Thank you very much for taking the time to reply. I’m leaning towards the Carbon not so much for the dollar difference but more the fact that I would like to stay with SS. My little Stax which does a great job driving the 009s is also SS and runs a little warm. It’s around 35 years old now but was the top of the line when I purchased it and has stood the test of time. I’ve been corresponding with Birgir and Carbons will be available later this week. They are going through their burn-in right now.
Visually I have to agree that the BHSE is very sexy but sound is what I’m after. I’ve never turned the helical of a Leica Noctilux but have on a Rodenstock 90mm SW and I know the feeling of smooth.
I have my listening area in a studio portion of my house. The room is large enough that I could position the amplifier far away and use an internal 64bit volume control if necessary but I don’t think that will be necessary.
I just added up my AC tonnage…Yikes… I’m at 15 tons - 5 zones and all running right now here in Tennessee. It’s pretty toasty outside but nice and cool inside.
I got around to re-doing the first part of my system diagram. This is now generated as one of the newer features of the app I have yet to get around to releasing (feature creep is a real hazard when there’s no forcing function to release). It still needs some refining, especially around scaling, but basically you build your gear list (add items from a list), tell it what feeds what, and it spits out these diagrams (you’ll need to zoom in to see the detail properly at the moment):
To make it work properly, the gear images are scalable vectors - so I have to create those rather than appropriating existing bitmaps; a couple or three examples of which are:
These are a deliberately stylized take and not meant to be perfect recreations (manufacturers that want to put their gear in the app can provide their own images - which would override any I provided, for which I have the necessary simple specification - nothing that can’t be done in Illustrator etc.).
The gear items for the gear list carry all their pertinent specifications (for headphones, DACs, amps). So you can select a chain or path and see those end-to-end characteristics, e.g. if you come of the Woo amp, what’s the available power (as well as V and I), maximum SPL and headroom for all the cans it would be driving.
If nothing else, it’ll give a way for people to post an interactive, detailed, system setup in their (various) forum signatures, without it being randomly formatted text that tends to screw up search.
If you’re not already, be aware that there’s a difference between how “warm” or “hot” something runs (it’s temperature) and how much heat it puts out. It’s the latter that’s at issue.
Not that they’re huge emitters (about 200W each) - but until I rewire the house for 10 GbE and move the storage arrays etc. to their dedicated room, they’re enough to slowly push up the temperature in my room more than I want (I get cranky beyond about 72℉) - at least on the current run of 92℉ days.
That said … I spent some time A/B’ing them last night, and have been doing so since early this morning …
… and on the sonic front, they’re both excellent and more similar than not.
Some differences are apparent, but not huge. And the BHSE is not a particularly tubey-sounding amplifier - at least not with the stock tubes (can’t say if that changes much with others, yet).
I could happily listen with either. I don’t really have a reason to have both (beyond an aesthetic desire to have both solid-state and tube options) - but then I don’t really have a reason not to have both, either.
Carbon? Or Carbon CC?
If the former, he must have not update his site recently. I just bought mine, since the wait for the Carbon CC was going to be towards the end of the year - though I will likely snag one of those once he has them again - because I’m funny like that.
Anyway, we’ll see how much I am willing to put up with being warmer than I want this week, as once the Audeze CRBN arrive (it’s been three weeks since I ordered, so hopefully only one more to go) I imagine I’ll be focusing on that for a bit.
A well appointed, all-in-one app for gear synergy and description - nice idea. Would consolidate a lot of questions. Will there be an option to add personal gear that may not be as commercially well known?
That’s a very small part of what it does, and not the original nor primary purpose of the app. Just something I started fiddling with while taking some time away from solving a much more involved (and interesting) problem.
You can add anything you want to your local database.
Things added there that are not in the core database get submitted to a central queue for validation/review and approval. After which they would appear in the core database.
That’s to stop the sort of thing you see with, say, food-tracking apps - where 5,000 different people add incorrect/incomplete/broken and/or inconsistent information for the same thing. And it also means there will only ever be a single “core” entry for any given piece of gear (there’s an additional discriminator capability for “silent revisions” or “running changes”).
Some other things it will do, which are closer to its raison d’être …
Perform a detailed audiogram (i.e. profile your hearing)
Generate EQ and convolution/IR filters (including channel differential/matching*)
Generate DSP filters (expressed via convolution/IR) to allow adjustments beyond direct FR**
Normalize response feedback across evaluations/evaluators
There’s a bunch more stuff in there (I’ve babbled about bits of it here and there already) … some of which is only in the app and some of which is in the app and on the related website.
*Requires an EQ tool or plug-in that can apply different EQ on a per-channel basis.
Its been interesting to note the reactions in people after providing them with an EQ profile that compensates for their actual hearing response (with no other adjustments).
Lots of “audiophiles” believe they have superb hearing - so it’s also interesting to see how many are wrong and/or have significant broad (or specific) hearing issues (possibly from listening too loud for too long).
Similarly dramatic responses are found when taking a proper baseline for a person’s actual listening levels and then, where appropriate, applying the necessary compensations to accommodate the Fletcher-Munson/equal loudness contours.
Both of these factors make a huge difference in how one perceives sound and music relative to others.
I must admit to being somewhat ignorant regarding regular Carbon amps vs. Carbon CC amps. I just emailed Birgir and asked for some clarification.
