[dougms3]

Yes. The KLEI are the newer Eichmann bullets. And yes they have gone up in price recently with inflation. If you are comfortable with ordering from China or Taiwan, then you can find similar style bullet connectors on eBay in the style of the older Eichmann style before the model was updated. I bought KLEI and stuff from Taiwan off of eBay. I actually thought the Taiwanese stuff had thicker silver and it was what I used for my CD interconnects. For my turntable and headphone I used the KLEI solid silver since I was using smaller gauge silver wire for that stuff.

I see, this $140 naim clone headphone amp is becoming alot more expensive lol. I'd have to reevaluate this whole thing.

I can't buy this kind of stuff off ebay or china. I need to know I'm getting the real deal from an authorized distributor if I get stuff like this.

I'm really interested in that air gapped teflon sleeved silver cable though.

 

[arpinnurmela]

I see, this $140 naim clone headphone amp is becoming alot more expensive lol. I'd have to reevaluate this whole thing.

I can't buy this kind of stuff off ebay or china. I need to know I'm getting the real deal from an authorized distributor if I get stuff like this.

I'm really interested in that air gapped teflon sleeved silver cable though.

Indeed. That’s where I started. I bought some entry level silver plated brass connectors and silver wire from Tempo. And did hear a meaningful enough difference across a wide enough array of my systems that I suddenly found the desire to go all in on solid silver connectors.

I’ve also experimented with solid copper wire for my bedroom system, theater system, all the insides of my subs and speakers, and for speaker wire. You get around 90% of the benefits of the solid silver using this stuff. All sourced in the US and can be purchased on eBay. Search for 22ga 99.9% solid round copper. And then purchase either 18ga or 16ga Teflon tubing. It is way way cheaper. And since most jacks you’ll be connecting to are gold plated I think you could easily go with gold plated RCA connectors. This is what I did for my car stereo and for my home theater.

In my experience, the benefit of the air-gapped solid core vs stranded wire is refinement. Refinement in tone and timbre, a cleaner top end, a more forward mid, and a deeper and tighter low end. Thicker gold plated connectors would be highly advised. But I personally would avoid gold plating over solid copper. Just get gold plating over brass. When you do go to solid copper or solid silver connectors, you’ll find that the bass response is dramatically improved and the top end will have more depth. And this holds true for either copper or silver.

 

[dougms3]

Indeed. That’s where I started. I bought some entry level silver plated brass connectors and silver wire from Tempo. And did hear a meaningful enough difference across a wide enough array of my systems that I suddenly found the desire to go all in on solid silver connectors.

I’ve also experimented with solid copper wire for my bedroom system, theater system, all the insides of my subs and speakers, and for speaker wire. You get around 90% of the benefits of the solid silver using this stuff. All sourced in the US and can be purchased on eBay. Search for 22ga 99.9% solid round copper. And then purchase either 18ga or 16ga Teflon tubing. It is way way cheaper. And since most jacks you’ll be connecting to are gold plated I think you could easily go with gold plated RCA connectors. This is what I did for my car stereo and for my home theater.

In my experience, the benefit of the air-gapped solid core vs stranded wire is refinement. Refinement in tone and timbre, a cleaner top end, a more forward mid, and a deeper and tighter low end. Thicker gold plated connectors would be highly advised. But I personally would avoid gold plating over solid copper. Just get gold plating over brass. When you do go to solid copper or solid silver connectors, you’ll find that the bass response is dramatically improved and the top end will have more depth. And this holds true for either copper or silver.

I'm with you on the solid core wire with teflon sleeve. I recently changed out the driver wire on a couple of my headphones to mundorf solid core silver gold wire with amazing results. I'm a big fan of the solid core over the stranded wire. Like you said i think it does refinement a bit better.

That's why I'm very interested in this air gapped solid silver wire.

 

[arpinnurmela]

Very nice!! Well, now I get why you were interested in the rewire of the Naim clone. When I first started reading about this air-gapped solid core DIY wire, I thought that there was no way I'd ever make my own interconnects or do any replacement of internal wire on anything I own. It all started for me when I bought some 12ga solid silver from Tempo to replace my banana jumpers. From there I made myself a headphone cable for my Verum One mkII. Which then led me to make interconnects. And then 100 plus hours later... Now I enjoy all of my gear so much more. As I type I'm listening to my Etymotic ER4SR via a custom 28ga solid silver air-gapped in 24ga teflon tubing and loving it. Prior to doing this, the ER4SR were good, but now my EtyS are excellent.

What made you do rewires on your headphones? From an outsider's perspective it seems pointless. So something must have got you curious enough to possibly ruin your headphones.

