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Originally Posted by donunus /img/forum/go_quote.gif
AAAhhhh finally, the stax in on my ears!
Sorry Larry but I have to comment before even 20 minutes of play time
All I can say is wow! Ive been wasting too much time mucking around with dynamic cans for nothing. Everything Ive been looking for is Here, Now... Among all dynamics Ive heard, I guess these sound closest to the senn hd600... but ooooohhhh the bass on the stax is amazing! How come no one ever says that. People keep on talking about the thin stax sound. Well screw that... it is better than any of the dynamics ive had or heard. Bass comes out of nowhere and goes deep and there is no bloat or lag that i can hear so far in my first few minutes of listening. Vocals pop out of a black background and instruments are so delicate sounding without the grainy edge present in dynamics (even the so called smooth hd600s are grainy and etched in comparison). These remind me of listening to great sounding high end speakers more than any headphone ive heard.
More than any of the traits above that I love is the musicality of this thing. I am enjoying anything I play on it. The hd600s for example have a thinness to the upper bass that seems to make the whole sound lack coherence for me. It was my most major gripe with the hd600s but I still kept them because all other cans Ive heard in the price range were inferior IMO. The stax 202 doesnt have a problem with coherence... the music just seems to flow through it.
Oh, and these impressions were done using a basic pioneer dvd player. I'll post impressions when everything is burned in and when I use it with the mhdt havana nos dac.[/IMG]
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Hah. Well dynamics don't have to be grainy. The HD600 is grainy when it's not driven all that well. That grain goes away from a proper system. The HD650, believe it or not, has better detail than the SR-404 to my ears, and, when properly driven, is so much better all-around that it's not even funny. Though when it's poorly driven, it is also much worse. It's a weird little critter to be perfectly honest, and I have no idea why, seeing how hard it is to system-match properly, it is as popular as it is.
But, of course, then there is the O2. Which the HD650, good as it is, will never touch.
You will have the O2 fairly soon.
If you like what you hear now, it gets quite a bit better from here, trust me. The source swap will be the single biggest improvement. Electrostatics, as you've found out, are very, very transparent. That transparency makes them highly source and recording-dependent. As they say, garbage in = garbage out.
You very much hit the nail on the head with that whole coherence thing. On a good system, instruments just sound like instruments and not like a system reproducing said instruments. They pop out of thin air and feel life-like, rather than you getting the impression that there are pulsating drivers creating the illusion of a soundstage. That trait starts here, and only keeps getting more and more evident as you move up the food chain.
It is present in good dynamics too, mind you, but not to the same degree.
Don't be in a rush to get everything, though. With the O2, you're not fooling around. It's either perfect, or there is no point. Which will mean $. Although, if you're smart, you can get everything far cheaper than you'd think.
