[adrianm]

I think this audience might be interested in hearing that the new Airpods Pro 2 are pretty damn punchy.

 

[whirlwind]

I wonder how big is the Glenn EL3N club? Other than you, myself and @zach915m - how many Glenn EL3N amps are out there??

I really do not know. @Sound Trooper has one and uses Abyss with his, not sure if he is still around or not.
Maybe a dozen out in the wild somewhere. Does yours use 4 tubes in stage one? Mine only uses two tubes in stage one and still powers high impedance cans easily.

Definitely much fewer GEL3N and 300B amps that OTL amps.

 

[Zachik]

Does yours use 4 tubes in stage one? Mine only uses two tubes in stage one and still powers high impedance cans easily.

Mine has 2 drivers plus 4 output tubes (that is the reason I named it 6EL3N...)
Also has speaker taps, so can easily drive sensitive speakers

 

[earthtodan]

Might could have just saved some time and money and just use the cross section and length calculation for the resistance of copper (and therefore find the voltage drop as well as attenuation factor).

But who am I kidding, why would anyone use electrical engineering principles for... electrical headphones? Looks cool though.

An audio cable is also a, er... chargedcapacitor. It needs to be evaluated on complex impedance, not just resistance. The capacitance increases as you increase wire gauge to lower resistance, so there's possibly a tradeoff as it starts to become a high frequency shunt. And I don't even know how it affects inductance. May as well just make cables and have fun with it.

 

[csglinux]

It felt like groundhog day returning to the same SoCal venue for this CanJam (historical throwback: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/canjam-socal-2019-impressions-thread.909385/post-15027066). Despite a couple of years of pandemic-fueled supply-chain constraints and near double-digit inflation, the Marriott was still charging the exact same $7 for a bottle of water - at a convention where people are on a Brewster's-millions-type quest to part with their money:


As usual, there was way too much to digest in a single weekend, so profuse apologies to the 99% of products/vendors that I didn't even have time to visit. Some interesting things I did see...

Spoiler: SE846 Gen 2(?)

Shure now have a second generation(?) SE846, which is really just an original SE846 with a new filter option. There's been a big effort on headfi to produce filter mods for this headphone (special shout out to @Jamnperry who got this particular ball rolling: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/se846-filter-mod.802350/). Shure have now produced a 'red' filter which is the new default in the latest model SE846. You can see how it compares to the white & blue filters (with Cp800 eartips) here: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/shure-se846-impressions-thread.675219/post-17157513

Spoiler: Letshuoer Cadenza

Letshuoer allowed me to demo their prototype Cadenza. It wasn't quite right for me, but it actually looks reasonable stacked up on a graph against the Harman target:
https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Cadenza

Spoiler: JH Audio Sharona and Sheena

Jerry Harvey had a couple of new IEMs at the show (Sharona and Sheena):
https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Sharona&Sheena

They sounded ok, but JH IEMs are huge and I wasn't the only person at their booth having fit issues. Even if you ultimately intend to only buy a custom fit, it might be challenging to demo the universal fit, given the bulk.

Jerry Harvey also gave a talk about a new EQ product for his headphones. He's basing the EQ off his customer's audiograms, which makes sense - as least as an initial shot for folks that don't want to fiddle around with fine-grained EQ. I picked up one useful snippet from talking to Jerry afterwards that I'd never fully appreciated before. He said that an important aspect of his multi-BA design is dynamic range. I'd always seen custom IEMs for stage musicians as essentially hearing-protection products, but it seems that's not the case - at least not for many of Jerry's customers. It seems musicians like to drive their headphones to extremely loud volumes (since high volume = adrenaline rush for the performer). Jerry told me that some of his customers are pushing their IEMS to the point of around 6% harmonic distortion. He said he just provides the product - the customer decides how to use it

Spoiler: xMEMs Transducers

xMEMs had an interesting booth showing off a new type of transducer. They were kind enough to let me measure a demo transducer which was mounted in a coupler-friendly test nest. This is not how a final headphone would sound, as it's just the driver firing directly into the coupler at point blank range, but it shows the potential for a high-frequency driver:

Its distortion seems to be BA-level, but even-order dominated - so different in character to both existing balanced armatures (or BA hybrids, e.g., EE Hero) and dynamic drivers (e.g., Periodic Audio Be):

The downside is these transducers need to be powered, so you're not likely to be seeing these drivers in standard wired headphones anytime soon. But their tiny size could make them useful in products like true wireless Bluetooth headphones.

