Electrostatic headphone - Events and shows

Sonoma have good marketing and promote the model 1 at great expense.

Revolutionary design... Lots of small hexagonal panels of different sizes driven from a single stator (outer side, so diaphragm is effectively next to your ear) which uses DSP for asychronous correction, needed for single stator operation. Requires their dedicated energiser for single stator operation.

This is a prototype of Mr Speakers ESHS, due for release around January 2018.

There has been a lot of excitement over the release of the Trilogy H1 energiser.

With Nic Poulson, the Trilogy H1 designer.

SRM-T8000 launch day (Saturday 15th July 2017). Auditioned with SR-009.

Hybrid energiser, Tube pre-amp and Solid State output stage.

I personally prefer the Solid State output stage but would also like to see more Solid State energisers being developed. All the new energisers coming to shows are Valve based.

HiFiMan Shangri-La.

Expensive at $50,000 but does sound good.

Massive 300B tubes for the ouput stage. I should think that is plenty of power!

Uses woven wire (thickness of wire 50um) stators with about 70% open space to stator ratio. This is much greater than the conventional 50%, but HiFiMan claim that with the thin wire and so much openness in the stator it is acoustically transparent.

My own testing with Muamp research shows the more open the stator the better the sound but at 70% ratio I would be a bit worried that there would not be enough charge on the stator to adequately move the diaphragm, but there is!

At last, I have auditioned the Sennheiser HE 1 (Orpheus).

With Sennheiser's Axel Grell - acoustic engineer and chief designer.

Axel's enthusiasm to show the quality and detail was wonderful. He said they sell around 250 HE1's every year.

Sennheiser have a patent on the HV output stage being incorporated in the ear-cups. I guess this means that the beautiful tubes in the marble energiser are purely pre-amp with HV MOSFETs in the earcups...

Jude of Head-Fi.org

Jude said he will test and review Muamp#6.