The newest one is not shiny.  Evidently they switched away from it.

I just got my MS-2i's today after a manufacturing delay, and it seems they've switched back away from the chromed look to a slightly textured aluminum.  These are the only MS-2i's I've seen in person, so I'm not sure if this is the same as they used to look.  

Doh! I just bought an MS-1. Now I wish I waited to see what the new ones are like. Oh well.

I'm not sure it's worth placing power efficiency as a main concern if the other goals of the project are audiophile quality and high capacity 2.5" hard drives. If it has a 2.5" hard drive in it, it's already not exactly portable or power efficient, so you might as well stick a giant (~6-8 AA)...

As far as the difference between Grados, the Grado site itself has reasonably detailed descriptions of the differences in models. The SR-80s have seperate ground wires for the channels, while the SR-60s have a shared ground that combines in the Y, presumably. Whether or not that makes a...

Quote: Originally Posted by utilisateur *subscribed and i've got a link to check out NSLU as audioplayer Not bad. Looks like FLAC is only 17% CPU usage for a 266mhz Xscale.

Quote: Originally Posted by j4cbo I don't think Xscale is available in anything non-BGA, which would make DIY assembly more or less impossible. The NXP (formerly Philips) LPC2368 is a nice processor: 72 MHz ARM7, half a meg of Flash, built-in I2S, built-in SD (8 gigabyte SDHC cards...

AFAIK, there are no FLAC DSPs, or low power FPGAs, for that matter. That's why it would be easier just to use software decoding, and have a reasonably beefy CPU. If it's not going to be small anyway, that should be fine. Anyway, I looked at my friend's NSLU2 again, and it's much smaller than...

Sure, with a team of CS, CE, and EE people putting thousands of man-hours of work into this, it could become a reality. But, I think this is outside the scope of a DIY project. It's sort of strange really, that there are such massive open source software projects around, but open source...

Google SketchUp. Probably the easiest CAD tool in existance.

Making something small with decent battery life that could play FLACs (for example) would be extremely difficult without some uber computer engineering skills. Especially if you want to interface IDE or SATA to it. I suppose hacking something something like an NSLU2 wouldnt be impossible. You...

Erm, I couldn't possibly imagine running with SR60s on. They might hold tight for the first few weeks, but the headband will flex and loosen. Though, iGrados might work. The Grado sound in a behind the neck form factor. Even so, PX100s or PMX100s would be lighter.

Quote: Originally Posted by balou Sorry, but this is completely bogus. There are lossy archivers, which omit information and make a file always smaller. And there are lossless archivers/archive formats. The most known example is Zip. As the name implies, Zip files are NOT lossy. No...

You can compress .wav. You shouldn't be able to make something like FLAC more than a few percent smaller. Either way, all archivers are by definition lossless, otherwise they would be worthless.

I got the "grattle" from a hair in the driver once. I was able to get it out by using a needle carefully on it.