Ripper2860
Headphoneus Supremus
Mine are on their way, I hope.
What a long, strange trip it's been -- (Robert Hunter)
- Thread starter Baldr
- Start date
RickB
Headphoneus Supremus
Be careful; you should only bend them on the metal sliders, NOT the headband.
riffrafff
1000+ Head-Fier
Also, they say the clamp force will diminish over time, between the headband loosening slightly and the pads compressing. Actually, I don't mind the clamp force. It's a nice change for me, coming from a pair of Philips SHP9000S 'phones that would all but fall off if I merely glanced down at my watch! 
Rensek
Headphoneus Supremus
Took me a couple of days of massaging the metal band so they'd finally stay in a comfortable (non vice like) position. Now I barely notice they are on my head.I just received mine Tuesday. Very nice, indeed.
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Rensek
Headphoneus Supremus
Link for YouTube video to reduce clamping force.
https ://youtu.be/iNxK-NwSR5U
https ://youtu.be/iNxK-NwSR5U
bosiemoncrieff
Headphoneus Supremus
Walkure was good. Like Rheingold, very human scale staging, not too many bells and whistles for their own sake. The tree in the middle of Hunding's house was two-dimensional, and the sword sort of popped out of it just as 1.3 was beginning. I like to say that there are two kinds of Wagner tenors: Sunshine (Melchior, Kollo, Windgassen, Jess Thomas) and Gravel (Suthaus, Vinay, Domingo, Stuart Skelton, late Max Lorenz). Some walk the line very nicely—Vickers, early/mid career Lorenz—but most are clearly one or the other. Our tenor was clearly Gravel, albeit very nice sounding. Gravel tenors don't sound unpleasant, just dark. For Tristan, and perhaps Siegmund, this sound is preferable. For Siegfried it implies a certain doom that may not apply as well.
Wagner sopranos must never sing at 100%. If you sing at 100%, you give yourself over to the music and lose control. At most a Wagner soprano (or any other singer for that matter) should give 95% of their capacity, and then only at the very climax of the role. Our Sieglinde opened her mouth very wide and seemed to give every last bit of power she could in Act 1—and only at O Hehrstes Wunder is she even nominally okay going that far. It's much better form to open the mouth less far and exercise greater control. Force the air through; focus it. Don't open your instrument wide and let it go where it may.
Fricka in particular was a tremendously gifted actress with a voice like a knife. I actually preferred her to Wotan. Brunnhilde, Irene something something, was better than Sieglinde, but the part's demands are somewhat absurd: her first minute is coloratura, and the rest is heldensopran. Schwarzkopf was brought in famously to sing the high C in the Liebesnacht from the 1952 Furtwängler Tristan. Perhaps she should have sung the Hojotojo for Flagstad two years earlier. At any rate, for the coloratura, Irene's wobble was plainly apparent. For the rest she was strong and focused.
Francesca Zambello is a gifted stage director. The stage pictures are striking. I liked how Fricka gets Wotan to sign the contract of Siegmund's death at the end of 2.1 and then, on a bridge upstage, looming above, watches his murder in 2.5 before ripping up the contract at the point of Hunding's death and striding offstage before Wotan's angry send-off about punishing Brunnhilde. I was lukewarm about the end of Act 1. The Volsung twins were on top of one another and then rolled as a unit upstage four times or so, and then rolled downstage the same amount. It looked childish. The fallen heroes are not in body bags, as lesser directors do clumsily, or supernumeraries. Instead, the Valkyries carried large square portraits of the faces of servicemen and women who died serving the United States. It's an interesting directorial choice, both potentially distracting from Wagner and extremely economical and graceful onstage.
I've become indifferent to hugs. It's something we human beings do a lot, but it also is from a very different register than Wagnerian drama. Wotan and Brunnhilde kind of eye each other for a while during the farewell before embracing one last time, and I have to admit that the embrace was kind of a dramatic letdown. The buildup was much more powerful. Another letdown was during 2.4, when Siegmund is about to kill Sieglinde. Brunnhilde knocks Nothung from his hands, and declares that she will change the outcome of the battle—the moment, in my reading, where she becomes a human being, and no longer one of the mere slaves that Wotan bemoans he is able to create to the exclusion of free beings. (Truly free beings, he says, must create themselves. I don't know that I buy that part.) Instead of knocking it out with a spear or a shield, or knocking him to the ground, she just kind of goes up behind him and takes it, almost with a "no, no, dear, let me have that."