My studio is a good size space with the main area 21 X 16 and then there are three recessed window areas which measure 5 X 6 (just took this quick measurement with my Leica Disto). It is one of the zones for AC and is sized at 2 1/2 tons. I have never had an issue with cooling and this part of the US will see it’s hottest weather in the next four weeks.
I am very curious regarding a KGSSHV Carbon amp that I saw on Ebay with a brand name of JR Audio on the front of it. I looks just like a Mjolnir and is made in China. It’s an upgrade from the Mjolnir in that it has line inputs as well as XLR. Needless to say when I saw it some alarm bells went off in my head.
So the pendulum is swinging now towards a BH.
This house is all Cat5 - Circa 2004. It would be great to have 10 GBE but I really don’t need more speed for my network other than it would be nice to have more speed. I have a 5 bay Synology which has lots of stuff on it - mostly my images and my audio files. Of course it’s all backed up and then there’s another backup… you know how that goes.
I am very interested in your reaction to the CRBN. I’m sure it will be somewhat similar to the 009S.
This rebirth for me of my prior audio hobby days is very enjoyable and mimics somewhat my lifetime photographic hobby. It’s not so bad with 10k here, 10k there… pretty soon it starts to get into real money area. The big difference between it and my Photo stuff is Photo stuff is 40k here, 40k there and then you gotta start traveling. Just a little more serious.
Just got this from Birgir:
Blockquote
Hi Victor,
These are normal Carbon amps, the CC will not be available for a while yet. Probably a few months away but with the current situation, it is impossible to tell.
The CC uses the same amplifier channels as the regular Carbon but it has an improved power supply, larger chassis for more separation, upgraded volume control and solid silver signal wiring. The next batch will also have special output sockets, upgraded resistors in the amplifier section and completely new chassis design. This will push the price up quite a bit but I hope to keep them below 7500$.
The “retired” bit is really about no longer working for a living.
That I have a bunch of my own projects that I now have time to properly pursue (at least until the world gets back to some semblance of normality … travel wise at least), is as much self-entertainment as anything.
When I have nothing else I can productively or entertainingly do …
Sounds like heat will be a non-factor - and it’s about the same for both amps anyway, so not really a decision-maker there.
If sitting too close to the amplifier results in enough radiated warmth to be annoying, at least the Stax extension cables don’t result in any audible change vs. direct connection to the amplifier. Well, at least the SRE-950S doesn’t.
…
Other than Birgir having a unit on hand when I ordered my Carbon, that’s the same thing he told me regarding the Carbon CC. I decided I didn’t want to wait, so ordered a Carbon there and then with the intention to order a CC version (and sell the current one, which is easy to do) once they are available again.
…
I’ve been able to move a huge amount of my computing infrastructure to the cloud. But there are some things, especially with my more recent personal projects where that’s just not very tenable.
Can’t wait to get it out of my office … but that really is predicated on faster network connections.
…
I’ve often said that audio is my least expensive hobby. Photography and diving dwarf what I spend on audio gear … mostly because of the associated travel (and how I like to do that). Though my Leica habit doesn’t help with the photography side of things.
I’ve been working on what would be required for a community-driven and truly scientific approach to hobby audio. An approach that isn’t limited to electrical test rigs and the narrow analyses they permit. It’s conceptually simple, in that it just merges in established perception and human-machine interaction research and methods. Implementation is a bear, as human testing requires all sorts of pre-testing, norming, adjustments for arbitrary biological facts/biases, large participant samples, and response accuracy checks.
Is this is worth the time/effort for hobby enjoyment in a mature industry…likely no. However, many critical listeners who now call themselves “subjectivists” actually aren’t. They just (rightly) reject the electrical measurement method and don’t now have a suitable alternative. To me it’s worth a write-up to get beyond the bickering and offer a better strategy for those who want useful data on nuanced and ephemeral differences.
Travel is not cheap. My wife and I were lucky to have made it to Japan ( we always travel alone ) two years ago for a photographic trip. Fascinating place and VERY expensive - especially where we like to stay… we had lots of fun and spent lots of money but it was worth every penny. We were going to go back and then this Covid crap hit so it’s just the States for now.
It’s the upload speed that’s so crazy slow. I have a DropBox account that I like a lot but I haven’t considered moving 3 or 4 TB to the cloud as it would take forever… and DropBox is one of the fastest upload cloud providers. I don’t think I would need all of the bells and whistles of Amazon or Microsoft cloud services - I just need some fast upload speeds and if necessary fast download speeds.
I’m really not as knowledgeable in this area as I should be.
Thank you much for the well listening wishes. I’m sure it will be fine but I’ll be a little alarmed if I can put a pan on top of those 4 EL34s and fry and egg!!
That’s after 4 hours or so of continuous, spirited, listening split between SR-009S and SR-007MK2.
My primary cloud stuff is R&D centric with complex ML/DL and other compute intensive tasks running against (necessarily) large data sets - some of which has to use drive-shipping to make it time-tenable.
Then there’s stuff that runs locally on higher-speed bonded-channel setups, which is local because it is much more dynamic, so I can’t afford the upload time (even with my gigabit upload pipe, which is the fastest I can get at this house) there. That’s the stuff I am looking forward to putting in its own room … but I need the faster internal network links to make interacting with those machines form my workstation(s) practical.
Something for me to try.