 

[dougms3]

Very nice!! Well, now I get why you were interested in the rewire of the Naim clone. When I first started reading about this air-gapped solid core DIY wire, I thought that there was no way I'd ever make my own interconnects or do any replacement of internal wire on anything I own. It all started for me when I bought some 12ga solid silver from Tempo to replace my banana jumpers. From there I made myself a headphone cable for my Verum One mkII. Which then led me to make interconnects. And then 100 plus hours later... Now I enjoy all of my gear so much more. As I type I'm listening to my Etymotic ER4SR via a custom 28ga solid silver air-gapped in 24ga teflon tubing and loving it. Prior to doing this, the ER4SR were good, but now my EtyS are excellent.

What made you do rewires on your headphones? From an outsider's perspective it seems pointless. So something must have got you curious enough to possibly ruin your headphones.

If youhave a chance topost the pics, I'm very interested in seeing your diy headphone cables.

Reason i rewired them is because a couple headphones i saw that the stock wiring seemed to use a really cheap, maybe 32 awg wire for the driver. I wondered what kind of difference it would make if i upgraded it to something like that mundorf silver gold solid core wire. The wire isnt too expensive at about $8 a foot and i only need two so i thought I'd test it out. Pretty much only a $16 risk, there was no concern on my end that the headphones would be ruined afterwards.

I was blown away by the improvement from that upgrade. And funny thing is its still not even fully burned in almost a month later. That silver gold solid core teflon sleeve wire takes forever to burn in. The sound is still getting better.

I posted that mod on Reddit and you should see how much hate i got from it lol.

 

[arpinnurmela]

If youhave a chance topost the pics, I'm very interested in seeing your diy headphone cables.

Reason i rewired them is because a couple headphones i saw that the stock wiring seemed to use a really cheap, maybe 32 awg wire for the driver. I wondered what kind of difference it would make if i upgraded it to something like that mundorf silver gold solid core wire. The wire isnt too expensive at about $8 a foot and i only need two so i thought I'd test it out. Pretty much only a $16 risk, there was no concern on my end that the headphones would be ruined afterwards.

I was blown away by the improvement from that upgrade. And funny thing is its still not even fully burned in almost a month later. That silver gold solid core teflon sleeve wire takes forever to burn in. The sound is still getting better.

I posted that mod on Reddit and you should see how much hate i got from it lol.

Exactly. The wire really isn't that expensive which makes it very reasonable to try out. And when you examine the internal wiring, usually it is stranded, of poorish quality, and often too thin.

I will say this about my personal experience with air-gapped solid core wire (copper or silver): I feel that after just an hour you'll have 80% of the gains. After 3-4 hours you'll have about 90% of the gains, and after 24 hours of burn in you're pretty much at 100%. So the "theoretical" advantage of air-gapping is to facilitate surface flow (where >60% of current wants to flow) without worrying about any molecular interference or capacitive effects of a coating uniformly applied to the surface of the wire. This could be why air-gapping seems to have a much faster burn in process. It's pure speculation on my part though.

But for sure, we aren't the only audiophools to "hear" the benefits of solid core wire. And for sure, the wiring inside the Naim clone was definitely nothing special as is usually the case in almost all consumer level products. For some very high end audiophile equipment, makers are indeed using solid core wiring or high quality wiring. And the jacks on the Naim clone were also pretty entry level and didn't seem to be of high quality at all. But all of this that I'm typing I was entirely skeptical of until hearing with my own ears, like you.

Doing air-gapped solid core headphone cables are unadvised unless SQ is absolutely paramount. If convenience or cable flexibility are top considerations then doing air-gapped solid core in teflon is going to be super annoying since teflon tends to be stiff and wants to retain its shape. But I personally have found that because I'm not doing some thick jacket around the cabling that the cabling, despite having a mind of its own, is still light enough that I can run my ER4SR with it and have zero annoyances.

 

[dougms3]

Exactly. The wire really isn't that expensive which makes it very reasonable to try out. And when you examine the internal wiring, usually it is stranded, of poorish quality, and often too thin.

I will say this about my personal experience with air-gapped solid core wire (copper or silver): I feel that after just an hour you'll have 80% of the gains. After 3-4 hours you'll have about 90% of the gains, and after 24 hours of burn in you're pretty much at 100%. So the "theoretical" advantage of air-gapping is to facilitate surface flow (where >60% of current wants to flow) without worrying about any molecular interference or capacitive effects of a coating uniformly applied to the surface of the wire. This could be why air-gapping seems to have a much faster burn in process. It's pure speculation on my part though.

But for sure, we aren't the only audiophools to "hear" the benefits of solid core wire. And for sure, the wiring inside the Naim clone was definitely nothing special as is usually the case in almost all consumer level products. For some very high end audiophile equipment, makers are indeed using solid core wiring or high quality wiring. And the jacks on the Naim clone were also pretty entry level and didn't seem to be of high quality at all. But all of this that I'm typing I was entirely skeptical of until hearing with my own ears, like you.

