NYC Spring 2011 Meet March 19th Impressions and Pictures - Page 3

Had a blast, learned a lot, was a ton of fun - I realized I only liked headphones that cost > $900.  Perfect

 

I enjoyed the Hifiman 500 prototype very much.  As a first timer it was good to just plug into every can I could. 

 

Ultimately - I realized that I'm just a speaker guy and even the best setup there doesn't do it for me the way my 2.0 does.  I did buy a pair of PK1's for work - they sounded great for portable headphones, rivaled some budget full sized cans IMO.

 

Oh and whoever brought the chocolate platter, you are awesome!

Really enjoyed the meet, wish I could have gotten there earlier and stayed later.  The Woo Audio amps were awesome, especially the WA5

Awesome pics everyone - thanks so much for posting them! Congrats to Aaron for another great meet.

 

I spy a pair of Sony MDR-F1's, which I don't recall ever making a NY meet before, and one headphone I still want to hear. Dang!

 

What amp is this:

Pretty sure that is kerry's new  amp for the nikongod challenge....

A fully solid state T2 for dynamic headphones. Balanced only output for now.

Edited by kevin gilmore - 3/20/11 at 6:56am

All,

 

I want to thank:

 

-- Aaron for organizing this Bayside NY Headfi Spring meet (hey, it is finally Spring!!! )

 

-- Telica for the most delicious chocolate brownie plates ***drool, drool and more drool....***

 

-- All the members for inviting team RWA (Alexis and I) to the meet. 

-- To everyone who came over to listen.  I appreciate all your time and feedback, and enjoyed getting to meet and talk to new members and seeing so many familiar faces!

 

-- And to all that contributed to the auction and made it fun as usal.  Looking forward to the next one!

 

Good times, and happy listening!

 

Vinnie

 

 

Yes, it was a DIY built for Nikongod's $69 amp challenge.  He didn't keep it under budget, but he came close and it sounded quite good.  Here's a shot of the internals.

 

 

Thanks to you and the lovely Alexis for coming down and bringing the FANTASTIC Isabellina with you.  It was easily the biggest surprise for me at the show.  I was blown away.  I had no idea what to expect from battery powered high-end audio, but you convinced me of the merits and my ears convinced me that you're on the right track.  As I said in the Isabellina thread, I spent my time listening (to my own music from my iPhone, not a special 'Audiophile' recording that I'd never heard) just muttering 'wow' and picking my jaw up off the floor. 

 

I fell in love with Isabellina! 

 

Alright, one pic with me in it, talking to the UE rep in the background.  If those UE 18 Pro's weren't so expensive, I'd have bought a set on the spot.

 

Yes, this is the amp that I started designing for Ari's $69 challenge.  Cost was a bit over ($55 for the amp and $35 for the PS), definitely not counting the case / heatsinks. 

 

The design idea was to roughly take the T2 (very cool Stax electrostatic amp that Kevin revived as a DIY project)  topology and do it as a fully balanced, DC coupled, solid state amp for dynamic headphones.  Its a simple 2SK170 pair front end (top half of a dynalo front end) with a translation to the bottom rail (similar to a T2, but simplified) and the Pass Son of Zen v7 for the output stage.  Thanks to Kevin for some great ideas. 

 

 

The whole thing was conceived and built in about a month and a half.  The sound is very nice, but I'm looking forward to tweaking it over the next several months.

:)

 

I had a great time at the meeting catching up with everyone and meeting some new folks.  As usual I spent more time talking than listening, but was happy to start comparing some of the planar headphones  (LCD-2, HE-6 and HE-500).  I'm such Stax guy, but I definitely see some dynamics in my near future and this amp gives me a great excuse.

