Incoming longish post.
First and foremost thanks to everyone who had a hand in organizing this meet. I don't know the specifics of who did what so please pardon me lumping you all into one group. You did a great job adapting what was supposed to be a small local meet (which quickly turned into an East Coast regional meet).
Impressions: much like Aaron and Tom I spent a majority of my time at the meet catching up with folks that I generally only get to communicate with online. I did set out to listen to two rigs in particular to experience the "I'll never own it" factor.
1.
Thrice's Stax Mania - I didn't get to spend a ton of time with this rig but what time I did was great. Whether the source was the sweet Wadia or his new budget vinyl rig both the Lambda Pros and Sigs sounded very, very good. I could easily live with either pair fed by the Stax amp, that's for sure. And the for being all of a couple hours old the Bottlehead phono stage sounded good to me. I'm no vinyl expert but it was very listenable. I didn't get a chance to check out the third pair of Stax he had at the meet
, I looked up at the clock realized it was getting near 4pm and I hadn't checked into the hotel yet. Good thing I did, they had my reservation listed as 0 days. What, am I going to check and check out on the same day?
2.
Meridian 508.24 + Ray's B-52 w/ balanced HD600s - me =
+
. This rig sounded amazing. Recently I've spent a fair bit of time with balanced HD650s and seen the difference that balanced drive makes for that headphone - it would appear that the same is true for the HD600s as well. This amp was as clean, extended and detailed as any I've heard. It's not too hard on the eyes either.
Otherwise I spent a fair amount of time hanging around my rig, explaining it to folks and hoping against all hope that the beta wouldn't go Mount St. Helens on us since it was stuck running a fuse half the required rating (blame the builder). It finally went poof at the end of the day when it was time to pack up so I guess it has an internal clock that I didn't mean to install. It was a lot of fun having people check it out and comment, especially Tom (bozebuttons). He sat down, gave it a critical listen and said something to the effect of, "It's a great amp Nate, but that source is crap!" This started a trend for the rest of the day and he finally convinced me to bring the amp over and run it off of his Theta/AckDAC rig. Boy am I glad I did. The Tushi is a nice budget transport but ultimately lets the amp (and DAC for that matter) down quite a bit. A few folks who'd listened to the amp earlier in the day came over to check it out again and confirmed what Tom and I had already heard. We even hooked up my Monica DAC to the Theta and the difference was there again. Color me convinced. I think I did a fair job of taking Stephen and Tom's ribbing for the remainder of the day (and into the night) and how you really should start with the source first. Guys, I GET IT!
As luck would have it one of the next projects on my bench is building a dedicated transport so we'll see if that can live up to the Theta. So far it looks promising, the chassis for this beast must weigh 15lbs. If you guys throw another meet in the fall/early winter I'll see if I've accumulated enough points to take off for the weekend again. I might even have a new DAC by then...
So that's all the text that's fit to print. Onto the pictures.
Thanks again for letting me spend my birthday with you folks. I didn't bring it up for the precise reason of
not wanting a cupcake episode at dinner.
See ya next time!
Nate