Doing air-gapped solid core headphone cables are unadvised unless SQ is absolutely paramount. If convenience or cable flexibility are top considerations then doing air-gapped solid core in teflon is going to be super annoying since teflon tends to be stiff and wants to retain its shape. But I personally have found that because I'm not doing some thick jacket around the cabling that the cabling, despite having a mind of its own, is still light enough that I can run my ER4SR with it and have zero annoyances.

Yea i found that interesting as well about the surface current flow and air as the initial dielectric.

My only concern would be oxidation but i guess it should be ok if its sealed properly at the terminations.

Yeah in second thought it looks impractical to use for headphone cables. I like what u did with the splitter there tho.

 

[dougms3]

Yes. The KLEI are the newer Eichmann bullets. And yes they have gone up in price recently with inflation. If you are comfortable with ordering from China or Taiwan, then you can find similar style bullet connectors on eBay in the style of the older Eichmann style before the model was updated. I bought KLEI and stuff from Taiwan off of eBay. I actually thought the Taiwanese stuff had thicker silver and it was what I used for my CD interconnects. For my turntable and headphone I used the KLEI solid silver since I was using smaller gauge silver wire for that stuff.

Looking over the prices, might be a good idea to reconsider the ebay klei option lol. Do you have the link to that item?

Btw this is the difference in the thickness of the wire I replaced in one of the headphones. The red is 24awg.

 

[neonixcool]

I'm very interested in this amp and the mods that you did to it. If you could elaborate a little further the specifics of what you did, it would be greatly appreciated.

The link previously posted isnt working, can you please post where you purchased it, thanks.

Good day dear please look for my head amps

This is not Chinese clone
This is my hobby schematic of headamplifier based on Naim headline

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc4h2SKuB7H/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

And

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdwEQj5ubDp/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

And

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdwEyS6OjHI/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

 

[neonixcool]

Hi @dougms3. Sorry for the delay in responding. It had been a while since I checked this thread. Here is a link below:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001441359988.html

For the mods, I replaced the jacks and signal wire. The jacks were upgraded to CMC style 80micron thick silver plated jacks. And the run of signal wire inside the machine that ran between the jacks and the potentiometer were replaced with 24ga solid silver (no strands) air gapped inside of 20ga teflon tubing. I have a photo of the first upgrade I did which was replacing just the wiring and keeping the original jacks. Like I said I have replaced the jacks as of now and they have been that way for probably 9 months now. The jacks made a silly difference, improving bass performance quite well in purely subjective before and after tests. Obviously, none of my upgrades are amenable to blind listening tests, so I had to trust my ears on this one. I did use the same albums and tracks before and after upgrades, but given that the work took between 1-2 hours, there is no real clean psychoacoustic memory available. The wiring cleans up the signal and straightens out the tones. Again, totally my subjective experience. I can tell you that all of this "nonsense" was convincing enough to my ear to replace every single stranded wire and jack in every subwoofer, speaker, and electronic component that I own.

You'll note in the first picture that I have the original jacks in at this point. (The second picture shows the upgraded silver jacks.) I never bothered taking the circuit board out of the unit and instead ran silver wire to the top of the board, routing the wire to the side of the chassis so that it wasn't too close to the transformer. What I recommend you do prior to this "surgery" is to make yourself your own solid silver RCA cable using solid silver Eichmann bullets. Trust me, the solid silver Eichmanns sound so much better than silver plated RCAs and are simply worth the extra cost. This will allow you to hear the difference that solid air-gapped silver makes outside of the machine. If you like the results, then it is time to perform the surgery... If the cost for solid silver interconnects is too much, then you can build yourself solid air-gapped copper interconnects with solid copper Eichmann bullets. For solder I use 8% silver content solder, which works well with either the solid silver or the solid copper. When I solder I try to make sure that the metal-metal interface is surface to surface and then put solder over it to "lock it in".

But making DIY interconnects first is what convinced me to go crazy and potentially end the life of my Naim clone. If you don't hear a difference, then you're probably better off. I ended up spending probably 100 hours upgrading all of my equipment. It was fairly ridiculous and totally not scientific, but it sounded better to my ear enough that it made me do dumb things like rewiring the inside of my very prized hifi system and turntable. Made some near fatal mistakes along the way, but managed to come out on the other end with all my gear intact and sounding way better. Yay for crazy and unscientific.

Dear this is not full clone of Headline 2
You listen original Naim Headline 2 ?
You need get original amp and testing his between China clone

 

[neonixcool]

I wonder if any of the AliExpress sellers are willing to build a clone with a larger toroidal transformer, better RCA jacks, and better internal wiring.

The two chassis version looks nice https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003309256247.html

Good day some like this one ?