something like 20 soda cans being crushed all at the same time. We have a trash bag filled with cans to take to the recycling center every so often, so my initial thought was the dog was trying to get into it to find some food. So I called him, and he came from the side of the bed in the same room so I knew it wasn't him. That's when I noticed a loud high pitched squealing noise, and a faint smell of something burning... I turned around back to my desk and noticed that the squealing sounded like it was coming through the headphones! I Stupidly I went to put on the headphones so I could make sure it was them, but before I put the pads to my head, I also heard a bunch of super loud staticky crackling sounds coming from the headphones as well, and that's when I realized that I was about to put some 300 odd volt headphones with a clear malfunction onto my head and I threw the headphones back down on my desk... I then look at the amplifier and the power indicator light was cycling between red, yellow, green and back to to red, and as I got closer I found the smell was coming from the amp... I immediately shut it off and pulled the power... Idk what in the world happened but it was terrifying... And I can't help but think that there's a good chance my wife saved my life that day by asking me a question, prompting me to pull the headphones off and put them down on my desk... God knows what would've happened if I had the headphones on when that happened... The sound coming from the headphones was super loud, so at best it would've blown my eardrums, and at worst electric shock with high voltage directly to the head... I was beyond furious and sent a nasty-gram to drop support who promptly took them back and refunded the money...
That was the day I decided that whatever the supposed benefits of electrostatic headphones were, I didn't care, and I would never touch an electrostatic headphone ever again in my life . With these measurements, I can also see that I'm not missing out on anything either...
Funny you mention that... I had a bit of an "experience" myself...
The same in regards to FR.we need to make sure how do the same pair of stax 009 measure differently with different amps
I have always had some suspicions about EDM aka Electrostatic Destruction Music.
This is what I've always doubted and why I haven't considered stax.
Please keep publishing. your measurements are very useful to me. and if other people are able to push the accuracy of measurements even further than this, then let them post them also so that we can all benefit. but in the end you have awoken transparency. which will awaken progress. It's the right way forward. let's keep moving forward!700t has been offered for testing as well as another unit. I will have to decide whether I am publishing the results though or just testing for the owner and myself....
These are Japanese variety meaning you can eat them when they are hard. Indeed they don't ever get as soft as western version. It is tricky though as too early and they are astringent although not nearly as bad as the western variety in that phase. I will probably wait a month or two before eating these to make sure they are ripe enough. Wish I could leave them on the tree to ripen.....
When we went to visit the great wall outside of Beijing, there were miles, miles and miles persimmon orchards. They were massive in size and beautiful. Once we stopped at one of the wall entrances, there were vendors selling them. I asked my colleagues to buy me some and they warned me that they would not be good to eat. I assumed pesticides but maybe they were talking about the mold? I forced them to buy one anyway and I ate it after peeling off the skin. It was incredible.In China they are left to ripen to the max unfortunately they say the mold that develops is related to the mold on peanuts which is carcinogenic.View attachment 91221
You don't get near state of the art with QA401. And your resistor divider likely adds fair bit of distortion due to high voltages involved multiplied by its VCR.Look this is actually simple, you all spend thousands on amplifiers. Go and buy a quantasylum qa401 for $450. near state of the art performance on the cheap. Then build your own 20x attenuator board, or wait for me to release mine. About $50 in parts. Then you can measure 2200vpp on any of the meters you desire. AP, dscope,qa401 all have the same 100k input impedance.
Sounds more like a poorly designed amp. Flashbacks to Schiit gear dumping tons of DC into the driver on power on..Aha, it's nice every now and then to get some reassurance it's not paranoia.
Transformers are an excellent and frankly better alternative. Probably the most easily accessible one is the ifi iesl which is about $1500, but stax SRD7 Pro/mk2 (just avoid SB variants) are much cheaper if you manage to find one.. Mjolnir makes some as well but they're quite pricey. Avoid Woo Wee tho. Good components, flawed design, atrocious customer service.Error. I own the SR-007MKII and are great, and the SR-009s are the best headphones I've ever listened to. Although I've not listened to the high end Focals. For some reason Stax amps are not at the same level as their headphones. The problem here is that the alternatives to Stax are not very tempting. Gilmore's Blue Hawaii, and Spritzer's units have the price of an used car and not independent measurements.
Transformers are an excellent and frankly better alternative. Probably the most easily accessible one is the ifi iesl which is about $1500, but stax SRD7 Pro/mk2 (just avoid SB variants) are much cheaper if you manage to find one.. Mjolnir makes some as well but they're quite pricey. Avoid Woo Wee tho. Good components, flawed design, atrocious customer service.
Decent speaker amp paired with a transformer outperforms basically all but the best energizers.