 

Thanks to Aaron and everyone else that helped put this together.  Ari did a great job (first time out) with the silent auction.  Overall another great NYC meet :D

It was my first meet and I enjoyed it very much. I heard a lot of different cans including those i will never be able to afford such as R10, O2 and one more pair of Stax with amp. I like HD800, D700 and HE500 so one of those should be my next purchase. Iwas never considering buying amp since my HD650 with Moon Audio Blue Dragon Version 3 sound great straight from Auzen X-Fi Prelude card (i gonna try to change OPAMP to see if it makes it even better) but after hearing them thru Peter's tube amp i'm wondering if any tube amp with price $300 or less will make them sounding better.After trying ESW9 i discovered that it not necessary to deal with IEMs to be portable while i"m enjoying my GR10.

Nice meet. I enjoyed talking to folks and listening to gear. Lots of good looking gear at the meet and all of it was good sounding. I liked little tube amp from PHP Audio and Woo amps were very nice as always. A real surprise for me was ECP Audio's tube amp L’espressivo. I was very curious to hear the amp to see if this interesting design actually sounds good. This is a transformer coupled (input and output) tube amp with cute little triode tubes. It was very clear and transparent yet muscular and worked very well with my modded T50RP and all other headphone I was able to plug into it. Great sounding amp that looks good, sounds great and can drive a lot of different headphones very well. I will be watching developments on this one closely. 

Edited by Faust2D - 3/20/11 at 11:18am

1st meet. Was there from 10am to 5pm and the time just flew by. It was great to meet everyone and I am certainly looking forward to the next one. A special thanks to Aaron. Spent quite a bit of time with Brasewel and Sphinxvc at the Woo table. I would like to thank Jack for letting us essentially take over his gear, as we plugged every headphone we could get our hands on into the Woo amps. The HD800 \ T1 \ LCD2s \ HE-6 all sounded great as expected, each with own positives and negatives. The HE-6s were a little bright though. What was surprising was how well my K701s with stock cable stacked up with the big boys. At $250, they were nothing short of impressive when compared to, for example, $1400 for the HD800s. Also, Brasewel's Lawton modified AH-D2000s sounded fabulous with a lot of spaciousness paired with those oversized cups. 

Oh, now I understand. You don't speak english. You think and speak "electronica" (not the music kind). I was wondering if it had a translation to the bottom rail   .

 

Kerry, you are one of the nicest people that I have ever met. The world needs more people like you.

 

On another note:

Only one picture of those 2 massive $100 plates of homemade brownies, oreo truffles, chocolate covered pretzels and strawberries, chocolate marble cake, chocolate wafers? It took my wife from 8 pm until 9 am to make all of it, and then she went to sleep, from 9 am until 11 am, and then came to the meet at 2:00 pm.

 

Thanks to everyone that came. It seems that every year we are getting more and more people coming without equipment, hoping to hear other people's equipment. We have to change that. 3 years ago we used to fight over table space. We had a barrage of people that showed up at around 2 o'clock with no equipment. Without gobs of equipment, it it just a talking get-together, which is fine, but we can meet in the park and have a bar-b-que and save the $800 for the rooms.

Either that, or we can go back to renting just one room.

 

I will post my impressions of the equipment I got to hear upcoming. Right now, I have a bowl of chocolate covered strawberries to contend with  .

 

thank you telica for serving us those wonderful deserts,and thank you aaron for being a wonderful host! usually the day after a head-fi meet,im dreaming about the gear i heard,and what id like to have in the future. well,right now,im dreaming about telicas chocolate covered strawberrys,chocolate covered pretzles and brownies that  were to die for! that said,fangs new he-500 prototype headphones were really special! as a sony r10 and audeze lcd-2 owner, the he-500 has a midrange sweeter than both these phones, they really wowed me.

i can see a pair in my future. they are however,harder to drive,than the audeze and sonys,but easier to drive than the he-6

On another note:

Only one picture of those 2 massive $100 plates of homemade brownies, oreo truffles, chocolate covered pretzels and strawberries, chocolate marble cake, chocolate wafers? It took my wife from 8 pm until 9 am to make all of it, and then she went to sleep, from 9 am until 11 am, and then came to the meet at 2:00 pm.

 

I gave up sweets for Lent...it was hard enough just being NEAR those treats, let alone photographing them.

 

I did take some home for my kids and they think they're GREAT.