first of all, thanks a lot Voltron for hosting this meet!! I really liked the cozy atmosphere and the snacks you provided. the table you had ready seemed a bit weak to handle all the heavy gear on it (we estimated it to have near 200 pounds on top)
but it held up so I suppose it was fine.
and a great big thank you to utep10 and NeilPeart for driving all the way up to Santa Rosa to pick me up for the meet, along with the pile of gear. I doubt I would have made the effort to get to the meet myself, especially with the amount of gear we brought. navigator? what's that?
It was quite tiring carrying all the gear from place to place, but it seemed to be well worth it. I doubt I would want to do it again anytime soon though. it also took longer than usual to set up. wasn't too bad though since Voltron left me plenty of room for the gear.
I think I'll start off with a few comments on my gear and explain the setups we used.
first, there was no balanced R10. neilvg must have been hallucinating or something.
I had plans of recabling mine, but never got around to it in time for the meet. I think he was referring to using the R10's with a convertor so it hooks up to the SDS-XLR with dual XLR's to get the most out of the amp with true dual mono amplification. nice setup, but a balanced one seems to be worth it from what little info is out there about this configuration.
most unbalanced headphones when used with the SDS-XLR used a convertor so it can benefit from being driven in dual mono, with one driver tube per channel. I think some people plugged unbalanced headphones directly into the 1/4 jacks on the SDS-XLR, but since the input was XLR for the whole duration of the meet from what I can tell, all they were getting was the positive signal in one channel, and the negative signal (of the same channel as the positive one) in the other. I doubt this happened a lot though, I saw the convertor used most of the time.
the balanced headphones included the L3000, Qualia 010 (with a variety of cables), HD650 (with one made from the stock cable, and a solid silver wire one), and the PS1.
the tubes on the SDS-XLR were usually a pair of 6SN7W black bases as drivers, with a quad of Bad Boys as the output tubes. we also used a pair of tung sol round plates in place of the 6SN7W when using headphones such as the MDR-R10 to make it more enjoyable. there were a few settings on the SDS-XLR that people could have used, and hopefully people figured it out. the volume attenuation should have been with the dual 45 position stepped attenuators for the duration of the meet (the digital volume control wasn't used except for a few instances when I was messing around with the settings). there are three settings to change the sound. one is the circuit without the solen stage capacitors, another puts them in the circuit (we used this one primarily since it also has the best resolution), and another with the solen stage and a circuit to attenuate the highs a bit (nice with the Qualia 010 and R10).
no clue what was going on with my DHA3000. it sounded great at home IIRC, and it wasn't so good at the meet being quite bright and having a bloomed midrange or something. I probably should have listened to the DHA3000 with the L3000 more closely at the meet (I barely got a listen after neilvg commented on the sound) but I didn't so cannot say much more. well, it was a meet so you cannot expect too much from it.
there's some more impressions on the DHA3000 in the san mateo meet impressions from the meet we had earlier this year in february.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hirsch
If there have been channel imbalance issues with the HE90 and any amp besides the HEV90, the owner should probably be following this thread.
|
uh... hi Hirsch? I posted in that thread so that probably is a good indication that I was following it. I didn't say anything about what mods I did since I didn't think it was necessary, but here they are....
I installed the HE90 plug directly since I wasn't using the Omega-II at all, changed the bias current to 500 volts, and also changed the output resistor to 10M total. all this was done at least a week before the meet. to me that seems to be a complete fix in terms of what is outlined in the thread.
anyways I've been using the Blue Hawaii with my HE90 at least since last December. not like I just got this pair and have no clue what I am doing. it was doing fine until recently (it started to show problems after I got it back from the san jose meet whatever that means) and I'm not quite sure what the difference is. I thought it was fixed and I didn't notice any issues prior to taking it down for the meet, but then it started to show some serious balance issues at this meet again.
take a look at the san mateo meet impressions from february for another take at my Blue Hawaii with HE90 in meet conditions. no issues there, and that's with the Blue Hawaii running under STAX bias voltage and output resistance.
