Nimzerz
1000+ Head-Fier
Happened to stumble across your post and saw you tried the Tungsten on the SIT-3. How did that sound?Had a great time on Saturday. I don't have a great picture of what I brought but I did take some pictures of other things that I heard. Was really cool to hear a lot of rare tube amps and see how they pair with ZMFs. Also was great to spend more time with tungsten and compare my single sided version to the double sided.
@Ishcabible had an incredible setup. I didn't get to spend a ton of time listening but I thought the caldera sounded great through the Oliver Sayes preamp and Esoteric poweramp.
On the same setup I heard the new Yamaha Planar which sounded very odd but I kind of liked it. It was just very v-shaped and aggressive sounding but for some genres like metal perhaps I could see it working well.
From @pravous I heard the Aegis and Airmid with Atrium. I've spent some time with Airmid in the ZMF room at Canjams but it was my first time hearing the Aegis. I preferred the Aegis overall, it had a more full and punchy sound while the Airmid sounded a bit more open and clear but lacked some of the weight that I really liked from the Aegis.
The new ZMF portable sounded great. I first heard it in Chicago off of the JDS Labs amp collab and enjoyed it but it sounded almost more cohesive here however I'm not sure if there have been any changes to it since Chicago or perhaps the amp pairing just worked better.
The Vali 2 was a great little amp that had a really pleasing sound with Bokeh and HD800.
@wizzman121 had an awesome setup as always and I really liked hearing both the Auteur Classic and Caldera Redheart on the Cayin HA-3A
@DeweyCH brought some awesome tube gear as well and I really enjoyed the Bottlehead Stax amp but didn't get a chance to spend time with the Ampsandsound I think it was a Mogwai. The L700s on the bottlehead sounded warm and fun, no harshness or lack of bass but they still had that ethereal and fast sound of an estat.
At my table it was fun to compare the Tungsten single sided (purple) to the double sided (orange) off of the Firstwatt SIT-3 that I brought. I thought the SS was a bit warmer with more up front vocals and a slightly punchier sound while the DS had much smoother and airier treble with a more laid back presentation reminding me of Susvara.
I also brought my Mass Kobo 475 and it was fun to hear a bunch of IEMs on it and compare to the Kinera Loki which are my favorite IEM at the moment.
I only heard about half of what was at the meet so looking forward to impressions and pictures of the gear that I missed. It was great to meet everyone and chat about audio and headphones.
I was convinced the SIT-3 would not be able to power them without sounding awful because they are high impedance, and the amp's high order distortion grows with impedance. If you install resistors in parallel to reduce the impedance seen by the amplifier, you probably won't have enough power to the headphones.