Spoiler: Astell & Kern SP3000

Astell & Kern stole the show for me three years ago with the SP2000, and had their new SP3000 on demo at this CanJam. It looks like another hit to me. It sounded great - different (better) to me than that of the SP2000, but it's also a bit more powerful, so final conclusions from listening tests would need to wait for a proper SPL-matched A/B test. (Measurements show it's more accurate than the SP2000, but not dramatically so. More time's needed to post these.) The SP3000 has a couple of neat new software tricks, such as AK file drop and a type of cover-flow art-work, where all your album/song covers get added to a sliding CD-cover carousel. They've also fixed the zero-day bug in the SP2000's 20-band equalizer. Here's the SP2K trying to add 5 dB gain at 1 kHz using a q factor of 2 (a roughly two octave bandwidth). The gray line shows what this filter should look like; orange shows what the SP2K does:

And here's the same filter applied with the SP3K (red line):

This is great news for future SP3000 owners, as you now have a useable system-wide 20-band EQ. It's not such great news for existing SP2000 owners though. The impression I got from the A&K folks is that none of the new software features are going to be back-ported to the SP2000 (understandable, I suppose?), but also none of the bugs in AK Connect or the 20-band equalizer are going to get fixed either (disappointing, given that the SP2K was advertised as having a 20 band EQ and now it seems that throughout its entire lifespan, it will have never had a usable EQ). On the flip side, existing SP2000 users can still enjoy 512 Gb internal storage. (While both units have an SD card slot, internal memory on the SP3K has dropped to 256 Gb due to supply-chain issues.)

Spoiler: Astell & Kern Odyssey

A&K were also showing off their new Empire-Ears-manufactured 'Odyssey'. The Odyssey sounds good (https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Odyssey), but seeing it right next to the SP3K, with a very similar price tag, it didn't necessarily strike me as terrific value for money.

Spoiler: Noble Kublai Khan

My favorite headphone of the show was the new Kublai Khan from Noble. I obviously haven't spent weeks auditioning and A/B-ing it, but in the time I was able to spend with it I really couldn't fault it. Here it is compared with the original Khan and the Sultan SE: https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Khan&Sultan_SE&Kublai_Khan

Spoiler: Noble FoKus Pro

Noble also have a fairly premium-looking true-wireless headphone called the 'FoKus Pro'. It's a really fun-sounding headphone, up there amongst the best bluetooth headphones I've heard, and it also has a 10-band EQ built into its app for those of you that find its tuning to be a bit too much fun: https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&FoKus_Pro

Many thanks to all the head-fi folks, organizers and vendors for all their hard work in putting this event together

 

[AnalogEuphoria]

No idea who she is... and that appears to be a Labtec Elite 835.

Damn, out of my price range.

 

[NiGHTS4EVA]

LOL at the water bottle price, first thing my friend and I did once we saw that was hit up the local gas station and stock up.

 

[theveterans]

LOL at the water bottle price, first thing my friend and I did once we saw that was hit up the local gas station and stock up.

My local Safeway store has spring bottled water for 1/2 dollar. Fiji water would cost 3 dollars though

 

[warrenpchi]

 

[DenverW]

I live in waking distance of Hodads and haven’t been there yet. I didn’t realize it was supposed to be that great.

Also, I mentioned before the but the Expanse paired with the Woo WA23 was the highlight for me. That amazing warm tubey sound with all the details still coming thru. I already purchased the Expanse a few days before so got to try it out in a few setups and the Woo was the best by far.

I already feel it...2023 Socal Canjam is going to be the year of the SD crew carpooling .

 

[om letap]

live in India , saw all these amazing post and how amazing time ya’ll had and all the cool stuff you guys got to sample , trying to convince my wife to take a family vacation to Singapore at the end of march ( Singapore camjam2023) I didn’t tell her thats the reason yet.

 

[Zachik]

I didn’t tell her thats the reason yet.

Need to know only.
Wife does not need to know!

 

[normie610]

This was an experiment cable I built (15awg x 8 = 12awg x 4) to determine the relationship between cable gauge and SPL on the Raal transformer box. Not a retail product.

Wow, just when I thought the C15 S-Mod is your largest cable. Still using that with SR1a + old interface box, spectacular sound indeed. Look forward to what you’ll be coming up with for the new transformer box (TI-1b).

 

[Netforce]

It felt like groundhog day returning to the same SoCal venue for this CanJam (historical throwback: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/canjam-socal-2019-impressions-thread.909385/post-15027066). Despite a couple of years of pandemic-fueled supply-chain constraints and near double-digit inflation, the Marriott was still charging the exact same $7 for a bottle of water - at a convention where people are on a Brewster's-millions-type quest to part with their money:


As usual, there was way too much to digest in a single weekend, so profuse apologies to the 99% of products/vendors that I didn't even have time to visit. Some interesting things I did see...

Spoiler: SE846 Gen 2(?)

