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Can anyone provide pictures or gear impressions for those that were unable to attend?
Unfortunately there wasn't a great turn-out for this meet - only 7 people in total - 6 Head-Fi members and 1 guest. There was some interesting equipment there, specifically the Bryston BHA-1 headphone amp. That in my opinion is one heck of a great unit for a solid state amp. With Bryston's standard 20 year warranty, even better! I was really leaning towards a Schiit Mjolnir/Gungnir combo for my new HD800s, but the BHA-1 is starting to look like more of a possibility.
I've always been a stickler for matching gear which is why I was tempted by the Mjolnir/Gungnir set. One of the real big advantages of the BHA-1 are that it has numerous outputs which can all be used simultaneously. Theoretically you could have 3 sets of cans attached and swap between them at your leisure. Of course this is a headphone fanatics benefit - most of us will have 1, maybe 2 pairs of headphones that we switch between, so I guess having 3 outputs is almost overkill. It does have a native single ended output and the other two outputs can be wired to accept single ended phones using adapters, if so required. The Mjolnir however is purely balanced - you can't even use a single ended adapter due to the design. Attaching a single ended adapter would throw the Mjolnir into protection mode.
So in considering which of these high end solid state amps to buy, one has to take in to consideration whether or not they want single ended capability. If so, the BHA-1 bests the Mjolnir. If however you are willing to wire all of your headphones with balanced cables, the Mjolnir looks to be an incredible piece. Alas the one member that had ordered his set was still waiting for it to arrive. By the time the next meet rolls around, I expect I'll have either a Mjolnir/Gungnir combo or a BHA-1/Gungnir combo in my possession.
As for other gear, we had a pretty good assortment of headphones present, with most of the flagships represented: Sennheiser HD800s, Audeze LCD-2, Audeze LCD-3, Grado PS-1000, Beyerdynamic T1. The lower end cans that were present were the Beyer DT770 Pro 250 Ohm, the AKG K702, some Ultimate Ears 6000s and my set of Shure SE-530 IEMs. With the availability of a couple of each of some of the flagships, we did some comparisons. Of interest was comparing my new HD800s (s/n 19xxx) with Colin's HD800s (s/n 10xxx). Mine only have about 120 hours of listening on them, but we could hear very minute differences between the two sets. Everyone that listened suspected that with more burn-in time on my set, they would begin to sound almost exactly like Colin's. Might be interesting to repeat the comparison at the next meet, but who know what phones will be present then!
A new 'favorite' at the meet was TrailerTrash's Oppo setup with his Burston driving his AKG K702s. We all agreed that this was the first time we'd seen anyone bring a 'video' setup to a meet. Listening to hi-res blu-ray audio through the setup was an interesting treat, something I'll have to play with at home when/if I pick up a couple of Bluray concerts. I also provided some interesting source material - some of the new Chesky/HDTracks.com binaural albums and some 96/24 hi-res flac content. I think most of the attendees will agree that my $250 Fiio E17/E9 was a bit of a surprise in how well it handled headphones like the HD800 and the Audeze LCD-2/3.
As usual, the meet was a good 'gab fest' and great to see some of the familiar faces out there. Hope everyone can make it to the next one in the May/June timeframe! Oh, Andrew took a few pics so hopefully he'll get a chance to post them eventually.
Dale
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