Both the music and the staging in 3.1 when the Valkyries are waiting for Brunnhilde to appear was a letdown. The sisters say that they have never seen a Valkyrie ride so furiously before, and yet the were just kind of chilling, Runnicles playing at a much more leisurely tempo than I expected. I've found this characteristic of Runnicles: he smooths out Wagner's rough edges, and makes everything a little more even, a little more stately. Like the 1953 WF Ring, but ironed past anything even Karajan would approve of.
Hunding had a great voice. The projections were good. Act 2 was too long, as usual, but 3.3 is kind of necessary and yet at the same time the Volsung drama is always more boring to me than the Wotan/Brunnhilde/Fricka/Alberich/Fafner drama looming in the background.
Siegfried in one hour! Looking forward to it.
Wagner sopranos must never sing at 100%. If you sing at 100%, you give yourself over to the music and lose control. At most a Wagner soprano (or any other singer for that matter) should give 95% of their capacity, and then only at the very climax of the role. Our Sieglinde opened her mouth very wide and seemed to give every last bit of power she could in Act 1—and only at O Hehrstes Wunder is she even nominally okay going that far. It's much better form to open the mouth less far and exercise greater control. Force the air through; focus it. Don't open your instrument wide and let it go where it may.
Fricka in particular was a tremendously gifted actress with a voice like a knife. I actually preferred her to Wotan. Brunnhilde, Irene something something, was better than Sieglinde, but the part's demands are somewhat absurd: her first minute is coloratura, and the rest is heldensopran. Schwarzkopf was brought in famously to sing the high C in the Liebesnacht from the 1952 Furtwängler Tristan. Perhaps she should have sung the Hojotojo for Flagstad two years earlier. At any rate, for the coloratura, Irene's wobble was plainly apparent. For the rest she was strong and focused.
Francesca Zambello is a gifted stage director. The stage pictures are striking. I liked how Fricka gets Wotan to sign the contract of Siegmund's death at the end of 2.1 and then, on a bridge upstage, looming above, watches his murder in 2.5 before ripping up the contract at the point of Hunding's death and striding offstage before Wotan's angry send-off about punishing Brunnhilde. I was lukewarm about the end of Act 1. The Volsung twins were on top of one another and then rolled as a unit upstage four times or so, and then rolled downstage the same amount. It looked childish. The fallen heroes are not in body bags, as lesser directors do clumsily, or supernumeraries. Instead, the Valkyries carried large square portraits of the faces of servicemen and women who died serving the United States. It's an interesting directorial choice, both potentially distracting from Wagner and extremely economical and graceful onstage.
I've become indifferent to hugs. It's something we human beings do a lot, but it also is from a very different register than Wagnerian drama. Wotan and Brunnhilde kind of eye each other for a while during the farewell before embracing one last time, and I have to admit that the embrace was kind of a dramatic letdown. The buildup was much more powerful. Another letdown was during 2.4, when Siegmund is about to kill Sieglinde. Brunnhilde knocks Nothung from his hands, and declares that she will change the outcome of the battle—the moment, in my reading, where she becomes a human being, and no longer one of the mere slaves that Wotan bemoans he is able to create to the exclusion of free beings. (Truly free beings, he says, must create themselves. I don't know that I buy that part.) Instead of knocking it out with a spear or a shield, or knocking him to the ground, she just kind of goes up behind him and takes it, almost with a "no, no, dear, let me have that."
Both the music and the staging in 3.1 when the Valkyries are waiting for Brunnhilde to appear was a letdown. The sisters say that they have never seen a Valkyrie ride so furiously before, and yet the were just kind of chilling, Runnicles playing at a much more leisurely tempo than I expected. I've found this characteristic of Runnicles: he smooths out Wagner's rough edges, and makes everything a little more even, a little more stately. Like the 1953 WF Ring, but ironed past anything even Karajan would approve of.
