Official March 21st NYC Meet Thread - Page 7  

Thanks to Aaron, SiBurning and everyone else who helped get this meet organized. It was well-organized and a lot of fun!

It was a great to meet quite a few new faces and also see the familiar ones. I want to say thank you to those who stopped over to give a listen to the iMod / Amphora, and special thanks to those who posted their impressions above (and in the ALO forum) - much appreciated!

Chatting with you guys, listening to so many great sounding rigs, and the not-so-silent auction were all a lot of fun.

And thanks to jpelg for the company on the ride to/from the meet and navigating!

All the best,

Vinnie

Nice pics Erik!



I know. It was great having you there lan. I have fond memories of you:


A picture says a thousand pixels.

I just remembered MoodySteve's AWESOME CCK3 build. I have wanted to hear this amp for some time now, and it is very very nice indeed.

That's about how the world looks when you closing your eyes and listening to some tunes.

I didn't realize how late it went. I was about to head over and I realized it was 2PM and I figured it was all packed up. Oh well, count me in for November. By then I will be looking to upgrade my amp.

glad to see the meet was a smashing success...

did any Wavelength Audio Protons make it to the meet?...
if so, could i please get some brutally honest impressions?...

cheers...

Great meet! Eye/ear-openner for this 1st timer..

Well it was everything I was thinking (afraid?) it would be & more... Hard to even comprehend the gear there, let alone figure out what to listen too There weren't enough hours in the day.
Want to add my thanks to Aaron (immtbiker), SiBurning, etc (edit: sponsors donating stuff, e.g. Fang, Vinnie) for making it possible. Random thoughts:

• Nate's Menace - Holy Cow what a creation! Sounds even better than its massive looks would lead you to believe. Made a great room heater too
• Vodoochile's work of art sounded great too... A high bar there in a lot of ways.
• Got to hear what all the AKG K1000s hub-bub is about in EL_Doug's nice kit.
• Listened to electrostatics c/o Head-Direct's Fang table. Whew! Very good, nicely priced stuff there (EF-1, buds, etc).
• The Sennheiser Orpheus, set up next to my CTH bit, was a required stop. Yeah, many tables had Interconnects & Power cables probably costing more than my entire setup.
• Moody_Steve's B22. Oh boy. It's high on my build list now for sure. As is doing something about source (BantamDAC -> my bigger CTH as a start?)
• ESW9s are really something as were the brownies... Got to listen to that Frankie CD from not-so-silent auction on the way home to boot. Anyone perusing my iPod would not expect that from me

+ Talking/meeting all the great folks of course... And gear, etc I've forgotten in all that goodness above. But be warned - Your wallet could easily become a casualty in the weeks after attending an NYC meet. Might have to skip the Fall one... Had to promise the wife going wouldn't make me buy/build more. And there is no way that's going to be the case

Seems like a lot of people missed out on the highlight of the meet, the tooleaudio balanced mosfet...

Nope, I listened to it fed by VPI's RTR setup and it sounded as fantastic as I remembered it being. It remains one of the most capable and flexible rigs I've come across.

Sounds like a guy missing his old amp.

The amp got listened to quite a bit when I was around but I made the mistake of hooking up the HP-2s to the headphone out of the RTR so I could cue music and answer people's questions about what songs were playing and everyone assumed that was the way to listen to all the analog goodness.

I made a couple of rounds and ended up listening to The Menace, BHSE, Voodechile's amp, Bozebuttons Zana and Melos, Woo's new balanced amp, the amphora and Nikongod's Silver Ghost.

The Menace is about the coolest amp around in my book. A headphone amp that is two piece and as large as my 350 watt monoblock speaker amps has to be cool. Sounded great with the grados that were hooked up to it when I stopped by, HF-1s I think.

BHSE was ecxellent, just as I remember the Prototype being. The case work looks fantastic, better than some more expensive home audio gear I have had in my system.

I had no idea what Voodoochile's amp was but I noticed it immediately on looks alone. Ari told me it was a must hear so I sat down for a bit and was really impressed with my HP-2s.

I originally ventured over to the second room with HP-2s in hand to listen to Bozebutton's Melos. It was everything I remember and it made me really miss my stock SHA-Gold.

