First and foremost, major kudos to CEE TEE for organizing and running a flawless and wonderful meet. I totally enjoyed the meet, the Friday night party, and greatly appreciated being able to "crash" in your suite after a 300 mile drive. It's a lot of fun to demo and talk equipment, but the best part of any meet is turning fellow Head-Fiers into friends. Thanks again Christian, people like you transform this forum into a community.
My mostly home-brew system had been operational for less than 48 hours at the time of the meet, so I spent a lot of time "babysitting" and got limited listening time on other systems, but a few things impressed me. The first was N3rdling's Orpheus system. I first heard an Orpheus in 2007 and felt it by far the best headphone system I'd ever heard. Lots of things have changed and improved in the headphone world since then, but I still think the Orpheus is king. Very few will ever own this system, but it gives everyone who hears it an ideal of what is possible, and for DIY types like me, a target to shoot for.
I was very impressed with purrin's HD-800 mods. Although I don't own one, I've heard the HD-800 fairly extensively and though I admire its resolution and impressive sound-stage, its modern "audiophile" treble emphasis has always been a turn-off. Purrin's mod went a long way towards smoothing things out. Best sound I've ever heard from the HD-800. Keep up the good work Marv!
Spent some time with the Cavalli Liquid Lightning. I have no idea what the circuit is, but it sounded good and had an unusually smooth and warm presentation for a solid-state amp.
As always, my table-mate Ironbut's R to R tape system was the "hands-down" source king. No more excuses on that 211 electrostatic amp!
My other table-mate Mikeymad brought his 007/ Woo 300B/ transformer box system. While the SRD-7 is not the last word in resolution, it provides a good taste of DHT goodness to the Stax. This system started my dabbling with Stax/ DHT combinations. I really, really would like to see something besides 6S4's and El34's used for output tubes in electrostatic amps.
I barely scratched the surface of the abundance of gear in the other rooms. After a point everything sort of runs together and it becomes difficult to make any meaningful assessments. What was abundantly clear however was there was a huge selection for every taste and price point.
A number of people have asked me questions about my DIY tube amps. The cocobolo/copper amp driving purrin's LCD-3's (Special thanks to purrin for the extended loan!) was specifically built for ortho's. It's a single-ended two stage design using a CCS loaded type 56 triode directly connected to a type 46 DHT, which drives a 7k:32 Electra-Print output transformer. Puts out about 1.5W. Power supply is solid state with dual vacuum tube based regulators. Sorry, no more mercury rectifiers at public events.
The wenge/copper electrostatic amp (the black one) was an exercise in recycling and repurposing components. It's core is a couple of old Cary Audio interstage transformers converted to electrostatic output use. Everything else is either surplus or the cheapest possible foreign components. The chassis was originally built for an earlier "spud" amp for dynamic headphones. Total cost, excluding the chassis, was about $250.00 I originally intended to bring a different electrostatic amp that was as close as possible to the ortho amp. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish it in time for the meet.
Once again, thanks to CEE TEE for a wonderful meet. Definitely up for doing it again in SoCal!
