The Stax Sigmas are  pretty much unique among headphones, because they mount the drivers ahead of the ears and facing to the back of the head. Thus unlike virtually every other phone made there is no direct transmission of sound to the eardrum, but all sound reaching the eardrum is reflected one or more times by the external ear structures or ear canal.   Stax did this to create a more lifelike presentation, since this type of reflected sound is what you would get from speakers or real instruments located ahead of you.  So in that sense virtually...

After some years of seeing other headfiers rave about these amps, I finally got a B series model and found that indeed it had  advantages over my later model SRM3 amp.  I was mostly concerned with running a set of Sigma pros and Sigma/404's which are the least efficient Stax phones and they definitely sounded better with the SRM1Mk2 than my more modern SRM3.    For some reason Stax reduced the voltage swing on the later amps compared to the SRM1Mk2, reducing it from 370 to 300 volts. Stax kept this lower voltage swing on most later transistor and...