My Annies, for sale in the forums, now reduced to $850. Someone please buy them. https://www.head-fi.org/f/threads/fs-audio-technica-w3000anv-japan-with-balanced-option-extra-pads-price-reduced-4th-time.827786/#post-13622497

me too

Thanks for your input. It didn't occur to me that it would lower the resale value, but I see your point. The mod was done quite seamlessly, and retained all of the original cable and the pretty wood plug. If anyone is interested in this headphone, please PM me.

Hi, I'm having a financial emergency and am trying to sell my Annies in the forums here. But I'm having trouble. They are in really nice condition but the original owner had a Neutrik XLR plug installed in-line with the original 1/4" plug, so they can be used balanced or single-ended. Also...

Same here. Just incredible SQ with the desktop Tidal application serving Masters to the DragonFly Red. It's not subtle at all. With the Nightowls, the separation, richness and especially the bass are just in another world.

The NO sounds horrible—horrible!—for the first 30 hours, then pretty bad for the next 100. Whether you are "skeptical" about burn-in or not, it's quite real and observable, especially with the NO. Leave it playing for a for a good six or seven days before forming an opinion.

I convert high-rez PCM to DSD as well. I find it works very well. My advice: don't worry so much about the theory and just give it a listen. It won't take you long to figure out what you prefer.

Austinpop, the preferences look very much like mine. I believe upsampling is forced on the main screen, in the four drop-downs. I use, going from (left to right),  poly-sinc-2s/DSD7/5644800/SDM (DSD). This should force all PCM to be upsampled to DSD128. If you want DSD files to be played back...

Hey austinpop—   I use HQPlayer with my Codex. I find that I prefer its sound—and not by a small margin—to Roon, Amarra and Audirvana+. Of course the UX is a bear to use and it's very processor intensive. To use Roon as a remote application for HQPlayer, you need either a very powerful...

Not in my experience. I have balanced Pono cables for all my phones. Some sound quite different in balanced mode, while others (like the W3000ANV) do not. What I'm saying is that the NightOwl sounds hugely different, and entirely better, in balanced mode.

Just got a balanced cable for the NightOwls and am kind of stunned. The sound of this headphone changes more dramatically with a switch to balanced topology than any I've heard. Using a Pono Player, I couldn't believe the improvement. Everything is better: drive, tone color, detail, presence...

Honestly, I'm not sure whether it's changed. The soundstage is still pretty vast for a closed headphone. I also have the AT 3000ANV here, and it doesn't even come close in terms of soundstage. I hear the Nightowl's soundstage as being wider than my HD650's as well (though, of course, the HD650...

I'm at 200 hours with the Nightowls and love them to bits. They are rich and creamy, and really open sounding for a closed headphone. They also excel at emotional engagement, the most important criterion for me, and at this they are better than any of the dozens headphones I've owned...

Hi, I'm hearing a slight channel imbalance in my pair of Annies. Anyone know how to address/fix this?   Never mind, figured it out. It was the pads not sealing.

Hi everone, I'm in the midst of some financial nonsense and selling my beloved Annies. This pair is a bit unusual.   http://www.head-fi.org/t/827786/fs-audio-technica-w3000anv-japan-with-balanced-option-alpha-dog-pads

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I'm using a MacBook Pro with an SSD boot drive running the latest Audirvana + to send files to my Codex, and I found that both the Uptone Audio Regen and the AQ Jitterbug make huge differences to the sound. As does the choice of USB cables. Wish it weren't so, but it is. 

Had no idea. Apologies.

Man, with all due respect, can you please use capitalization, grammar and paragraph breaks, especially when writing at this length? You have a lot to say, and these are a bear to read.

  I, too, started with the Pono, which I continue to love. It's beguiling musicality is in my experience unique among portable devices. In general, I think one of the challenges in this hobby is making meaningful distinctions between sound and music, and one of the interesting things about...

I can confirm that the Codex sounds great out of the box and then gets really bad. Don't be alarmed. It takes more patience than most, but it's a documented phenomenon.

Thanks Jeff. I'm finding that the sound keeps changing pretty dramatically over the first 250 hours.

  What is your impression of the unit before break in? What frequencies are you equalizing?   (I have found the first 200 hours pretty rough with my Codex, honestly.)

I called.

Spoke to Alex Brinkman at Ayre this morning, who was funny and cool, and who confirmed that 1) the chip in the Codex is the ESS ES9018K2M, not the plain 9018, and that 2) it is perfectly normal that my Codex, which has about 180 hours on it currently, is still sounding steely, bright and way...