Hunding had a great voice. The projections were good. Act 2 was too long, as usual, but 3.3 is kind of necessary and yet at the same time the Volsung drama is always more boring to me than the Wotan/Brunnhilde/Fricka/Alberich/Fafner drama looming in the background.
Siegfried in one hour! Looking forward to it.
ScubaMan2017
Headphoneus Supremus
I appreciated the heads-up, @RickB . I held off cranking & bending until I got a second opinion (headband was rigid, my horsesense told me to stop).
Once I gently flexed the spring steel rails, the clamping became less unpleasant. My older HD cans were all plastic.Also, they say the clamp force will diminish over time, between the headband loosening slightly and the pads compressing. Actually, I don't mind the clamp force. It's a nice change for me, coming from a pair of Philips SHP9000S 'phones that would all but fall off if I merely glanced down at my watch!
10-4
Thanks, eh.
[edited for grammar after a couple of hours]
Last edited:
the finisher
1000+ Head-Fier
I just got mine early as well, I had a date of Aug 14. They sound great with the Jot balanced.
A nice change from the LCD Xs.
A nice change from the LCD Xs.
Baldr
Sponsor: Schiit Audio
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- May 14, 2011
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Damn, there is some highly contentious debate raging on a Schiit product thread here over the measured performance of a certain D/A converter. One of the points raised is financial collusion/influence by Schiit and internet ad venues. More on that later. Now I can’t tell any story other than my own or my side of Schiit’s as a co-founder. I may even be able to tell a bit of my partner’s story as well. So here goes.
I do this because I love it. At my age, audio is my livelihood, and it is not a bad one. I have spent 90% of my whole life doing exactly this. Paid a lot of dues. The audio business is difficult in which to survive as a self-funded entrepreneur; the market is small and the corporate competition is plentiful and formidable. The high-end audio sector is speeding toward an insanely priced bizarre bazaar. They sell increasingly ludicrous car-priced products to each other as their true new clients dwindle from the high to low thousands. This being my background (and Jason's of course as well), we know how to build competitive high end sounding products. The rest of the audio biz is tougher. There are far more contenders than survivors. So we learned to scale up and reduce costs for all users. That is exactly why you get so much for the buck in our products, uniquely for those made in the USA. This is really how we can disrupt the market, something we frequently are accused of. Sorry for the shameless bragging.
Now let me address the collusion/corruption issue. Schiit provides and sells audio products. We sell and promote them. That is what we do and it costs us money. There are entities such as this forum who reach more far users/clients than we do. That is what they do and it costs them money as well. It is an agreement that we pay those entities money for ad space. Good for them, good for us, and good for those who read the various threads here and elsewhere. Now, for example, I don’t think any forum wants to manufacture audio any more than Schiit wants to run an internet audio forum. In case the accusatory reader didn’t notice, there are many other ads on this forum (as well as all others) including many of our competitors. I also hasten to point out that this forum gave us exposure long before we expanded to the point of being able to afford ads. Good for their competitive news, good for our early exposure. That should quash any collusion rumors here (or elsewhere). Just look at the ads. If there are no ads you are reading an editorial.
Now I have strong opinions, am six and a half feet tall, very loud, and generally don’t care what you think of what I say, which I will say to your face. That may have pissed some off along the way, but I really am harmless. I can’t help it. Jason is at his heart, a marketeer. He always looks for the best and then shouts it by whispering in his ads. He agonizes how to present all things Schiit with the most possible logic in the best possible light. He can’t help it either. That is who we are. I enjoy good to great relationships with 99% of those I encounter on our common audio path. Those who consciously or sub-consciously realize that the more slop they throw out the more comes right back, whether from themselves or others. I like those I meet in this hobby. I would not expect them to return the favor if I had nothing good to say to them, either to their face or behind their back. On this thread I allow pretty much everyone the opportunity to have their say unless all they have to repeatedly say is how much my products suck and how my engineering expertise lacks. Occasionally, posters show up who are just like lice, leeches, and ticks. They depend on others to survive, and fall off when they are sated, only to show back up when they need feeding and attention. They seem to be part of our world, whether trolls or lampreys. The particularly stubborn metastasize rather than reproduce.
