šŸ”¶ KOSS ESP/95x

I guess I will just stay with the Loki. Not a hardship as it is a magical combo. :heart_eyes:

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Well, the crack is more made for driving headphones rather than a preamp, but that being said, I would expect it to make a positive change as a preamp if you wanted to add a bit of tube into your koss

I’m going to guess that the buzz is an impedance mismatch between the koss and the crack, or perhaps it might be a ground loop somehow, but I’m not good with stuff like this lol. Try isolating the 95x and crack to separate outlets if you can, see if that changes anything

That being said, if you don’t find you have a use for your crack (as in you don’t have anything you can use with it), it should be easy to sell as they are in demand for prebuilt versions

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The koss amp? Hmmm strange, perhaps could it be from your dac?

Also how were you using the crack as a preamp? It doesn’t have any rca outs unless you were to mod them in

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Hmmm interesting. I’ve seen a few people use them as preamps but didn’t know if it was actually encouraged or not lol.

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Tube amps are designed to drive specific loads, I honestly haven’t looked at how the crack output section is designed, but it’s quite possible that it will sound radically different driving another amp where the input impedance is probably 50-100K Ohms than it would driving a 300 Ohm headphone

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Then I’ll believe him.

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Makes sense

@RamenFlamen did you just finish the build and are having this issues, or have you had the crack for awhile and it just started happening

Gotcha, well the 600 is an awesome pairing with the crack :+1:

Really??? That’s interesting and surprising

Well it’s still an estat, many high end estat amps are either tube (or hybrid) based

That’s quite shocking. Just expected that like a planar it wouldn’t be good on tubes

I mean one of my main amps for some planars is now a SET tube amp lol, once you get into the higher end things change.

Also I would assume that working with tubes in an electrostatic amp is somewhat simple because tubes already operate at high voltages, and estats require high voltage so it makes sense? Possibly lol?

Yes I’d imagine it simplifies designs, Valves are basically Voltage amplifiers and Transistors are much better at amplifying current.

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Perhaps I should pick up a higher end solid state estat amp to really get a sense of what that can do lol (since I have only heard them at shows

I’ve listened to very few EStat headphones, I’ve heard some older Stax and that might be it.

For reference what other headphones/amp setups do you usually use? I was very close to pulling the trigger on these, might be a pair for the future.

Let me start by saying that I am not a crier. However, I watched this Tiny Desk Concert the other day with my ESP95X, and I had tears in my eyes (not an all out cry, but still).

So, yeah, these headphones definitely have a quality to them. I’d say that they are very transparent with the environment that the recording was performed in.

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St Paul and the broken bones did a fantastic tiny desk Concert:

Yeah, that one is a shocker. That’s some soul right there.

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What an unexpected yet fantastic voice!