Boze's Zana with his HP-1s proved to be a great combination. I listened to this one for a while and could definitely see the Zana in my rack in the future.

I spent some time at Vinnie's table, first to listen to the Amphora with my UE-11s and second to discuss some options for some of his speaker amps. The Amphora proved to be a good amp for the UE-11s when switched to unity gain as it did not have the overly present bass that these iems get with a lot of amps.

Jack's balanced amp was much smaller than I expected and is actually going to be a nice, user-friendly amp with impedence matching and all. i did not pay attention to see if balanced cables were actually used into the amp from the older CDP.

Ari's Silver Ghost has changed from balanced to single ended since I last listened but is still every bit as good. The two 1/4" outputs are set for different impredance and the difference was obvous. I thought the high impedance jack set the voices back a bit in the mix but made guitars far more life like. Electric guitar on a Beatles CD that I was listening to sounded very realistic with HD-580s.

Another great NY meet and it was a lot of fun meeting some new people and getting to hear some new amps. Still missed out on listening to the AT AD-2000s so that is a must for me at the next meet.

Thanks everyone for setting this up and attending.

I'm looking forward to CJ '09 now and hope the debuts there will be just as great as the ones in NY.

Who, me?

Sounds like I missed a great meet. I spent the day going through my Dad's storage area. Tax records going back to 65, every students theses and even every little mileage booklet going back to his 68 Malibu. 15 LARGE file cases of what amounts to garbage, all needing to be shredded.

It was all worth it for the 2 boxes of family memorabilia (he had saved all of my report cards) and 3 boxes of photos.

Meet Impressions, Part I

The first rig I listened to was decur's Wavelength DAC and Rudistor RP 010 with Denon 7000 cabled with the Cardas Fatpipe.



This was a really stunning rig. The sound was so clear and detailed but without any trace of harshness. The Wavelength DAC is really impressive (it was the Cosecant, no?).

Since I had my Denon MD5000 DE and the LA7000 (sent my Lawton Audio, thank you very much!) it was a perfect opportunity to compare the three headphones out of a stellar rig. I recruited immtbiker to help me compare. He picked out an Al Di Meola song that had an usually low bass drum hit. All three of the headphones could reproduce it effortlessly. All three seemed to handle the low bass extremely well.

Comparing the overall sound for each, the LA7000 seemed to have the largest soundstage, followed by the D7000 and the MD5000 DE. Certainly both 7000 models were more refined than the 5000. The highs were just a bit smoother on the higher end Denons and ever so slightly sizzly with the MD5000. For the record, when I first heard the MD5000 I thought they were too bassy, but after spending time with them, I think the bass is just about right, although it is very system and genre dependent and the bass on the 7000 is that much tighter. Between the two 7000 models it was difficult to discern much difference between the two, other than soundstage. I thought the highs were smoother on the LA7000, while decur seemed to think the opposite. I will defer to his opinion since he knows his headphones better than I know the LA7000 since I just received them a couple of days prior to the meet.

It was good to see Jude at the meet and I'm glad he had a chance to listen to the LA7000s.



I'd be curious to hear his impressions, especially out of bozebutton's Zana Duex.

At was still fairly early at this time, before noon, and I headed over to room 2 to see what I could find. Wow! This seemed like the high end room. It was a bit darker with probably a few less people and plenty of out of this world gear.

The first up for me was the Orpheus. Since it was early there was nobody waiting to listen to it so I had quite a bit of quality time. Thanks to dannyandelyse for bringing this legendary headphone system to the meet. There are almost no words to describe how good this headphone system sounds. Danny had it running off of his azur 840C cd player and it sounded wonderful. With the Orpheus, it's not like putting on a pair of headphones, it's like walking into a room where the music is playing live. It is the most realistic sounding headphone I've ever heard.

Looking around the room, I couldn't miss another piece of outstanding gear:



The Blue Hawaii and the SR-007 MKIIs fed by a Sony XA500ES was another treat for the ears. This was the most impactful electrostatic setup I ever heard. While the Orpheus sort of surrounds you with sound, the Blue Hawaii setup made you sit up and take notice. I'd like to say it was aggressive, but in a good way. A very good way!

Looks damn good too!









After that, I had to leave room 2 for a while, but I knew that I would be back!