Anyway, what works for me is just to keep doing what I have been doing. I hope all enjoy this thread in the furtherance of this hobby as being just that – a pursuit of an activity we like.
I do this because I love it. At my age, audio is my livelihood, and it is not a bad one. I have spent 90% of my whole life doing exactly this. Paid a lot of dues. The audio business is difficult in which to survive as a self-funded entrepreneur; the market is small and the corporate competition is plentiful and formidable. The high-end audio sector is speeding toward an insanely priced bizarre bazaar. They sell increasingly ludicrous car-priced products to each other as their true new clients dwindle from the high to low thousands. This being my background (and Jason's of course as well), we know how to build competitive high end sounding products. The rest of the audio biz is tougher. There are far more contenders than survivors. So we learned to scale up and reduce costs for all users. That is exactly why you get so much for the buck in our products, uniquely for those made in the USA. This is really how we can disrupt the market, something we frequently are accused of. Sorry for the shameless bragging.
Now let me address the collusion/corruption issue. Schiit provides and sells audio products. We sell and promote them. That is what we do and it costs us money. There are entities such as this forum who reach more far users/clients than we do. That is what they do and it costs them money as well. It is an agreement that we pay those entities money for ad space. Good for them, good for us, and good for those who read the various threads here and elsewhere. Now, for example, I don’t think any forum wants to manufacture audio any more than Schiit wants to run an internet audio forum. In case the accusatory reader didn’t notice, there are many other ads on this forum (as well as all others) including many of our competitors. I also hasten to point out that this forum gave us exposure long before we expanded to the point of being able to afford ads. Good for their competitive news, good for our early exposure. That should quash any collusion rumors here (or elsewhere). Just look at the ads. If there are no ads you are reading an editorial.
Now I have strong opinions, am six and a half feet tall, very loud, and generally don’t care what you think of what I say, which I will say to your face. That may have pissed some off along the way, but I really am harmless. I can’t help it. Jason is at his heart, a marketeer. He always looks for the best and then shouts it by whispering in his ads. He agonizes how to present all things Schiit with the most possible logic in the best possible light. He can’t help it either. That is who we are. I enjoy good to great relationships with 99% of those I encounter on our common audio path. Those who consciously or sub-consciously realize that the more slop they throw out the more comes right back, whether from themselves or others. I like those I meet in this hobby. I would not expect them to return the favor if I had nothing good to say to them, either to their face or behind their back. On this thread I allow pretty much everyone the opportunity to have their say unless all they have to repeatedly say is how much my products suck and how my engineering expertise lacks. Occasionally, posters show up who are just like lice, leeches, and ticks. They depend on others to survive, and fall off when they are sated, only to show back up when they need feeding and attention. They seem to be part of our world, whether trolls or lampreys. The particularly stubborn metastasize rather than reproduce.
Anyway, what works for me is just to keep doing what I have been doing. I hope all enjoy this thread in the furtherance of this hobby as being just that – a pursuit of an activity we like.
Last edited:
fianbarr
100+ Head-Fier
There will always be people who can't understand that other people have a different opinion from them (especially if it is something they feel strongly about, being positive or negative). And it's much easier for their world view to blame bias in moderation/admins/contributors than accept that different people have different priorities.
Unfortunately those people generally shout the loudest and drown out civilized discussions.
Unfortunately those people generally shout the loudest and drown out civilized discussions.
Ripper2860
Headphoneus Supremus
The thread referenced clearly has at least one participant that has an axe to grind with the Schiit organization -- and it is without a doubt, very personal. 
wink
His amps are made out of recycled beer cans
and his source from tomatos.
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Nil bastardo carborundum.......
fianbarr
100+ Head-Fier
that's why they call it personal audio.... it is without a doubt, very personal.
Ableza
Headphoneus Supremus
Ban the lice, leeches and ticks. Let them cry persecution to their small following. F*c*k them.
GearMe
Headphoneus Supremus
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