Mini-Meet: South Florida - Redux

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As a final “hurrah”, and to mark my exit from the “hobby” aspect of headphone-audio, I figured I’d take a second pass at hosting a mini-meet in my new home in Florida. I did a bunch of these in Seattle, but haven’t managed one here (tried before, but things got delayed).

I am only targeting SOTA/TOTL gear here.

You’re welcome to bring gear of your own, though please note that I will NOT be reconfiguring the systems I have set up. So don’t come expecting to plug your THX AAA 789 into my DAVE or Linn gear, nor your D90SE into my WA234 MKII, etc. Though you’re welcome to run whatever headphones you like off any of my setups (I have modular cabling for every combination of amp/headphone you can imagine, so no need to bring anything special).

We’ll target early April for this (date to be finalized), to give people time to plan. Locale will be my home; for reference look at the “Deering Estate” for a close-enough location for planning purposes. Feel free to bring your SO, we have a huge enclosed patio, a nice big pool, copious “refreshments” and my wife is a fabulous hostess.

Also, we can host out-of-towners/long-distance visitors overnight, since we have multiple on-suite guest rooms; FCFS on that (with priority given to those living further afield).

If you’re interested, just post the dates you can make in April (in order of preference). I’ll host this over a 3-day period (Friday through Sunday).

Gear on Hand

Headphones:

  • Audeze CRBN
  • Audeze LCD-5
  • Focal Stellia
  • Focal Utopia
  • RAAL-requisite SR1a
  • Sennheiser HD800S
  • Sennheiser HD820
  • Stax SR-X9000
  • Stax SR-009S
  • Stax SR-007MK2
  • ZMF Vérité LTD
  • ZMF Vérité Closed LTD

Amplifiers:

  • Benchmark HPA4
  • Chord Étude
  • Chord Ultima 5
  • HeadAmp Blue Hawaii Special Edition (BHSE w/ ALPS RK50)
  • iFi Pro iESL
  • Linn AK4200
  • Mjolnir-Audio Carbon
  • RAAL-requisite HSA-1b
  • Woo Audio WA-234 MKII MONO

DACS/Streamers:

  • Chord DAVE (w/ Blu-Mk2 as M-Scaler)
  • dCS Vivaldi Stack (DAC, Clock, Upsampler)
  • Linn Klimax DSM/3 (Katalyst)
  • Linn Klimax DSM/4 (Organik)
  • MSB Select DAC (w/ dual PowerBase)
  • RME ADI-2 Pro FS R BE

Sources:

  • Auralic Aries G2.1
  • iFi Zen Stream
  • Music CONDUIT (my self-designed/built no-holds-barred Roon end-point)
  • Pi2AES

Probable additions; though dependent on equipment availability:

  • Chord Mojo 2
  • RAAL-requisite VM-1a

Possible appearances; dependent on my friend, Kit, making the date:

  • HiFiMan Shangri-La Jr. (System)
  • HiFiMan Shangri-La Snr. (System)
  • Mjolnir-Audio Carbon CC
  • Sennheiser HE90/HEV90
  • Sennheiser HE1
  • Stax Omega
  • Stax T2 (original and DIY)
  • Warwick Acoustics Aperio
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I live up in Boca, so not too far away. Pretty flexible in April as well. If you’d like, I have a Holo Audio May KTE and an Eddie Current Studio B that I could bring. Never been to a meet before, gotta say… I’m kinda excited!

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I am pretty confident that the May KTE and EC Studio B would be something that would be very well received (the May, especially, is still a hot-ticket in terms of getting ears on it). They’re both excellent pieces of gear.

You’ll just need to bring interconnects and AC cables … I have lots of filtered AC availability.

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Something else I should probably mention …

We tend to do a group “sing along” (NOT Karaoke, it’s a group thing … and you probably won’t be heard over the speakers - it’s just for fun) bit on the 2nd night (don’t feel like you have to be there for more than a few hours, nor on more than one day). The set list is generally provided in advance, and we tend to go with faster-paced, melodic, complex lyrical pieces (since everyone is usually one more drink in than they want to be at this point).

You can pretty much always count on the following pieces being involved though:

  • “Promised Land”, Elvis.
  • “Irish Rover”, The Pogues.
  • “American Pie”, Don McLean
  • “The Star of the County Down”, Loreena McKennit.
  • “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen.
  • “Sweet Caroline”, Neil Diamond.
  • “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, Charlie Daniels Band.

:wink:

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I’ll bring the vegemite

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For those of you lucky enough to be close enough to attend:

  1. Go! These things are so much fun.
  2. This event is ultimately going to cost you a lot of money. Ask me how I know.

Hope you folks have a great time. I wish I could join you.

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I had that same feeling, should probably start saving now… :joy:

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Given the impressive lack of interest in this, I’m going to close the thread.

For those that were/are interested, here, or via PM, we’ll set something up directly as a smaller deal. “Meets”, at least of the nature I had in mind here, really need 10-15 people to be worthwhile.

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