Shure now have a second generation(?) SE846, which is really just an original SE846 with a new filter option. There's been a big effort on headfi to produce filter mods for this headphone (special shout out to @Jamnperry who got this particular ball rolling: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/se846-filter-mod.802350/). Shure have now produced a 'red' filter which is the new default in the latest model SE846. You can see how it compares to the white & blue filters (with Cp800 eartips) here: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/shure-se846-impressions-thread.675219/post-17157513

Spoiler: Letshuoer Cadenza

Letshuoer allowed me to demo their prototype Cadenza. It wasn't quite right for me, but it actually looks reasonable stacked up on a graph against the Harman target:
https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Cadenza

Spoiler: JH Audio Sharona and Sheena

Jerry Harvey had a couple of new IEMs at the show (Sharona and Sheena):
https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Sharona&Sheena

They sounded ok, but JH IEMs are huge and I wasn't the only person at their booth having fit issues. Even if you ultimately intend to only buy a custom fit, it might be challenging to demo the universal fit, given the bulk.

Jerry Harvey also gave a talk about a new EQ product for his headphones. He's basing the EQ off his customer's audiograms, which makes sense - as least as an initial shot for folks that don't want to fiddle around with fine-grained EQ. I picked up one useful snippet from talking to Jerry afterwards that I'd never fully appreciated before. He said that an important aspect of his multi-BA design is dynamic range. I'd always seen custom IEMs for stage musicians as essentially hearing-protection products, but it seems that's not the case - at least not for many of Jerry's customers. It seems musicians like to drive their headphones to extremely loud volumes (since high volume = adrenaline rush for the performer). Jerry told me that some of his customers are pushing their IEMS to the point of around 6% harmonic distortion. He said he just provides the product - the customer decides how to use it

Spoiler: xMEMs Transducers

xMEMs had an interesting booth showing off a new type of transducer. They were kind enough to let me measure a demo transducer which was mounted in a coupler-friendly test nest. This is not how a final headphone would sound, as it's just the driver firing directly into the coupler at point blank range, but it shows the potential for a high-frequency driver:

Its distortion seems to be BA-level, but even-order dominated - so different in character to both existing balanced armatures (or BA hybrids, e.g., EE Hero) and dynamic drivers (e.g., Periodic Audio Be):


The downside is these transducers need to be powered, so you're not likely to be seeing these drivers in standard wired headphones anytime soon. But their tiny size could make them useful in products like true wireless Bluetooth headphones.

Spoiler: Astell & Kern SP3000

Astell & Kern stole the show for me three years ago with the SP2000, and had their new SP3000 on demo at this CanJam. It looks like another hit to me. It sounded great - different (better) to me than that of the SP2000, but it's also a bit more powerful, so final conclusions from listening tests would need to wait for a proper SPL-matched A/B test. (Measurements show it's more accurate than the SP2000, but not dramatically so. More time's needed to post these.) The SP3000 has a couple of neat new software tricks, such as AK file drop and a type of cover-flow art-work, where all your album/song covers get added to a sliding CD-cover carousel. They've also fixed the zero-day bug in the SP2000's 20-band equalizer. Here's the SP2K trying to add 5 dB gain at 1 kHz using a q factor of 2 (a roughly two octave bandwidth). The gray line shows what this filter should look like; orange shows what the SP2K does:


And here's the same filter applied with the SP3K (red line):


This is great news for future SP3000 owners, as you now have a useable system-wide 20-band EQ. It's not such great news for existing SP2000 owners though. The impression I got from the A&K folks is that none of the new software features are going to be back-ported to the SP2000 (understandable, I suppose?), but also none of the bugs in AK Connect or the 20-band equalizer are going to get fixed either (disappointing, given that the SP2K was advertised as having a 20 band EQ and now it seems that throughout its entire lifespan, it will have never had a usable EQ). On the flip side, existing SP2000 users can still enjoy 512 Gb internal storage. (While both units have an SD card slot, internal memory on the SP3K has dropped to 256 Gb due to supply-chain issues.)

Spoiler: Astell & Kern Odyssey

A&K were also showing off their new Empire-Ears-manufactured 'Odyssey'. The Odyssey sounds good (https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Odyssey), but seeing it right next to the SP3K, with a very similar price tag, it didn't necessarily strike me as terrific value for money.

Spoiler: Noble Kublai Khan

My favorite headphone of the show was the new Kublai Khan from Noble. I obviously haven't spent weeks auditioning and A/B-ing it, but in the time I was able to spend with it I really couldn't fault it. Here it is compared with the original Khan and the Sultan SE: https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&Khan&Sultan_SE&Kublai_Khan

Spoiler: Noble FoKus Pro

Noble also have a fairly premium-looking true-wireless headphone called the 'FoKus Pro'. It's a really fun-sounding headphone, up there amongst the best bluetooth headphones I've heard, and it also has a 10-band EQ built into its app for those of you that find its tuning to be a bit too much fun: https://www.hypethesonics.com/iemdbc?0&Harman_2019&FoKus_Pro

Many thanks to all the head-fi folks, organizers and vendors for all their hard work in putting this event together

Maaaan, one of the first things I did when I saw those water prices was go to Target and bought a case of water for the team

 

[LeFaucon]

Me I want that exactly !
funny !